Does culture make emotion?
Franz Boas helps us solve the puzzle of where our emotional lives originate: in our selves or in the cultures around us
- by Noga Arikha
Franz Boas helps us solve the puzzle of where our emotional lives originate: in our selves or in the cultures around us
- by Noga Arikha
It’s called AirSnitch:
Unlike previous Wi-Fi attacks, AirSnitch exploits core features in Layers 1 and 2 and the failure to bind and synchronize a client across these and higher layers, other nodes, and other network names such as SSIDs (Service Set Identifiers). This cross-layer identity desynchronization is the key driver of AirSnitch attacks.
The most powerful such attack is a full, bidirectional machine-in-the-middle (MitM) attack, meaning the attacker can view and modify data before it makes its way to the intended recipient. The attacker can be on the same SSID, a separate one, or even a separate network segment tied to the same AP. It works against small Wi-Fi networks in both homes and offices and large networks in enterprises.
With the ability to intercept all link-layer traffic (that is, the traffic as it passes between Layers 1 and 2), an attacker can perform other attacks on higher layers. The most dire consequence occurs when an Internet connection isn’t encrypted—something that Google recently estimated occurred when as much as 6 percent and 20 percent of pages loaded on Windows and Linux, respectively. In these cases, the attacker can view and modify all traffic in the clear and steal authentication cookies, passwords, payment card details, and any other sensitive data. Since many company intranets are sent in plaintext, traffic from them can also be intercepted.
Even when HTTPS is in place, an attacker can still intercept domain look-up traffic and use DNS cache poisoning to corrupt tables stored by the target’s operating system. The AirSnitch MitM also puts the attacker in the position to wage attacks against vulnerabilities that may not be patched. Attackers can also see the external IP addresses hosting webpages being visited and often correlate them with the precise URL.
Here’s the paper.
On March 3, 2026, Earth lined up directly between the Moon and the Sun, casting its shadow on the full Moon. The total lunar eclipse was visible throughout the Americas, East Asia, Australia, and the Pacific. Skygazers in those parts of the world may have witnessed a “Blood Moon,” when the dimmed lunar surface temporarily turned an orange-red color.
Meanwhile, satellites observed the effect of the darkened Moon on Earth’s surface. Changes in the amount of moonlight reflected back to Earth as the eclipse progressed appear in this composite image, composed of nighttime observations made by the VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) on the NOAA-21 satellite. The satellite collected these images of the Arctic about every 100 minutes, with earlier swaths toward the right and later swaths to the left.
The VIIRS day-night band detects nighttime light in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared and uses filtering techniques to observe signals such as city lights, reflected moonlight, and auroras. The darkest swath was acquired at 11:20 Universal Time (2:20 a.m. Alaska Standard Time), about 15 minutes after the total phase had begun. With very little moonlight reaching Earth, ribbons of light from the aurora borealis shine through, along with specks of artificial light from settlements in the Yukon and eastern Alaska.
When the satellite passed over western Alaska and the Bering Strait, at 13:00 Universal Time (4:00 a.m. Alaska Standard Time), the eclipse was in the partial phase. The scene is noticeably brighter than the earlier one, and light from the partially shaded Moon illuminates snow-covered topography and offshore clouds. The brightest swaths on the far right and left sides were acquired before and after the eclipse, respectively, with light from the full Moon.
The next chance to view a total lunar eclipse will occur on December 31, 2028, when it will add a dash of astronomical flair to New Year’s Eve celebrations in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Pacific.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Michala Garrison, using VIIRS day-night band data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE, GIBS/Worldview, and the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS). Story by Lindsey Doermann.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
Astronauts and much of Earth’s population had a chance to view a coppery “Blood Moon” during a total lunar eclipse…
An astronaut photographed moonglint shimmering across the sea surface and the bright clusters of Florida’s cities at night.
The glow of city lights, the aurora, and a rising Moon illuminate the night along the northwest coast of North…
The post Shades of a Lunar Eclipse appeared first on NASA Science.
Yesterday UN Ambassador Mike Waltz announced that the US was moving ahead rapidly to achieve all its war objectives which he listed as 1) destroying Iran’s missiles, 2) eliminating its nuclear program and 3) ending its ability to do terrorism. So much for regime change, it seems and also unconditional surrender, both of which don’t seem remotely in the ballpark any time soon. That was the trial balloon. Then today President Trump followed up on this by declaring that the war is actually pretty much over already.
He told CBS News’s Weijia Jiang that “the war is very complete, pretty much” and that the US is “very far” ahead of the initial 4 to 5 week timeline. “The war is very complete,” he said in case there was any ambiguity about his words. Indeed, in his vaguely genocidal way Trump seemed to implicitly take regime change off the table by threatening either regime change or perhaps genocide if Iran got “cute.”
“They better not try anything cute,” he told Jiang, “or it’s going to be the end of that country.”
Again, where’s regime change? Where’s unconditional surrender? That’s old news, I guess. By this evening it might even be fake news.
What this all comes down to is that the White House is running as fast as it can from regime change and even faster from its demand for “unconditional surrender”. Trump wants to be done because the conflict is getting too messy, Gulf allies are certainly privately asking WTAF Trump’s plan is and more than anything else Trump is realizing that he is triggering what has been the most reliable presidency killer in American politics for more than half a century: spiking gas prices.
On gas prices, Trump is saying they’ll be back down very fast. But that’s not remotely how it works. Once gas prices really spike the half life of the price rise is really long. The oil and gas shock that came out of the Ukraine War wasn’t nearly as severe as many feared. But it still ran pretty much right through the end of Biden’s presidency.
Trump wants out now. Or at least he does today. Tomorrow may be another story.
This is week two of this year’s Annual TPM Membership Drive. We started to get traction at the end of last week. Today we really need to keep that going. If you’re not a member, please consider joining today. This is our lifeblood. It’s what we need to keep doing this work and, if possible, expand our reach going forward. If you’re a new reader or maybe your membership lapsed, we need you back. Just click right here. If you’re on the fence, we’re even offering a 25% discount.
This week I’m going to be telling you some of our plans for the coming year and how you and our growing community figure into those plans.
Sometimes I write a post where I don’t know the topic well enough to discuss it expertly but I understand it enough to point to the outlines of the debate and where to find more information. This is one of those posts. Here, I want to discuss drones and missiles deployed by Iran and the expensive, high-tech weapons the U.S. and its allies use to shoot them down. This applies right now in the Persian Gulf where Iran is using a strategy of “asymmetric attrition.” But it would apply in even more complicated and hard-to-address ways if and when the U.S. got into a major conflict with, say, China over Taiwan. It’s that basic challenge of asymmetric warfare for a Great Power like the United States: the U.S. relies on often quite effective but very expensive and hard to replace weaponry. Iran’s clunky but effective drones cost in the low five-figures to produce, while U.S. missile defense tech can costs millions for a single shot.
As this article in SpyTalk explains, Iran’s missile capacity, which provided a key part of its deterrence, has largely come up empty in this conflict. That was even more the case last year when Israel shattered Iran’s air defenses and bombed the country almost at will, while Iran was barely able to damage Israel. A mix of U.S. and Israeli made defensive weaponry were able to drastically limit Iran’s ability to strike Israel. Head to head, these anti-missile and anti-drone systems and munitions are stunningly effective.
But there’s another layer of the story. Iran can produce its signature Shahed-136 drones rapidly and seemingly without limit, or at least it could pre-war. Those cost about $20,000 a piece. The Patriot and SM-6 interceptors the U.S. and its Gulf allies often need to use to intercept them cost in the millions. (Here’s a Times piece on this price asymmetry.) Cost is one thing. Presumably, when it’s important, the U.S. can spend a lot. We’re rich and usually vastly richer and with a bigger tax base than almost any country we go to war with. But it’s not just cost. These high-tech weapons take time to make and they rely on rare earth metals and other scarce supplies that the U.S, doesn’t entirely control. This is a question I want to learn more about. But I’m routinely surprised at how quickly the U.S. appears to run low on these kinds of munitions whether it’s in direct combat with Iran or as a supplier to countries like Ukraine.
“Run low” can obviously mean a lot of things. The U.S. has moved on from its longtime “two war doctrine,” being capable of winning two major regional conflicts simultaneously. But “low” probably seldom means you’re out. It means you’re getting low when you take into account levels needed to fight various potential conflicts the Pentagon wants to be ready for at all times. Of course the Pentagon is going to be vague about anything like this because just how much reserves it has is a pretty critical state secret. You want to keep potential adversaries guessing. But it doesn’t seem like it’s just shortages in the supplies that aren’t needed for other contingencies. The U.S. military seems to run into supply constraints pretty quickly. More important, the U.S. doesn’t seem to have the industrial capacity to produce these weapons as quickly as they’re likely to be expended in a drawn out major power conflict.
That issue of speed of replenishment is critical, in a way more critical than the size of the stockpiles. If we got into a major conflict with China over Taiwan and it went on for a long time, the U.S. doesn’t appear to have an industrial capacity to resupply these weapons on an ongoing basis. An additional factor is that all these high-tech weapons require rare earth metals for their production, a critical resource that China dominates globally. In a wartime situation, the U.S. would likely claim all the rare earth materials being used for civilian purposes in supply chains it controls. And maybe that would be enough. But it’s a real vulnerability, and it puts time limits on the U.S.’s military dominance. You can have military dominance. But if a critical part of that dominance only last weeks or months, that’s a problem. For now, it seems clear to experts that Iran’s strategy is to absorb the punishment from the skies and keep sending waves of drones into neighboring counties until the U.S. stockpiles are run dry.
Here’s a (likely paywalled) article in Foreign Policy which looks how many munitions, drones and interceptors each side is using, the cost and how simple or hard they are to replenish in real time.
Needless to say, Pentagon planners have given these matters a lot of thought. I’m not saying anything that people who work in these areas don’t know. But it’s a basic question that looms over any conflict like this and whether a lower tech, perhaps less wealthy adversary could grind the U.S. down in a battle of attrition we’re not — in industrial terms — prepared for.
Yes, but can your tree do this?
Production query plans without production data
Radim Marek describes the new
pg_restore_relation_stats() and pg_restore_attribute_stats() functions that were introduced in PostgreSQL 18 in September 2025.
The PostgreSQL query planner makes use of internal statistics to help it decide how to best execute a query. These statistics often differ between production data and development environments, which means the query plans used in production may not be replicable in development.
PostgreSQL's new features now let you copy those statistics down to your development environment, allowing you to simulate the plans for production workloads without needing to copy in all of that data first.
I found this illustrative example useful:
SELECT pg_restore_attribute_stats(
'schemaname', 'public',
'relname', 'test_orders',
'attname', 'status',
'inherited', false::boolean,
'null_frac', 0.0::real,
'avg_width', 9::integer,
'n_distinct', 5::real,
'most_common_vals', '{delivered,shipped,cancelled,pending,returned}'::text,
'most_common_freqs', '{0.95,0.015,0.015,0.015,0.005}'::real[]
);
This simulates statistics for a status column that is 95% delivered. Based on these statistics PostgreSQL can decide to use an index for status = 'shipped' but to instead perform a full table scan for status = 'delivered'.
These statistics are pretty small. Radim says:
Statistics dumps are tiny. A database with hundreds of tables and thousands of columns produces a statistics dump under 1MB. The production data might be hundreds of GB. The statistics that describe it fit in a text file.
I posted on the SQLite user forum asking if SQLite could offer a similar feature and D. Richard Hipp promptly replied that it has one already:
All of the data statistics used by the query planner in SQLite are available in the sqlite_stat1 table (or also in the sqlite_stat4 table if you happen to have compiled with SQLITE_ENABLE_STAT4). That table is writable. You can inject whatever alternative statistics you like.
This approach to controlling the query planner is mentioned in the documentation: https://sqlite.org/optoverview.html#manual_control_of_query_plans_using_sqlite_stat_tables.
See also https://sqlite.org/lang_analyze.html#fixed_results_of_analyze.
The ".fullschema" command in the CLI outputs both the schema and the content of the sqlite_statN tables, exactly for the reasons outlined above - so that we can reproduce query problems for testing without have to load multi-terabyte database files.
Via Lobste.rs
Tags: databases, postgresql, sql, sqlite, d-richard-hipp
A recurring concern I've seen regarding LLMs for programming is that they will push our technology choices towards the tools that are best represented in their training data, making it harder for new, better tools to break through the noise.
This was certainly the case a couple of years ago, when asking models for help with Python or JavaScript appeared to give much better results than questions about less widely used languages.
With the latest models running in good coding agent harnesses I'm not sure this continues to hold up.
I'm seeing excellent results with my brand new tools where I start by prompting "use uvx showboat --help / rodney --help / chartroom --help to learn about these tools" - the context length of these new models is long enough that they can consume quite a lot of documentation before they start working on a problem.
Drop a coding agent into any existing codebase that uses libraries and tools that are too private or too new to feature in the training data and my experience is that it works just fine - the agent will consult enough of the existing examples to understand patterns, then iterate and test its own output to fill in the gaps.
This is a surprising result. I thought coding agents would prove to be the ultimate embodiment of the Choose Boring Technology approach, but in practice they don't seem to be affecting my technology choices in that way at all.
Update: A few follow-on thoughts:
Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, boring-technology, coding-agents, agentic-engineering, november-2025-inflection
I can’t remember where I got them, but some years ago, I got two well-used albums of poster stamps. This is what Perplexity AI says about them:
Poster stamps are small, gummed advertising labels, slightly larger than postage stamps, popular from the late 19th century through the 1920s, often featuring miniature poster art for products, events, or causes.
They peaked in the 1910s “Golden Era,” with a craze among collectors who pasted them into special albums or scrapbooks, much like postage stamps. Production continued into the 1920s and 1930s, but interest waned after World War I, though they remained affordable souvenirs for children and adults.
People got them free from companies, contests, or events and mounted them in dedicated albums. Today, they’re valued by philatelists as ‘cinderella stamps’—non-postal labels—often found in vintage scrapbooks at auctions or online.
The Poster Stamp Collectors Club is a good source of information. They write:
Poster Stamps can be classified by their purpose into categories:
As promotion for an event- such as a concert, exposition, or exhibit, or
As commercial advertising- for a product or service or tourist location, or
As political or social propaganda- for a movement or a political candidate, or
As promotion of charitable giving to a particular need or non-profit group, or
As a souvenir to be saved, commemorating something: that is, a poster stamp that is propaganda, but is “preaching to the choir”.
Poster Stamps proved to be a powerful medium in the early 1900’s, and almost immediately both children and adults began saving them. But the peak of popularity was long ago, thus many stamp collectors have not seen Poster Stamps and are surprised by their beauty and appeal.
Just a brief note, because yesterday was a travel day and I didn’t even try to draft a full post — which was just as well, because oil markets went wild while I was airborne.
In a way that was odd, because the Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed since the war on Iran began, with no obvious way to get it reopened quickly. As I showed in yesterday’s primer, continued closure of the Strait is a shock to world oil supplies bigger than the oil shocks of the 1970s. What changed?
Well, on Friday Trump called for UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER, suggesting both intransigence and a tenuous grip on reality. Then the Iranians chose Khamenei’s son, reputedly a hard-liner, as the new Supreme Leader. These developments may have dashed the hopes of oil traders who still thought we might have cosplay regime change, Venezuela-style: The regime basically continues, but a new leader makes conciliatory noises and throws a bunch of money Trump’s way. That could still happen, but not for a while.
Time matters here. As the Strait remains closed, producers are shutting down, and this isn’t like turning off a tap that can be quickly restarted. There’s apparently a real nonlinearity here: a 2-week closure of the Strait has much more than twice the adverse impact on global oil supply as a 1-week closure. If this goes on for multiple weeks — and it’s easy to imagine that happening — oil prices, which retreated slightly off their highs early this morning, could go much higher.
Even so, premature to predict a global economic crisis. Prices now are roughly at Russia shock levels:
That shock was ugly but didn’t cause recessions in either the US or Europe. As I emphasized in the primer, advanced economies are much less vulnerable to oil shocks than they were in the 1970s.
But the situation is scary. And what’s even scarier is that the “warrior ethos” gang in the Trump administration seem to have been caught completely off-guard by the fallout from their adventure, even though the military and the intelligence community tried to warn them about the risks.
MUSICAL CODA
Yesterday, President Donald J. Trump was among the dignitaries who attended the dignified transfer returning the remains of the six U.S. soldiers killed in the military action against Iran to the United States for burial. At the transfer, Trump wore a white USA baseball cap for sale in his campaign store.
Recognizing that Americans would recoil from seeing Trump wear a baseball cap at a dignified transfer, the Fox News Channel declined to show how he had looked yesterday and aired old footage of Trump from his first term without the hat. Caught in their lie, the Fox News Channel admitted they had shown the wrong footage but claimed it was inadvertent. They did not, however, show the real footage from yesterday, showing Trump wearing his merch.
The producers at the Fox News Channel seemed to recognize that Trump’s USA hat at a dignified transfer looked like deliberate disrespect for those whose lives had been taken in the service of our country. They seemed to understand the gulf between the administration’s cartoonish approach to the war in Iran and the reality of war for those participating in it.
The official social media account of the White House has portrayed its military adventures in Iran as a movie, or a game, splicing images from what appear to be footage of U.S. military strikes with clips from adventure movies and video games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto. Undeterred by criticism, White House communications director Steven Cheung called for supporters to show their enthusiasm for one of the videos in comments below it.
Last Thursday, March 5, Trump talked to ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl about the war. “I hope you are impressed,” he said. “How do you like the performance? I mean, Venezuela is obvious. This might be even better. How do you like the performance?” Karl answered that “nobody questions the success of the military operation, the concern is what happens next.”
“Forget about next,” Trump answered. “They are decimated for a 10-year period before they could build it back.”
“We’re marching through the world,” Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) told a laughing Maria Bartiromo of the Fox News Channel this morning. “We’re cleaning out the bad guys. We’re gonna have relationships with new people that will make us prosperous and safe. I have never seen anybody like it. This is Ronald Reagan Plus. Donald Trump is resetting the world in a way nobody could have dreamed of a year ago. He is the greatest commander in chief of all time. Our military is the best of all time. Iran is going down, and Cuba is next.”
The administration’s approach to foreign affairs appears to be the logical outcome of two generations of a peculiar U.S. cowboy individualism. Since the 1950s, right-wing ideologues in the United States have embraced a fantasy world in which a hero cuts through the red tape of laws and government bureaucracy to do what he thinks is right. That image was fed by TV westerns that rose after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to portray a world in which dominant white men delivered justice to their communities without the interference of government. By 1959, there were twenty-six westerns on TV. In one week in March 1959, eight of the top ten TV shows were westerns.
The idea of white men acting for freedom and justice on their own, unhampered by a government that served Black Americans, people of color, and women, became a guiding image for the rising right wing beginning with Arizona senator Barry Goldwater in 1964. It found a home in the Republican Party with Ronald Reagan in 1980, as supporters took a stand against a federal government they insisted was redistributing the tax dollars of hardworking Americans to undeserving minorities and women.
That cowboy individualism spread into foreign affairs as well, until by 2003, right-wing talk radio host Rush Limbaugh could use it as shorthand to defend President George W. Bush’s military operation in Iraq. Just after the 2003 capture of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, Limbaugh gushed about presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, who had ignored the rules imposed by “liberals” and fixed what was wrong with the world. Limbaugh explained that Reagan was a cowboy: “He was brave, positive, and gave us hope. He wore a white hat…. Liberals hated Ronald Reagan.”
Limbaugh continued: “They also hate President Bush because he distinguishes between good and evil. He calls a spade a spade, and after 9-11 called evil ‘evil,’ without mincing any words, to the shock of the liberal establishment. That’s what cowboys do, you know…. In the old West, might did not make right. Right made might. Cowboys in white hats were always on the side of right, and that was their might. I am glad my President is a cowboy. He got his man! Cowboys do, you know.”
In Breaking the News today, James Fallows wrote that that way back in 2015, he concluded that “it had become far too easy for political leaders to strut and posture about ‘honoring the troops’—the Hegseth term ‘warfighters’ was not yet in common use—but then to commit them in half-thought-through “forever” wars, since so much of the public was so insulated from the consequences.”
But if Trump’s Iran adventure began with the strutting and posturing of a military performance, it is running hard into reality. It appears that Trump saw the strikes themselves as the culmination of his performance and did not have a plan for what would happen after them. He has said he was surprised that the conflict has included neighboring states.
Now the ships that carry about 20% of the world’s oil are not traveling through the Strait of Hormuz, and oil prices are surging. Rising oil prices are already hitting Americans at the gas pump—gasoline prices rose 14% last week—and will also hit the economy in general as jet fuel and diesel for trucks and tractors become more expensive. Trump tonight posted that high oil prices are “a very small price to pay for U.S.A., and World, Safety and Peace. ONLY FOOLS WOULD THINK DIFFERENTLY.”
The public support for the financing of this war is different from that of past adventures. While President George W. Bush could borrow to pay the cost of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, 2026 is a different story. The national debt has ballooned in the two decades since the Iraq war, and Republicans last summer justified their dramatic cuts to government programs, including healthcare and supplemental nutrition assistance, by insisting that it must be addressed. Now Trump is spending an estimated $1 billion a day on Operation Epic Fury, highlighting that while there was no money for programs that helped the American people, there appears to be plenty for a war of choice in the Middle East.
Since the 1980s, Republican presidents have been able to sell their military adventures with the argument that, like cowboys, they were cutting through bureaucracy and laws in order to do what was right. As Limbaugh described it, they were never looking for trouble, but when trouble came they faced it with courage. They were always on the side of right, defending good people against bad people. They had high morals and spoke the truth. They were “a beacon of integrity in the wild, wild West.”
The fantasy of those who embraced cowboy individualism was that if only they could have full sway, they would solve the world’s problems and keep Americans safe. But the conduct of the war is starting to illustrate that any claims of a moral code disappear when a leader exercises military might on a whim. According to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the U.S. will not be bound by any “stupid rules of engagement” and will rain down “[d]eath and destruction from the sky all day long. This was never meant to be a fair fight,” he said, “and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them when they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”
On Wednesday, March 4, a U.S. submarine torpedoed an Iranian warship in international waters. The vessel was not participating in hostilities; it was off Sri Lanka returning from a naval exercise organized by India in the Bay of Bengal. In the past, the U.S. has participated in those exercises.
Andrew Roth, Cate Brown, and Hannah Ellis-Peterson of The Guardian noted that submarine attacks since World War II have been incredibly rare, as are attacks on vessels not taking part in hostilities. The ship was believed to have 180 people on board; Sri Lankan officials said they rescued 32 and recovered 87 bodies from the water. Hegseth boasted: “An American submarine sank an Iranian warship that thought it was safe in international waters.”
On Thursday, Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali of Reuters reported that the U.S. appears to bear responsibility for the February 28 strike on a girls’ school in Minab, in southern Iran, in the early waves of the Israeli-U.S. attack. The strike appears to have killed 168 people or more, many of them children. Since the Reuters report, others have noted that the U.S. was operating in the area and Israel was not. The strike remains under investigation.
After Saturday’s dignified transfer, Trump told reporters on Air Force One. “I hate to do it, but it’s a part of war,” he said. “It’s a sad part of war.”
“It’s the bad part of war.”
—
Notes:
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/5773009-jake-tapper-donald-trump-iran-war-rhetoric/
“Westerns,” Time, March 30, 1959, p. 52.
Rush Limbaugh, “This Cowboy,” RushOnline.com.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-iran-war-bombing-girls-school-assessment/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/08/pete-hegseth-pentagon-trump-iran
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-iran-war-us-israel-attack-11606079
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/business/gasoline-prices.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/03/07/trump-dover-dignified-transfer-soldiers-iran/
Bluesky:
ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3mgkkvbwmg22i
atrupar.com/post/3mgkp7zvukc2g
mattgertz.bsky.social/post/3mgiukafxzc2x
atrupar.com/post/3mgkljfxigl2r
After twenty years of devops, most software engineers still treat observability like a fire alarm — something you check when things are already on fire.
Not a feedback loop you use to validate every change after shipping. Not the essential, irreplaceable source of truth on product quality and user experience.
This is not primarily a culture problem, or even a tooling problem. It’s a data problem. The dominant model for telemetry collection stores each type of signal in a different “pillar”, which rips the fabric of relationships apart — irreparably.
The three pillars model works fine for infrastructure1, but it is catastrophic for software engineering use cases, and will not serve for agentic validation.
But why? It’s a flywheel of compounding factors, not just one thing, but the biggest one by far is this:
Your data does not become linearly more powerful as you widen the dataset, it becomes exponentially more powerful. Or if you really want to get technical, it becomes combinatorially more powerful as you add more context.
I made a little Netlify app here where you can enter how many attributes you store per log or trace, to see how powerful your dataset is.
4 fields? 6 pairwise combos, 15 possible combinations.
8 fields? 28 pairwise combos, 255 possible combinations.
50 fields? 1.2K pairwise combos, 1.1 quadrillion (2^250) possible combinations, as seen in the screenshot below.
When you add another attribute to your structured log events, it doesn’t just give you “one more thing to query”. It gives you new combinations with every other field that already exists.
Note that this math is exclusively concerned with attribute keys. Once you account for values, the precision of your tooling goes higher still, especially if you handle high cardinality data.
“Data is made valuable by context” is another way of saying that the relationships between attributes are the most important part of any data set.
This should be intuitively obvious to anyone who uses data. How valuable is the string “Mike Smith”, or “21 years old”? Stripped of context, they hold no value.
By spinning your telemetry out into siloes based on signal type, the three pillars model ends up destroying the most valuable part of your data: its relational seams.
I posted something on LinkedIn yesterday, and got a pile of interesting comments. One came from Kyle Forster, founder of an AI-SRE startup called RunWhen, who linked to an article he wrote called “Do Humans Still Read Logs?”
In his article, he noted that <30% of their AI SRE tools were to “traditional observability data”, i.e. metrics, logs and traces. Instead, they used the instrumentation generated by other AI tools to wrap calls and queries. His takeaway:
Good AI reasoning turns out to require far less observability data than most of us thought when it has other options.
My takeaway is slightly different. After all, the agent still needed instrumentation and telemetry in order to evaluate what was happening. That’s still observability, right?
But as Kyle tells it, the agents went searching for a richer signal than the three pillars were giving them. They went back to the source to get the raw, pre-digested telemetry with all its connective tissue intact. That’s how important it was to them.
Huh.
I’ve been hearing a lot of “AI solves this”, and “now that we have MCPs, AI can do joins seamlessly across the three pillars”, and “this is a solved problem”.
Mmm. Joins across data siloes can be better than nothing, yes. But they don’t restore the relational seams. They don’t get you back to the mathy good place where every additional attribute makes every other attribute exponentially more valuable. At agentic speed, that reconstruction becomes a bottleneck and a failure surface.
Our entire industry is trying to collectively work out the future of agentic development right now. The hardest and most interesting problems (I think) are around validation. How do we validate a change rate that is 10x, 100x, 1000x greater than before?
I don’t have all the answers, but I do know this: agents are going to need production observability with speed, flexibility, TONS of context, and some kind of ontological grounding via semantic conventions.
In short: agents are going to need precision tools. And context (and cardinality) are what feed precision.
Production is a noisy, rowdy place of chaos, particularly at scale. If you are trying to do anomaly detection with no a priori knowledge of what to look for, the anomaly has to be fairly large to be detected. (Or else you’re detecting hundreds of “anomalies” all the time.)
But if you do have some knowledge of intent, along with precision tooling, these anomalies can be tracked and validated even when they are exquisitely minute. Like even just a trickle of requests2 out of tens of millions per second.
Let’s say you work for a global credit card provider. You’re rolling out a code change to partner payments, which are “only” tens of thousands of requests per second — a fraction of your total request volume of tens of millions of req/sec, but an important one.
This is a scary change, no matter how many tests you ran in staging. To test this safely in production, you decide to start by rolling the new build out to a small group of employee test users, and oh, what the hell — you make another feature flag that lets any user opt in, and flip it on for your own account.
You wait a few days. You use your card a few times. It works (thank god).
On Monday morning you pull up your observability data and select all requests containing the new
build_idor commit hash, as well as all of the feature flags involved. You break down by endpoint, then start looking at latency, errors, and distribution of request codes for these requests, comparing them to the baseline.Hm — something doesn’t seem quite right. Your test requests aren’t timing out, but they are taking longer to complete than the baseline set. Not for all requests, but for some.
Further exploration lets you isolate the affected requests to a set with a particular query hash. Oops.. how’d that n+1 query slip in undetected??
You quickly submit a fix, ship a new build_id, and roll your change out to a larger group: this time, it’s going out to 1% of all users in a particular region.
The anomalous requests may have been only a few dozen per day, spread across many hours, in a system that served literally billions of requests in that time.
Precision tooling makes them findable. Imprecise tooling makes them unfindable.
How do you expect your agents to validate each change, if the consequences of each change cannot be found?3
Well, one might ask, how have we managed so far? The answer is: by using human intuition to bridge the gaps. This will not work for agents. Our wisdom must be encoded into the system, or it does not exist. As @odysseusz0z said recently: “The work is making your judgment machine-readable.”
In the past, excruciatingly precise staged rollouts like these have been mostly the province of your Googles and Facebooks. Progressive deployments have historically required a lot of tooling and engineering resources.
Agentic workflows are going to make these automated validation techniques much easier and more widely used; at the exact same time, agents developing to spec are going to require a dramatically higher degree of precision and automated validation in production.
It is not just the width of your data that matters when it comes to getting great results from AI. There’s a lot more involved in optimizing data for reasoning, attribution, or anomaly detection. But capturing and preserving relationships is at the heart of all of it.
In this situation, as in so many others, AI is both the sickness and the cure4. Better get used to it.
Infrastructure teams use the three pillars for one extremely good reason: they have to operate a lot of code they did not write and can not change. They have to slurp up whatever metrics or logs the components emit and store them somewhere.
Yes, there are some complications here that I am glossing past, ones that start with ‘s’ and rhyme with “ampling”. However, the rich data + sampling approach to the cost-usability balance is generally satisfied by dropping the least valuable data. The three pillars approach to the cost-usability problem is generally satisfied by dropping the MOST valuable data: cardinality and context.
The needle-in-a-haystack is one visceral illustration of the value of rich context and precision tooling, but there are many others. Another example: wouldn’t it be nice if your agentic task force could check up on any diffs that involve cache key or schema changes, say, once a day for the next 6-12 months? These changes famously take a long time to manifest, by which time everyone has forgotten that they happened.
One sentence I have gotten a ton of mileage out of lately: “AI, much like alcohol, is both the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems.”
Update March 10, 1:21 a.m. EDT (0531 UTC): SpaceX confirms deployment of the EchoStar-25 satellite.
A direct television satellite for Dish Network, a subsidiary of EchoStar, headed into geostationary Earth orbit on Monday night aboard a Falcon 9 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral.
The satellite, EchoStar 25, flew to a geosynchronous transfer orbit before maneuvering to its operation position at 110 degrees West above the equator.
Liftoff of the 70-meter-tall launch vehicle from Space Launch Complex 40 happened at 12:19 a.m. EDT (0419 UTC). The rocket flew due east upon leaving Florida’s Space Coast.
The 45th Weather Squadron forecast a 90 percent chance for favorable weather during the launch window, citing a small chance for interference from cumulus clouds.
SpaceX launched the mission with Falcon 9 first stage B1085. This was its 14th flight after previously flying missions, including NASA’s Crew-9, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1, and Fram2.
A little more than 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1085 landed on the drone ship, ‘A Shortfall of Gravitas,’ positioned in the Atlantic Ocean. This was the 146th touchdown on this vessel and the 583rd booster landing to date for SpaceX.
The EchoStar 25 satellite deployed from the second stage of the Falcon 9 rocket nearly 33 minutes after liftoff.
On March 20, 2023, EchoStar entered into a contract with Lanteris Space LLC (formerly Maxar Space Systems, now a subsidiary of Intuitive Machines) to build the EchoStar 25 satellite. A launch contract with SpaceX was established in the fourth quarter of 2023.
The satellite is built on Lanteris’ 1300 Series satellite bus, the basis for spacecraft, like NASA’s Psyche probe and Sirius XM’s SXM-10. Dish will use it as a direct broadcast satellite.
EchoStar-25 will operate in the 12.2-12.7 GHz for space-to-Earth communications and 17.3-17.8 GHz for Earth-to-space, according to a filing with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
This will be the most recent EchoStar satellite to be operated by its subsidiary, Dish, since EchoStar 23, which launched in March 2017. In May 2025, the company ordered the construction of EchoStar-26 from Lanteris, which is expected to launch in 2028.
Deployment of @EchoStar XXV confirmed pic.twitter.com/VrYd2QtjxT
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) March 10, 2026
In September 2025, EchoStar announced it was selling spectrum licenses to SpaceX that it had planned to use for its own direct to mobile service. The $17 billion sale, split evenly between cash and SpaceX stock is awaiting regulatory approval.
“We are disappointed that we were not able to continue with something we built over 17 years,” EchoStar’s CEO Charles Ergen said. “I think that we are also pleased that we have made our bet, and that is with SpaceX and Starlink
The sale will help advance SpaceX’s Direct to Cell Starlink service, recently rebranded to Starlink Mobile.
“We see them as the most viable company to do that, and with their tremendous technology and launch capabilities, they are well-positioned to certainly be a leader in that. And as we publicly discussed, we already have an agreement with them to provide that to our customers,” Ergen said.
Juli Clover, MacRumors:
Featuring bubble-style lines with colorful gradients, the wallpapers come in Mac Purple, Mac Blue, Mac Pink, and Mac Yellow. The design and the colors spell out the word “Mac.”
They got me. I’m upgrading to Tahoe now.
Links for you. Science:
Why Some People Thrive on Four Hours of Sleep
Maryland faces another spate of viral infections. This time it’s mumps.
A familiar move with a new twist: Trump tries to cut CDC funds he just signed into law
Troubleshooting common errors in assemblies of long-read metagenomes
Scientists Found a Massive Lava Tube Hiding Beneath the Surface of Venus
One vaccine may provide broad protection against many respiratory infections and allergens (very good summary of the approach)
Other:
The record-breaking cocaine boom — and its deadly fallout
Some local police, sheriff and DA offices are communicating often with ICE, records show
ICE agents often ignore safety and privacy practices for detainee patients, Tacoma nurses say
Alaska lawmaker’s chief of staff arrested on sex trafficking and child exploitation charges
Trump Betrayed the MAHA Movement This Week. RFK Jr.’s Reaction Was Telling.
How Epstein and Maxwell used an elite Midwest arts school to prey on girls
MAGA’s weird, horny obsession with Alysa Liu. The far-right can only see a young woman as “goonbait” (they’re such losers)
Interview with Andrea Pitzer about concentration camps
Yeah, so… Substack, I’m out. The Polymarket partnership is the last straw.
I DON’T BELONG TO AN ORGANIZED RESISTANCE — I’M A DEMOCRAT
U.K.-based Caffè Nero wins auction to buy Compass Coffee
Judge forced to slash SF jury pool over hate for Elon Musk
Army warrant officers will ‘bid’ against each other for their next bonus (utterly fucked up policy)
Pennsylvania high school students violently attacked by police during anti-ICE walkout
‘Andor’ Creator Tony Gilroy Gives the Interview He Couldn’t During Its Release. While promoting his cautionary tale about fascism, Disney asked Gilroy to refrain from using the word. Nine months after it aired its finale, the ‘Star Wars’ series feels scarily prescient.
MAGA Senator Appears Not to Have Read the SAVE Act
I Verified My LinkedIn Identity. Here’s What I Actually Handed Over.
Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today, starts removing 695,000 archive links
The Unstoppable Alysa Liu: Watching a young woman be free was the joy I didn’t know I needed
MAGA’s Reaction to the Epstein Files Reveals Total Moral Collapse
Majority of Americans think Trump’s deportation campaign is going too far
Trump’s Attack on the Supreme Court Was Unhinged Even for Him
You Might Be Seeing A MAHA-Coded Doctor And Not Even Know It
On a new banner, Trump evokes the shadow world of authoritarian icons
The Primary Win That Stunned Democrats Everywhere
NFL Pro Bowler Tre’ Johnson, dead at 54, found a new calling as a teacher. He was a bruising offensive lineman, playing in Washington for eight seasons, before becoming a teacher and coach at the Landon School in Maryland.
What’s Next for US Healthcare? Ask Oklahoma.
There’s A Very Freaky Explanation For ICE’s Uncomfortable Interactions With Women
My child’s circus school is bracing for ICE. This is the toll of authoritarianism.
People Who Left ‘MAGA Christianity’ Share What It Really Took To Step Away
Paul Ford posted about a timeline site he’s started making after years of pondering the idea and tinkering with it.
I don’t know Paul but over the years I’ve got the sense we are similar in a few ways. And this only reinforces that sense because I also spent years pondering a website for making timelines. Maybe plenty of us have.
In fact one of the very first websites I started when I first got online in 1995 was a site collecting the dates of events in the development of “all this digital stuff,” as I came across them. It didn’t get very far.
But I think my more recent pondering started just over ten years later when I did some work for the BBC on a project called Eyewitness, creating a prototype website on which people would be able to contribute memories of a specific day. This sounds a little reckless for an organisation as cautious as the BBC is these days but back then, in the midst of Web 2.0, no project brainstorm was complete without a post-it with “UGC” scrawled on it (user-generated content).
The prototype site also included a load of events that I scraped from BBC News and Wikipedia, and I’d also spent some time looking at what was then available in terms of making and displaying timelines.
The project didn’t go any further but I kept thinking about a website for creating timelines. It was the kind of project that I’d think about while trying to get to sleep at night: how it could work, what the problems might be, etc. I envisaged a site on which people could create and share events and timelines, and combine them to create new ones, displaying them in a variety of formats
I didn’t get as far into the details as Paul has but even the easiest-to-identify problems were interesting.
How should it deal with events where we don’t know the exact date? I’ve always liked the way Flickr deals with ambiguity when recording dates but how should such vagueness be displayed on a graphical timeline?
How should it deal with the adoption of different calendering systems at different points in history? What does a timeline look like if it has days added or subtracted from the usual progression at odd points?
How should it deal with different timescales? You could have one timeline that requires sub-second accuracy and another based on millions of years.
One thing I really wanted to solve was how to deal with different zoom levels. Imagine a timeline of World War II, and you begin by looking at the whole thing from 1939 to 1945. Whatever the display looks like graphically there would only be space to see the most important events.
But you should be able to zoom in, and in, and in, until (assuming enough events have been added) you’re looking at minute-by-minute details of a single day.
Think of it like zooming into a map – if you’re zoomed way out you’ll only see the land/sea, the boundaries of countries, maybe capital cities. As you zoom in you’ll see gradually more features: towns, roads, built-up areas, individual buildings, bus stops… This suggested that every event should have a measure of importance, so we could tell at which zoom level it should be displayed.
So all I would need to do would be to rate every event in history with a number indicating its objective importance.
You can see why I never got round to making anything.
But I was still intrigued, and thought someone must have looked into this kind of thing: a numerical rating of the importance of events. Say from a rating of 1 for the beating of a butterfly’s wing up to 100 for the birth and death of the universe, and everything in between.
Ludicrous but interesting. Who could even judge? From who’s (or what’s) perspective would importance be measured?
As a side project, I then thought about a newspaper whose hierarchy of daily stories would be based solely on this measure of global (universal?) importance.
Obviously, none of this happened. At some point I realised I’d stopped thinking about the idea without having made anything. It all seemed a bit complicated and I didn’t really want to run a site that involved lots of data entry/updating on my part, or with lots of users. Making websites is interesting but running them is often less so.
Anyway, one difference between me and Paul is that he actually made something with this idea.
Voyager Technologies is investing in Max Space to help accelerate a partnership between the two companies on developing lunar habitats.
The post Voyager Technologies invests in Max Space appeared first on SpaceNews.
SpaceX is pushing back the first launch of the latest version of Starship even as NASA is asking it to accelerate work on a lunar lander version of the vehicle.
The post First Starship V3 launch slips appeared first on SpaceNews.
A senior Chinese space scientist and delegate to the country’s national congress is proposing the prioritization of an unprecedented orbiter mission to ice giant Neptune.
The post Chinese official calls for prioritizing Neptune orbiter mission appeared first on SpaceNews.
Modern society has become profoundly reliant on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). These systems support aviation safety, emergency services, finance, communications, energy networks and an expanding array of autonomous and industrial systems. Yet despite this reliance, GNSS remains inherently fragile: low‑power signals transmitted from medium Earth orbit are surprisingly easy to degrade, and the consequences […]
The post GNSS resilience is an economic and security priority appeared first on SpaceNews.
Here are recent reports on kidney exchange from India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and Germany.
Atul Agnihotri: SOMETHING REMARKABLE IS HAPPENING IN KIDNEY TRANSPLANTATION IN INDIA.
"Through collaboration with 63 transplant centers, APKD India enabled 130 kidney swap transplants in 2025, quietly becoming ONE OF THE LARGEST KIDNEY SWAP PROGRAMS outside the U.S.
And the momentum continues — January has already kicked off with 22 swap transplants.
A powerful reminder that when hospitals collaborate, more patients receive the gift of life.
"One Nation, One Swap."
https://lnkd.in/gZD6Q-md "
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Here's an article on the clinical trials of kidney exchange in Brazil, in preparation for a possible change in the transplant law to make it standard practice.
Doação Renal Pareada (DRP) no Brasil: relato do primeiro caso envolvendo três duplas Kidney Paired Donation (KPD) in Brazil: first 3-way case report by Juliana Bastos, Glaucio Silva de Souza, Marcio Luiz de Sousa, Pedro Bastos Guimarães de
Almeida, Thais Freesz, David Jose de Barros
Machado, Elias David-Neto, Gustavo Fernandes Ferreira https://doi.org/10.1590/2175-8239-JBN-2025-0177pt
Abstract: Kidney Paired Donation (KPD) is a transformative strategy in living kidney donor transplantation (LDKT), particularly for overcoming immunological barriers that preclude direct donation. In 2021, KPD accounted for one-fifth of adult LDKT and for half of LDKT for sensitized recipients in the United States. In Brazil, with a high prevalence of chronic kidney disease (CKD) and over 30,000 patients on transplant waiting lists, the demand for compatible donors far exceeds supply. This article presents a case report of KPD in the Brazilian context, illustrating its feasibility and highlighting challenges and considerations for broader implementation. The case demonstrates KPD’s potential to increase transplant rates, improve outcomes, and reduce dialysis costs. Nevertheless, structural, ethical, and regulatory challenges remain. This report emphasizes the implications of expanding KPD as a sustainable, life-saving strategy in Brazil.
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Here's a report from King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia:
Almeshari, K.A., Broering, D.C., Obeid, D.A., Alali, A.N., Algharabli, A.N., Pana, N.L. and ALI, T.Z., Innovative Strategies in Kidney Paired Donation: Single-Center Experience Achieving the Highest Annual Transplant Volume Globally. Frontiers in Immunology, 17, p.1623684.
"Methods: We analyzed all kidney transplants performed through our KPD program between January and December 2024. The program aimed to achieve full HLA and ABO compatibility for incompatible pairs, while also incorporating additional strategies: inclusion of compatible pairs to improve HLA matching, acceptance of ABO quasi-compatible matches (e.g., A2 donors to O or B recipients), low-risk HLA-incompatible matching for HLA-incompatible candidates with cPRA >80%, and ABO-incompatible matching for those with cPRA >95%.
Results: A total of 135 patients (121 adults, 14 pediatrics) underwent KPD-facilitated transplantation, including 69 HLA-incompatible (51.1%), 37 ABO-incompatible (27.4%), and 29 compatible (21.5%) pairs. Females comprised 60.7% of the cohort, with a significantly higher proportion in the HLA-incompatible group (p < 0.001). HLA-incompatible recipients were older than others (mean age 42.5 years, p < 0.001). Most transplants (93.3%) occurred through 2- to 5-way closed chains, with the remainder via domino chains (6.7%).
...
Conclusion: Our single-center experience demonstrates the feasibility and effectiveness of a high-volume KPD program in overcoming immunologic barriers to kidney transplantation. Strategic inclusion of compatible pairs, ABO quasi-compatible matching, low-risk HLA-incompatible, and ABO-incompatible matchings significantly increased access for difficult-to-match recipients. This model may serve as a replicable framework for other high-capacity transplant centers seeking to expand transplant access and improve outcomes for complex patient populations. "
########
And here's a report on proposed German legislation to (finally) make kidney exchange legal in Germany:
Biró, P., Budde, K., Burnapp, L., Cseh, Á., Kurschat, C., Manlove, D., & Ockenfels, A. (2026). Germany's Path to a National Kidney Exchange Program: An Assessment of the 2024 Legislative Proposal. Health Policy, 166, 105578.
"Highlights
The German Federal Parliament plans to amend the Transplantation Act (1997).
•
The main goal of the reform is to establish a national kidney exchange program.
•
The draft law follows European best practices in many respects.
•
However, the law prohibits the participation of compatible donor–recipient pairs, contrary to international evidence.
•
Germany may join cross-border kidney exchange programs in the future. "
This hand-painted stop motion animation recalls the textures of a family home demolished to make way for a widened road
- by Aeon Video
Is mathematical beauty real? Or is it just a subjective, human ‘wow’ that is becoming redundant in an AI age?
- by Rita Ahmadi
Just inland from the Pacific coast of El Salvador, the striking blue waters of Lake Coatepeque fill part of a caldera of the same name. An astronaut aboard the International Space Station took this photo of the lake and surrounding terrain on February 10, 2026, as the station passed over Central America.
The caldera formed during a series of explosive eruptions between 72,000 and 51,000 years ago. After the caldera’s formation, additional eruptions produced several lava domes along its western side, including one that became Isla del Cerro (Isla Teopán). According to the Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program, there have been no reported eruptions from the caldera during the Holocene (the past 11,700 years).
Today, homes, restaurants, boathouses, and other structures line the lakeshore. This human footprint extends westward toward the caldera’s steep rim, which abuts the eastern flank of Santa Ana—El Salvador’s tallest volcano. Unlike Coatepeque, Santa Ana remains active, with small to moderate explosive eruptions recorded since the 16th century. Its most recent severe eruption occurred in 2005.
Although the lake appears its usual blue in this photo, it can occasionally take on a strikingly different hue. At times, the water temporarily shifts to bright turquoise, prompting questions about its cause. In 2024, scientists reported that while pigments from microalgae and cyanobacteria can affect the lake’s color, the turquoise episodes are likely the result of natural mineralization.
The broader landscape around the lake and Santa Ana Volcano is a mosaic of urban areas, agricultural fields, and even more volcanic terrain. The city of Santa Ana lies about 15 kilometers (9 miles) to the north, while San Salvador, also nestled amid volcanoes, lies 40 kilometers (25 miles) to the east. The volcanic landscape stretches more than 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) along Central America’s Pacific coast, from Guatemala to Panama, composing the Central American Volcanic Arc.
Astronaut photograph ISS074-E-312810 was acquired on February 10, 2026, with a Nikon Z9 digital camera using a focal length of 400 millimeters. It was provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit at NASA Johnson Space Center. The images were taken by a member of the Expedition 74 crew. The images have been cropped and enhanced to improve contrast, and lens artifacts have been removed. The International Space Station Program supports the laboratory as part of the ISS National Lab to help astronauts take pictures of Earth that will be of the greatest value to scientists and the public, and to make those images freely available on the Internet. Additional images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Story by Kathryn Hansen.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
The glow of city lights, the aurora, and a rising Moon illuminate the night along the northwest coast of North…
The Large Magellanic Cloud—one of our closest neighboring galaxies—is a hotbed of star formation that is visible to both astronauts…
Rounding out a remarkable year, the outback lake displayed distinct green and reddish water in its two main bays.
The post Lake Coatepeque appeared first on NASA Science.
In October 1973, on Yom Kippur — the Day of Atonement — Syria and Egypt launched a surprise attack on Israel. After desperate fighting, the Israelis gained the upper hand, thanks in part to a huge airlift of weapons from the United States.
The Arab world erupted in rage, and oil producers temporarily embargoed exports to the U.S. and other nations that had supported Israel. The result was the first of a series of oil crises that wreaked global economic havoc.
And here we are, almost 53 years later, with a war in the Middle East causing a major disruption of world oil supplies. We don’t know yet how bad this will get. As I write this, analysts are divided. Basically, oil experts’ hair is on fire — the Strait of Hormuz is closed! — while macroeconomists are relatively calm, arguing that we’re not as vulnerable to an oil shock as we were two generations ago.
One thing is clear: It’s important to understand the risks and learn what lessons we can from the past. So today’s primer will be devoted to oil crises, past and possibly future.
Not to be coy about it: The disruption of world oil supplies caused by the war in Iran looks extremely serious. Indeed, if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed for an extended period, this will be a worse disruption than either the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War or the aftermath of the 1979 Iranian revolution. Hence the alarm of oil experts.
However, the U.S. economy and other major economies have changed greatly since the 1970s. They have become much less dependent on oil, and they are probably much less prone to experiencing inflationary spirals in the aftermath of an oil price shock. Hence the relatively relaxed attitude of macroeconomists.
Beyond the paywall I will address the following:
1. The history of oil crises, from the Yom Kippur War to Operation Epic Fury
2. Why oil shocks did so much economic damage in the 1970s
3. How the economics of oil have changed since 1973
4. Scenarios for the economic impact of the Iran War
What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.
— Joseph Weizenbaum, creator of ELIZA, in 1976 (via)
Tags: ai-ethics, ai, computer-history, internet-archive
In discussions of modern wars, Americans obsess about “exit strategies”. How do you avoid getting “bogged down?” How do you know when the mission is finished? How do you avoid “mission creep?” These are very much Great Power questions. They’re all questions you ask about what are fundamentally wars of choice. They’re framed as questions of duration and sustainability, questions a Great Power asks when there are likely multiple draws on blood or treasure in various parts of the world, fears of over-extension and over-commitment. Other countries don’t have the luxury of these kinds of questions; it’s built into the Great Power equation. Ukraine has no “exit strategy.” They’re being invaded. They’re fighting to control their own territory and sovereignty. In a way, at least if you place yourself in the world of Greater Russian nationalism where Vladimir Putin and his entourage live, Russia doesn’t have one either. They’re trying to reclaim “their” territory or something between a national and imperial possession. They’ll fight until they get it.
But talk of “exit strategies” is really a way of asking what the goals are that led you to start a war in the first place. If the goal of your military action is clear, your exit strategies should be straightforward. Indeed, you shouldn’t need a “strategy” at all. When your goals are met, you’re done and you leave. Or at least you stop using military force. If you know what your goal is, you fight until you’ve a) achieved your goal or b) realized through battlefield reverses that your goal is unattainable. If your goal is unclear, all the inherent forward momentum of superior military force drives you forward.
There are few modern wars in which the U.S. has launched an all-out war, which this certainly is, with so little clarity about what it is we are even trying to accomplish. The Iraq War of 2003 is certainly a pretty good example of that. But what we were trying to achieve in Iraq was comparatively clear: we wanted to topple the government of Saddam Hussein and replace it with another one. When the moment of invasion came in March 2003, really no one had any question that this was the only outcome the United States would accept. Just why that was so important was much, much fuzzier, and what kind of government we’d put in its place even more so. But the immediate goal of the war was clear: there was no way the U.S. would allow Hussein to remain in power.
How about here? We’re demanding now “unconditional surrender.” That appears to be our current war aim. But we’ve also said it’s eliminating Iran’s nuclear program, degrading its missile armory, creating an opening for a domestic opposition to take power, reacting to an imminent threat. Most notably, the U.S. doesn’t appear to be deploying the kind of force that has much chance of achieving this goal.
A friend of mine commented last night on just how little visibility we seem to have into any part of the war zone — just how little we’re seeing from inside Iran or also, in terms of missile hits, inside Israel. The private sector sources of satellite information have announced a 96-hour hold on imagery of damage to U.S. bases in the region. (If that’s a demand from the U.S. government, it’s an understandable one. But it leaves the public with even less visibility.) President Trump has made a series of increasingly totalizing demands which now appear to amount to unconditional surrender by the current government and an agreement to allow Trump to choose the future leader of Iran. (Notably, this approach to Trump’s electoral prerogative seems to assume a permanent leader, not someone elected by a future democratic government. Obvious, but worth saying out loud and tells you a lot. And Iran named Mojtaba Khamenei, son of killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as Iran’s new supreme leader after Trump called him an “unacceptable choice.”) If our aim is really unconditional surrender and Iran becoming a U.S. vassal state, it sounds like any exit could be very far off.
And why is defining war aims so difficult? We’re not the first power to have difficulty with this. But it’s a product of the vastly superior military power the U.S. has enjoyed for going on 40 years — figure 1989-90 as the turning point. (Note to get your bearings: that that is approaching as long a period of time as the Cold War itself.) And before that, the U.S. was one of two Great Powers with that kind of military heft within its own sphere. When you have that kind of totally disproportionate military power, you don’t think as clearly about the specific goals you’re trying to achieve. There’s plenty more military power where that came from, so you can improvise. There’s not a huge amount of need, at the level of civilian decision-makers, to finely calibrate and align costs and goals. The resort to military force becomes more a consequence of frustration — national or presidential frustration — when some unacceptable behavior is defined, recognized and then not easily resolved. Like many physically strong people, if they can’t easily get what they want by asking, they resort to force.
That’s been a problem for the U.S. for a long time. It’s wildly more so when U.S. power is so tightly chained to the will and impulses of a single person. Trump started this war as part of the international acting-out he’s been at for the last few months, a way of compensating for reverses at home. If we look at his statements and U.S. actions leading up to the beginning of the war, the impulse or the goal seems simply to be in charge, for Iran to do what Trump says. He’s even stated explicitly that this should be going how it did in Venezuela, where the next in command steps forward and agrees to an indefinite period of vassalhood under not so much the U.S. but Donald Trump himself. What remains of the Iranian state leadership does not seem interested in that. But the desire to be in charge is more a characterological impulse than any kind of military goal. Indeed, it leaves the initiative all in the hands of the adversary. Only the other side can tell you when you’ve gotten what you want. The U.S. keeps fighting until Iran agrees Trump is in charge or the government falls and is replaced by someone who will say that. That’s not only a hard challenge. It’s also a classic example of goals military planners don’t like. You want something clear that you can achieve at your own initiative, without someone else having to agree to anything: blow up the base, occupy the country, cut off exports. These are concrete things a superior military force can achieve through its own actions. This war is probably just about Donald Trump being in charge. That’s not a clear or definable goal. It leaves the initiative in the hands of whoever currently controls the Iran state and military. It’s a recipe for unclarity.
At 8:50 yesterday morning, President Donald J. Trump posted on social media: “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER! After that, and the selection of a GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader(s), we, and many of our wonderful and very brave allies and partners, will work tirelessly to bring Iran back from the brink of destruction, making it economically bigger, better, and stronger than ever before. IRAN WILL HAVE A GREAT FUTURE. ‘MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN (MIGA!).’ Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”
As Alex Leary and Vera Bergengruen of the Wall Street Journal observed, the demand for unconditional surrender was quite a shift from Trump’s original promise to the people of Iran that the future is “yours to take,” or even his early claim that he was hoping to knock out Iran’s nuclear facilities. Trump’s shift highlighted that there appears to have been very little planning for what would happen after U.S. and Israeli bombs began to rain on Iran.
Leary and Bergengruen noted that Trump was bouncing ideas for the next stage of the assault off journalists even as ships stopped passing through the Strait of Hormuz, American citizens were stranded in the Middle East, the war spread to countries throughout the region, and U.S. military personnel died.
When reporters asked about what Trump meant by unconditional surrender, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt seemed to say that unconditional surrender meant whatever Trump decides it does whenever he decides what the goals of Operation Epic Fury are. She said: “What the president means is that when he as commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces determines that Iran no longer poses a threat to the United States of America and the goals of Operation Epic Fury has [sic] been fully realized, then Iran will essentially be in a place of unconditional surrender whether they say it themselves or not.”
Like other administration figures, Leavitt suggested that the violence itself was the point, saying: “Frankly, they don’t have a lot of people to say that for them because the United States and the state of Israel have completely wiped out more than fifty leaders of the former terrorist regime including the supreme leader himself.”
President of Iran Masoud Pezeshkian said Iran’s enemies “must take their dream of the Iranian people’s unconditional surrender to their graves,” but he did apologize to neighboring countries for the strikes against U.S. military bases in their lands. He said Iran would suspend those strikes unless those states themselves launched attacks on Iran.
At 6:11 this morning, Trump posted on social media: “Iran, which is being beat to Hell, has apologized and surrendered to its Middle East neighbors, and promised that it will not shoot at them anymore. This promise was only made because of the relentless U.S. and Israeli attack. They were looking to take over and rule the Middle East. It is the first time that Iran has ever lost, in thousands of years, to surrounding Middle Eastern Countries. They have said, ‘Thank you President Trump.’ I have said, ‘You’re welcome!’ Iran is no longer the ‘Bully of the Middle East,’ they are, instead, ‘THE LOSER OF THE MIDDLE EAST,’ and will be for many decades until they surrender or, more likely, completely collapse! Today Iran will be hit very hard! Under serious consideration for complete destruction and certain death, because of Iran’s bad behavior, are areas and groups of people that were not considered for targeting up until this moment in time. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”
Zach Everson of Public Citizen recalled a quotation from William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, summing up Adolf Hitler’s view: “We must always demand so much that we can never be satisfied.”
Today, on Air Force One, when asked “what unconditional surrender looks like to you,” Trump answered: “Where they cry uncle or when they can’t fight any longer and there’s nobody around to cry uncle. That could happen too…. If they surrender or if there is nobody around to surrender but they’re rendered useless in terms of military.”
On Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth warned representatives from sixteen Latin American and Caribbean countries that if they don’t adopt more aggressive strategies against drug cartels, the Trump administration will do it for them. Hegseth urged the countries to remain “Christian nations, under God, proud of our shared heritage with strong borders,” and not be led astray by “radical narco-communism, anarcho-tyranny…and uncontrolled mass migration.”
Tiago Rogero of The Guardian reported that Latin American countries resisted the framing of Hegseth’s speech. The title of his article used the word “dismay.”
In Miami today, Trump and his advisors convened a “Shield of the Americas” summit with twelve of Latin America’s Trump-aligned leaders. At the meeting, Trump called for an “anti-cartel coalition” that would use military might to crush drug cartels. Former homeland security secretary Kristi Noem told the group: “Now that America is secure, and our borders are secure, we want to focus on our neighbors and help our neighbors with their borders and the challenges they have.”
Trump suggested that Cuba was next on his list of countries to topple. “We’re looking forward to the great change that will soon be coming to Cuba,” Trump said. “They have no money, they have no oil, they have a bad philosophy and bad regime.” “Cuba is in its last moments of life as it was, but it will have a great new life,” he said.
In Need to Know, David Rothkopf today called out the madness of the fact world trade and global security is being shattered by a single man. “Not since Adolf Hitler blew his brains out in a bunker beneath the garden of the German Reich Chancellery on April 30, 1945, have the lives of so many people around the world been so buffeted by the psychosis of a single man.”
Why has Trump launched a war against Iran on a whim, attacked other countries, and upended world trade, Rothkopf asked. “Because he’s insane. Because he’s venal. Because he’s a malignant narcissist. Because he’s a sociopath. Because he has a fragile ego. Because those around him exacerbate and play to those traits to advance their own interests. Because CEOs and investors do likewise to fill their coffers. Because to some people, whether he is insane or malevolent or repugnant or not matters less than whether his actions will feather their nests, increase their power.
“Because they, the billionaires…play their games and the consequences for the little people down below, the consequences for us, hardly matter a whit.”
On Thursday, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) called attention to another factor in play. In a speech to the Senate, Whitehouse noted that throughout his second term, Trump has advanced policies that help Russia, pausing weapons shipments to Ukraine, easing sanctions on Russia, and pushing a peace deal favorable to Russia. Last summer, he welcomed Putin to American soil, and administration officials have parroted Russian propaganda. Russian state media gloated when Trump “installed Russia apologist Tulsi Gabbard as his director of national intelligence,” and Attorney General Pam Bondi upon taking office stopped the anti-kleptocracy work that had targeted Russian oligarchs.
Trump’s new national security policy threw traditional U.S. allies overboard and favored policies that Russian government officials praised as “largely consistent” with their own.
“If Trump were purposefully doing Russia’s bidding,” Whitehouse said, “it is hard to see what he would be doing differently. The United States is the most powerful nation in the world. Russia is a weak, corrupt regime. My old friend Senator John McCain used to say that Russia is a gas station, run by gangsters, with an army. It doesn’t make sense that the President of the United States, who insists—insists—on being dominant in essentially every relationship, is so submissive to one person and that one person is Russia’s dictator, Vladimir Putin.”
Whitehouse suggested that the answer “could…have something to do with Trump’s close friendship with the deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.” He noted that the Epstein files, riddled as they are with references to Trump, are also riddled with references to Russian girls and women, Russian operatives, and Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Whitehouse spoke about how many of Epstein’s victims believed he was recording them, and how there were hidden cameras installed throughout his homes. He quoted Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre, who wrote: “He explicitly talked about using me and what I’d been forced to do with certain men as a form of blackmail, so these men would owe him favors.”
Whitehouse suggested the possibility that Epstein might have been working with Russian operatives, but emphasized that we don’t know. “Epstein was an inveterate liar and a criminal who often sought to exaggerate his power and influence, and the Epstein files need to be viewed through that lens,” he said. “What we do know is that a significant number of powerful men—our current President, some of his cabinet secretaries, tech billionaires like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and others—were very mixed up with Epstein at different times. And Epstein seems to have been very mixed up with Russia.”
“We also know that there is a cover-up afoot at the Department of Justice,” he continued, where officials are “trying to shield Trump from something in the Epstein files.”
“One of the great forces that Washington runs on is normalcy bias,” he said, but he suggested looking past that bias to note that “we have links with Russia, girls from Russia, money from Russia, people from Russia, deals and transactions with Russia, contacts with people with Russian intelligence, news reports exploring contacts with Russia, and an official investigation from the government of Poland into an Epstein-Russia connection.”
Yesterday Noah Robertson, Ellen Nakashima, and Warren P. Strobel of the Washington Post reported that Russia is providing Iran with the information it needs to attack U.S. forces in the Middle East, including aircraft and ships.
During a roundtable on college sports, Peter Doocy of the Fox News Channel asked Trump about that report, saying: “It sounds like the Russians are helping Iran target and attack Americans now.” Trump responded: “I have a lot of respect for you. You’ve always been very nice to me. What a stupid question that is to be asking at this time. We’re talking about something else.”
—
Notes:
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/trump-is-rewriting-the-iran-endgame-in-real-time-98f8531f
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/07/trump-shield-of-americas-summit
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/05/hegseth-latin-america-drug-cartels
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/03/06/russia-iran-intelligence-us-targets/
YouTube:
Bluesky:
zacheverson.com/post/3mghqh4cc4c2l
2026/03/06/trump-iran-oil-surrender.html
thetnholler.bsky.social/post/3mgj3lywzvc2h
atrupar.com/post/3mgfx6ep5ic2f
Last week, Apple released a parade of hardware announcements, and the one that captured the most attention across the industry was the $600 ($500 if you’re in education!) MacBook Neo, the brightly-colored low-end laptop that they launched to great fanfare. The conventional wisdom is that this product opens up Apple to the low end of the laptop market for the first time, radically changing the dynamics of the entire market, and throwing down the gauntlet to the garbage Windows laptop market, as well as challenging a huge swath of Chromebooks which tend to dominate in the education market. This is incorrect.
Apple has, in fact, sold a MacBook Air with an M1 chip at Walmart for years, which it has intermittently discounted to $499 at key times like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The single-core performance of that laptop (meaning, how it works for most normal tasks that people do, like browsing the web or writing email or watching YouTube videos), is very nearly equivalent to the newly-released MacBook Neo.
But. A laptop with an old design, using a chip that has an old number (the M1 chip came out six years ago!), sold exclusively through a mass-market retailer that is perceived as anything but premium, presents an enormous brand challenge for Apple. It is, to put it simply, embarrassing. Apple can have low-end products in its range. They invest lots of effort in that segment of their product line, as the new iPhone 17e shows, making a new basic entrant to their most recent series of phones. But Apple can’t have old, basic-looking products that people aren’tt even able to buy at an Apple Store.
And that’s what Neo solves. It’s a smart reframing of a product that is nearly the same offering as the old M1 Air: the Neo and that old M1 machine both have 13” screens, both weigh just under 3 pounds, both have 8GB of RAM, both start at 256GB of storage, both have about 16 hours of battery life, are both about 8”x12”, both have 2 USB ports and a headphone jack, and both of course cost almost exactly the same. They did add a new yellow (citrus!) color for the Neo, though.
What was more striking to me was Apple’s introductory video, which clearly seems aimed at people who are new to Apple computers, or maybe people who are new to laptop computers entirely. They’re imagining a user base who’s only ever had their smartphones and are buying computers for the first time — which might describe a lot of students. There’s no discussion here of the chamfers of the aluminum, or the pipelines in the GPU cores, and there’s barely even the slightest mention of AI; instead, they describe the basics of what the laptop includes, and even go out of their way to explain how it interoperates with an iPhone.
There’s also a very clear attempt to distinguish Neo’s branding from the rest of Apple’s design language. The type for the “MacBook Neo” name in the launch video, and the “Hello, Neo” text on the product homepage are a rounded typeface that’s so new that it’s not actually even an actual font that Apple’s using; they’ve rendered it as an image instead of a variation of their usual “San Francisco” font that Apple uses for everything else in their standard marketing materials. The throwback to 2000s-era design (terminal green, the word “Neo” — are we entering the Matrix?) couldn’t be more different from the “it looks expensive” vibes of something like the Apple Watch Hermès branding.
In all, it’s pretty impressive to see Apple use its marketing strengths to take a product that is remarkably similar to something that they’ve had for sale for years at the largest retailer in the world, and position it as a brand-new, category-defining new entry into a space. To me, the biggest thing this shows is the blind spot that traditional tech trade press has to the actual buying patterns and lived experience of normal people who shop at Walmart all the time; it would be pretty hard to see Neo as particularly novel if you had walked by a Walmart tech section any time in the last three years.
At a time when Apple has lost whatever moral compass it had, even though its machines still say “privacy is a human right” when you turn them on, we still want to see positive signs from the company. And a good one is that Apple is engaging with the reality that the current moment calls for products that are far more affordable. It is a good thing indeed when affordable products are presented as being desirable, when most of the product’s enclosure is made of recycled material, and when the lifespan of a product can be expected to be significantly longer than most in its category, instead of simply being treated as disposable. All it took was removing the stigma over the existing affordable laptop that Apple’s been selling for years.
Links for you. Science:
Experts warn NIH director now leading CDC will push ‘RFK Jr’s agenda’
N.I.H. Director Will Temporarily Run C.D.C. in Leadership Shake-Up
Revitalizing actinobacteria research: an urgent response to the antimicrobial resistance crisis
The 80% power lie
National Institutes of Health faces leadership vacuum as director positions sit open
This Is What Destroying the Vaccine Market Looks Like. A shocking move by RFK Jr.’s team has the industry spooked—for good reason.
Other:
Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, And The Construction Of Political Crisis
Don’t Be Fooled By the Corrupt Court’s Tariff Decision
Get Ready for Zombie Tariffs. Even after losing at the Supreme Court, Trump has plenty of ways to reconstruct his trade regime.
Pastor Linked to Erika Kirk Faces Child Trafficking Charges as Online Speculation Spreads
Kansas pass anti-trans ‘bathroom bounty’ law despite governor’s veto (very weird original headline, demonstrating a lack of basic political knowledge)
MAHA Moms Turn Against Trump: ‘Women Feel Like They Were Lied To’
DOJ Deleted Record Revealing That Maxwell Holds Potential Blackmail Over Trump
The break is over. Companies are jacking up prices again.
Kansas Mayor Who Voted for Trump as Noncitizen Faces Felony Charges (he’s Republican, obviously…)
Indian Skier Starts, Finishes Race
Florida pickleball brawl involving up to 20 people results in paddles to the face and felony charges
He made a fake ICE deportation tip line. Then a kindergarten teacher called.
How Legal Immigration Became a Deportation Trap
Maryland bans partnerships with ICE, citing ‘unaccountable agents’
Epstein was invited to gatherings with a dozen members of Congress years after his initial arrest, documents reveal
I Guess We’re Still Doing This
Jesse Watters says billionaires should “make the homeless people in skid row fight like gladiators”
‘Hello Girls!’: Epstein Donated to Harvard Student Group for Years After Sex Conviction
Security And Confidentiality
Staff at Dilley raiding cells to confiscate kids’ letters and drawings detailing conditions inside. The raids allegedly began in response to a recent ProPublica article featuring letters and drawings from children inside the San Antonio-area immigrant detention site.
US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere
ICE moves out to the suburbs. The less densely populated areas outside the Twin Cities make it harder for protesters and observers to organize.
Epstein Used Botstein’s Prestige and Connections to Recruit and Support One of His Victims, a Violinist from Europe
Turns Out There Was Voter Fraud in Georgia—by Elon Musk
The billionaires’ eugenics project: how Epstein infiltrated Harvard, muzzled the humanities and preached master-race science
Nevada Brothel Workers Are Unionizing to Protect Their Digital Rights
US judge throws out immigration board’s ruling endorsing Trump mass detention policy
Wow, Elon Musk sure does like White people
Look how much Canadians hate the United States now
Bizarre new RFK Jr video features shirtless secretary climbing into tub in jeans
Simon Willison:
There are a lot of open questions about this, both ethically and legally. These appear to be coming to a head in the venerable chardet Python library.
chardetwas created by Mark Pilgrim back in 2006 and released under the LGPL. Mark retired from public internet life in 2011 andchardet’s maintenance was taken over by others, most notably Dan Blanchard who has been responsible for every release since 1.1 in July 2012.Two days ago Dan released chardet 7.0.0 with the following note in the release notes:
Ground-up, MIT-licensed rewrite of chardet. Same package name, same public API — drop-in replacement for chardet 5.x/6.x. Just way faster and more accurate!
Yesterday Mark Pilgrim opened #327: No right to relicense this project.
A fascinating dispute, and the first public post from Pilgrim that I’ve seen in quite a while.
The state of my tasks list in Things remains non-optimal but has not yet descended into a swamp of forever tasks. Still recoverable.
Although I didn’t have many symptoms remaining from last weekend’s cold, I still felt unusually tired, so I skipped exercise until the end of the week. That was pretty nice, I must admit, gaining at least an hour or two a day (including driving time to the gym) for important faffing.
Had a filling this week, the first for years, which was fine, aside from the pain of the injection and the numbness for most of 24 hours. Now I’m just worried it’s going to break or fall out, which I haven’t been about the others for however long I’ve had them.
§ This week I’ve been listening a lot to Lucrecia Dalt’s 2024 album A Danger to Ourselves:
Some good sounds.
§ One day this week I wrote a script for getting all the listed buildings in a specified area of England and outputting that as an HTML table. I feel pretty rusty at writing code and I’m not sure if it’s because of this that it took me quite a while to work out how to access the API for getting that list.
[Several boring paragraphs detailing how I stumbled my way to figuring out the URL and parameters for the API deleted.]
It’s very nice that this is all “open data” but if you can’t provide some simple instructions for accessing and querying it then I’d argue it’s only “open” in one sense. I have no idea how anyone would find that – never mind figure out what any of it meant – without, as I did, stumbling around many pages, examining the network requests in my browser’s web developer console, trial and error, and gag asking ChatGPT.
If it’s open, write documentation.
§ I updated the guidelines for posting comments on The Diary of Samuel Pepys this week, for the first time in years (decades?), to say that using AI is not permitted. There is no surer sign of a man (and it usually is) who has nothing worth saying than them posting a comment that starts “I asked ChatGPT…” It’s barely happened on that site yet, but best to pre-empt such things.
§ I quickly finished reading Blue Ruin by Hari Kunzru this week (here’s a decent review) which I enjoyed. Although it’s set during COVID this is mostly just a reason for the characters to be stuck in one place with little outside contact. I enjoyed all the backstory about the characters as art students, then entering the art world, and their struggles with all that entails.
§ We finished season four of Industry this week which was good fun. Some dramas are a bit spoiled when certain events or dialogue seems unbelievable. But almost everything about Industry is unbelievable, all too over-the-top and simplified, that you can just accept this world and enjoy the drama and characters.
§ That’s all. Have a good week.
German launch startup Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA) says it is planning its first launch for this summer after delivering two of its stages to the launch site.
The post RFA plans first launch this summer appeared first on SpaceNews.
The Chronicle of Higher Ed has the story:
The Drop in International Students Last Year Was Worse Than We Thought By Karin Fischer
There are three basic facts you need to know about the U.S. macroeconomy right now:
The economy overall (growth, employment, inflation) is doing pretty well.
Productivity growth is unusually high.
Job growth is terrible.
Let’s start with some numbers. Late 2025 is the latest number we have for GDP growth, but it looks pretty solid — around 2.5%, about where it was in the late 2010s.
And most people still have jobs. Prime-age employment rates — my favorite single indicator of the labor market — are still really high. Higher than any time in the 2010s, actually:
If you look at unemployment, you can see a slowly rising trend since mid-2023, even if you restrict it to the prime age group. But this is entirely due to more people saying that they’re looking for work — prime-age labor force participation has been steadily rising. So that’s not very scary either. It’s just more of the people without jobs saying that they’re looking for work, instead of just sitting around.
Meanwhile, inflation is still in the 2.5% range — a little higher than we would like, but not particularly fast.
So in terms of the headline numbers, everything is kind of just bumping along. From a bird’s-eye view, this economy looks pretty normal and healthy. Under normal circumstances, I’d be inclined to not even write a post about the macroeconomy this month.
But underneath the surface, two interesting things are happening. The first is that productivity growth has accelerated; the second is that job growth has stalled out. On its face, this sort of pattern might suggest that AI is finally starting to take Americans’ jobs — and lots of people are suggesting this conclusion. But when we look closely at the numbers, the story becomes more complicated.
The first is that productivity growth has accelerated. Output per hour — also called “labor productivity”, which is sort of a quick, rough-and-ready measure of productivity — is growing significantly faster than it was in the late 2010s. It’s been at around 2.5-3% since late 2023, compared to more like 1-2% during Trump’s first term:
In fact, productivity is well above where economists thought it would be six years ago:
That’s a major acceleration. 2.8% labor productivity growth is about equal to the best decades we’ve seen since World War 2. If that rate is sustained for a decade, or accelerates further, it’ll be pretty historic.
What’s driving the productivity boom? It’s tempting to conclude that AI is making white-collar workers more productive, but Ernie Tedeschi points out that the biggest swing has been in manufacturing productivity. For a long time, manufacturing productivity was basically flatlining in America; now it’s suddenly growing again.
Tedeschi argues that this is also probably AI-driven, but it’s not about people using ChatGPT and Claude Code at work — it’s about the fact that a ton of data centers are being built, and data centers are very valuable:
If you look at data centers’ contribution to growth itself, it looks pretty small, but this masks the value of the computers contained within the data centers. Together, the creation of data centers and computing equipment have been contributing about as much to GDP growth as they were during the dot-com boom:
A second thing that’s happening is that American capital is being utilized more intensively — machines are being run for more hours of the day, buildings are keeping the lights on longer, and so on. The San Francisco Fed makes monthly estimates of Total Factor Productivity growth — productivity growth once you take the amount of labor and capital into account — and they find that it’s been pretty fast since late 2023. But once you take utilization rates into account, it looks like there was a moderate burst of TFP growth in 2023-4 that faded in 2025:
This is also consistent with the story that the data center boom, not an AI use boom, is driving fast productivity growth in America.
Donald Knuth, who, adorably, effectively blogs by posting TeX-typeset PDFs:
Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I’d been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6 — Anthropic’s hybrid reasoning model that had been released three weeks earlier! It seems that I’ll have to revise my opinions about “generative AI” one of these days. What a joy it is to learn not only that my conjecture has a nice solution but also to celebrate this dramatic advance in automatic deduction and creative problem solving. I’ll try to tell the story briefly in this note.
What's going on inside the head of this nebula?
Naipanoi Lepapa, Ahmed Abdigadir, and Julia Lindblom, reporting for the Swedish publications Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten:
It is stuffy at the top of the hotel in Nairobi, Kenya. The grey sky presses the heat against the windows. The man in front of us is nervous. If his employer finds out that he is here, he could lose everything. He is one of the people few even realise exist — a flesh-and-blood worker in the engine room of the data industry. What he has to say is explosive.
“In some videos you can see someone going to the toilet, or getting undressed. I don’t think they know, because if they knew they wouldn’t be recording.” [...]
The workers describe videos where people’s bank cards are visible by mistake, and people watching porn while wearing the glasses. Clips that could trigger “enormous scandals” if they were leaked.
“There are also sex scenes filmed with the smart glasses — someone is wearing them having sex. That is why this is so extremely sensitive. There are cameras everywhere in our office, and you are not allowed to bring your own phones or any device that can record”, an employee says.
Delightful. And what a brand move for Ray-Ban and Oakley.
Market Design
