City Observatory

America’s Most Expensive Highway Projects

Joe Cortright
Updated

Here’s our new, updated list of the most expensive highway projects in the US.  We rank projects based on their cost per mile.

Based on our current analysis  it looks like the two Portland area projects are the #1 and #3 most expensive highway projects (per mile) in the nation. The 5-mile  long Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) clocks in  at about $3 billion/mile and the 1.5 mile Rose Quarter at about $2.3 billion/mile.  (This chart and map show the most expensive project in the top ten states; full data for the remaining states is shown at the end of this commentary).

This list helps show which places are pursuing the most expensive projects, and helps put myopic cost estimates in their proper context.  ODOT is famous for downplaying or denying culpability for cost-overruns and forgetting or disappearing their original cost estimates hide the scale of this problem.  It’s hard for ordinary citizens, and even legislators, to put these numbers in perspective.  But here’s something that should help:  We can now show that these two large ODOT highway projects are now among the most expensive highway projects in the country.

 

Portland:  Home of the most expensive freeway projects in the nation

Shown below is a map of the nation’s ten most expensive highway projects, calculated on a per mile basis.  All of these cost at least $500 million per mile, according to current estimates.  There’s a good case to be made that the Rose Quarter and its nearby boondoggle companion–the Interstate Bridge Project–are, mile-for-mile–now the two of the three most expensive highway projects in the nation.

America’s Ten Most Expensive Highway Projects (Per Mile, 2026).

The recently announced price-tag for rebuilding central portion of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (itself a classic Robert Moses highway scar) is $4 billion for a one and one-half mile section of roadway, or about $2.66 billion per centerline mile.  This just exceeds the cost of the Rose Quarter project, which now is pushed down to third most expensive.  (Portland area projects highlighted in red).

Top 10 Most Expensive U.S. Highway Projects by Cost per Mile

Centerline cost per mile ($ Millions).

Interstate Bridge Replacement (OR/WA)
$3,000M / mi

Brooklyn-Queens Expressway Central (NY)
$2,667M / mi

I-5 Rose Quarter Improvement Project (OR)
$2,333M / mi

Allston I-90 Multimodal Project (MA)
$1,333M / mi

NJ Turnpike Hudson County Extension (NJ)
$1,321M / mi

I-84 Hartford Mobility / Replacement Plan (CT)
$1,250M / mi

I-10 Calcasieu River Bridge Replacement (LA)
$564M / mi

Highway 37 Reconstruction (CA)
$523M / mi

Washington Bridge I-195 Replacement (RI)
$500M / mi

I-94 East-West Corridor (WI)
$486M / mi

 

 

These data suggest that Oregon is not simply a representative victim of highway cost inflation, but is actively the worst DOT in the nation in managing highway project costs.  That conclusion is  also consistent with data on construction costs compiled by Yale University’s Zachary Liscow, who found that Oregon’s costs for routine road repairs were about double the national average.

List of most expensive highway projects in the US, by state

 

Rank State Project Estimated Cost Length Cost per Mile (Centerline)
1 Oregon/Washington Interstate Bridge Replacement (WA/OR I-5) $15.0 Billion ~5.0 mi $3,000.0M / mi
2 New York Brooklyn Queens Expressway Central Project (Brooklyn) $4.0 Billion ~1.5 mi $2,667 M / mi
3 Oregon I-5 Rose Quarter Improvement Project $3.5 Billion ~1.5 mi $2,333 M / mi
4 Massachusetts Allston I-90 Multimodal Project (Boston) $2.0 Billion ~1.5 mi $1,333.3M / mi
5 New Jersey New Jersey Turnpike Hudson County Extension $10.7 Billion ~8.1 mi $1,321.0M / mi
6 Connecticut I-84 Hartford Mobility / Replacement Plan $5.0 Billion ~4.0 mi $1,250.0M / mi
7 Louisiana I-10 Calcasieu River Bridge Replacement (Lake Charles) $3.1 Billion ~5.5 mi $563.6M / mi
8 Texas North Houston Highway Improvement Project (I-45) $13.0 Billion ~24.0 mi $542.0M / mi
9 California Highway 37 (Santa Rosa/Vallejo) $11.0 Billion ~21.0 mi $523.0M / mi
10 Rhode Island Washington Bridge I-195 Emergency Replacement $400 Million ~0.8 mi $500.0M / mi
11 Wisconsin I-94 East-West Corridor (Milwaukee) $1.7 Billion ~3.5 mi $485.7M / mi
12 Ohio/Kentucky Brent Spence Bridge Corridor (OH/KY Shared) $3.6 Billion ~8.0 mi $450.0M / mi
13 Virginia Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel (HRBT) Expansion $3.9 Billion ~9.9 mi $393.9M / mi
14 Maryland I-495 & I-270 Capital Beltway Managed Lanes $1.5 Billion ~4.0 mi $375.0M / mi
15 Alabama I-10 Mobile River Bridge & Bayway $3.5 Billion ~10.0 mi $350.0M / mi
16 Georgia I-285 / GA-400 Interchange & Top End Express Lanes $4.6 Billion ~16.0 mi $287.5M / mi
17 South Carolina I-526 Lowcountry Corridor (Charleston) $4.0 Billion ~14.0 mi $285.7M / mi
18 Nevada Project Neon / I-15 Trop-LVC Improvement (Las Vegas) $1.0 Billion ~3.7 mi $270.3M / mi
19 Utah I-15 Expansion & Bottleneck Fix (Salt Lake County) $3.7 Billion ~17.0 mi $217.6M / mi
20 Illinois Tri-State Tollway (I-294) Expansion $4.0 Billion ~22.0 mi $181.8M / mi
21 Oklahoma I-44 / I-235 Interchange Expansion (Oklahoma City) $680 Million ~4.5 mi $151.1M / mi
22 Pennsylvania Mon-Fayette Expressway (PA Route 43 Extension) $2.1 Billion ~14.0 mi $150.0M / mi
23 Arkansas I-30 Crossing Project (Little Rock) $1.00 Billion ~7.3 mi $137.0M / mi
24 Hawaii Honolulu Rail/H-1 Corridor Integration $650 Million ~5.0 mi $130.0M / mi
25 Colorado Central 70 Project (Denver) $1.2 Billion ~10.0 mi $120.0M / mi
26 Tennessee Choice Lanes Program (I-24 / I-65 Nashville Corridor) $3.0 Billion ~26.0 mi $115.4M / mi
27 Florida I-4 Ultimate / Beyond the Ultimate Corridor $2.3 Billion ~21.0 mi $109.5M / mi
28 Iowa I-80 / I-380 System Interchange (Iowa City) $387 Million ~4.0 mi $96.8M / mi
29 North Carolina Complete 540 / NC 540 Triangle Expressway $2.2 Billion ~28.0 mi $78.6M / mi
30 Michigan I-75 Modernization (Oakland County) $1.0 Billion ~18.0 mi $55.6M / mi
31 Delaware U.S. 301 Toll Road Extension $636 Million ~12.5 mi $50.9M / mi
32 New Mexico I-25 / I-40 “Big I” & South Corridor Upgrades $250 Million ~5.0 mi $50.0M / mi
33 North Dakota I-94 / I-29 Tri-Level Interchange Rebuild (Fargo) $95 Million ~2.0 mi $47.5M / mi
34 Idaho I-86 / I-15 System Interchange Rebuild (Pocatello) $112 Million ~2.5 mi $44.8M / mi
35 Maine I-95 / Hampden Bridge & Corridor Rebuild $85 Million ~2.0 mi $42.5M / mi
36 Minnesota I-494 Airport to Hwy 169 Corridor $377 Million ~9.0 mi $41.9M / mi
37 New Hampshire I-93 Widening (Salem to Manchester) $800 Million ~19.8 mi $40.4M / mi
38 Mississippi I-20 / I-55 West Jackson Corridor Improvements $180 Million ~4.5 mi $40.0M / mi
39 West Virginia Corridor H (Elkins to West Virginia/Virginia State Line) $1.20 Billion ~30.0 mi $40.0M / mi
40 Arizona I-10 Wild Horse Pass Corridor Expansion $1.0 Billion ~26.0 mi $38.5M / mi
41 South Dakota I-29 / 85th Street Interchange (Sioux Falls) $65 Million ~2.0 mi $32.5M / mi
42 Nebraska US-77 South Lincoln Beltway $352 Million ~11.0 mi $32.0M / mi
43 Kansas U.S. 69 Express Lanes (Overland Park Expansion) $570 Million ~18.0 mi $31.7M / mi
44 Vermont U.S. Route 2 / I-89 Reconfiguration (Chittenden) $45 Million ~1.5 mi $30.0M / mi
45 Alaska Seward Highway Upgrades (MP 75–90 / MP 100–105) $380 Million ~20.0 mi $19.0M / mi
46 Montana I-90 Missoula Corridor Reconstruction $140 Million ~8.0 mi $17.5M / mi
47 Indiana I-69 Finish Line (Evansville to Indianapolis) $2.0 Billion ~142.0 mi $14.1M / mi
48 Missouri Improve I-70 Statewide Program (3-Lane Expansion) $2.8 Billion ~200.0 mi $14.0M / mi
49 Wyoming I-80 Elk Mountain / Winter Safety Corridor Upgrades $85 Million ~15.0 mi $5.7M / mi

Methodology

There’s no single, authoritative list of current and planned highway projects, so as a first step, we enlisted the assistance of Google’s Gemini AI to compile a list of what it found to be the most expensive current highway project in each of the 50 states, ranked by millions of dollars per centerline mile of project length (a rough yardstick of project scale).  The usual caveats apply about AI-generated content, but at first glance, the list reflects most of the well-known projects underway around the country.

We’ve also surveyed colleagues from around the nation, and invited anyone to submit information about ongoing or planned projects that belong on this list.  (As promised, we’re periodically updating the list as we acquire more accurate information, and we invite readers to offer corrections and amplifications).

 

 

City Observatory

Two lies and a truth about Oregon Transportation Finance

Joe Cortright
Updated

Two lies about how Oregon plans for major projects are crippling any effort at reform.

ODOT highway projects have gone massively over budget for decades, costing the state billions.

The agency is in denial, attempting to blame others for its consistent pattern of low-balling cost estimates and fighting efforts to “right-size” projects.

Oregon’s Transportation Vision Task Force is being misled about the causes of these cost overruns and, as a result, will ultimately fail to produce a real solution.

At one time or another, you’ve probably played the icebreaker game “Two Truths and a Lie,” where a person makes three statements about themselves, two of which are true and one of which is made up; your challenge is to guess which is which. The Oregon Department of Transportation has its own variation of the game, which we’ll call “Two Lies and a Truth.”

Governor Tina Kotek has appointed a Transportation Vision Task Force to try to sort out the financial disaster that is the Oregon Department of Transportation. While the Task Force vaguely concedes that something must be done to deal with major project costs, its deliberations are perpetuating two utter falsehoods about project costs and scope. The truth is that ODOT has systematically prioritized megaprojects over maintaining and preserving roads. The lies aim to shift blame for low-ball cost estimates and project scope creep to the Legislature and to communities. In reality, ODOT and its bloated coterie of contractors are responsible for both of these problems.

Mostly, the department and the task force are in denial about the chief cause of the agency’s financial problems: exploding costs for a handful of megaprojects. (Two of the agency’s current projects, the IBR and the Rose Quarter, are, respectively, the most expensive and third most expensive highway projects per mile in the nation.) Accurately understanding why these projects are so expensive, and why for more than two decades ODOT has failed to come to grips with this problem, is essential to fixing transportation finance in Oregon.

Here are the three statements:

  1. ODOT is sacrificing preservation and maintenance to pay megaproject costs.

  2. ODOT was forced to “low ball” project estimates by a rushed legislative process.

  3. Local officials and the Legislature expanded the scope of approved projects, driving up their costs.

Only the first of these statements is true. The others are simply wrong.

1. TRUTH: ODOT is cannibalizing preservation and maintenance to pay for major projects

The truth they’ve conceded is that ODOT routinely sacrifices preservation and maintenance to divert funding into planning, launching, and covering the massive cost overruns of a handful of extraordinarily expensive megaprojects. And that’s not hyperbole: two ODOT projects—the Interstate Bridge Replacement and the Rose Quarter freeway widening—are, per mile, two of the three most expensive highway projects in the U.S. (a fact which, to our knowledge, hasn’t been disclosed, much less discussed by the Task Force). Furthermore, it was recently revealed that Oregon has one of the worst highway maintenance deficits of any state.

ODOT routinely launches its megaprojects with only a fraction of the needed funding in hand, and when costs escalate and hoped-for revenue evaporates, it takes money that could be spent on preservation and maintenance. At the September 9, 2026 Vision Task Force meeting, Oregon Transportation Commissioner Lee Beyer noted:

“So you got a project underway and you got to figure out how to fund that, and you end up taking money from preservation and maintenance or other smaller projects to do that, so that’s a really big issue on that…”

As we’ve noted before, ODOT routinely redistributes funds—flexible funding, unanticipated federal funds, project savings—to planning, starting, or paying the cost overruns of major projects. It has also used its short-term borrowing authority—a kind of payday loan—to launch projects and obligate future revenues to megaproject construction. It has systematically overestimated the revenues that would pay for megaprojects (whether from federal grants or toll proceeds), which has the effect of slashing funding for preservation and maintenance.

2. LIE: ODOT has been forced to do “rushed” cost estimates

The first lie is the claim that the Legislature suddenly comes up with ideas for projects that ODOT never knew about, and that ODOT prepares slapdash cost estimates that turn out to be far too low. Here’s OTC Commissioner Lee Beyer making that claim at the recent Vision Task Force meeting:

“The reality is that most of the major projects are not… they don’t come off ODOT’s planning list, if you will. They’re directed by the legislature, and often those projects, you know, are given a preliminary estimate before any work’s done on them to the legislature. It’s sort of like, ‘Oh, we want to do this, how much is that going to cost?’ and without having done the preliminary work, the staff gives a number.”

While Lee Beyer gives voice to this claim, he didn’t invent it; ODOT Deputy Director Travis Brouwer told the same tall tale in legislative testimony.

It’s hard to square this narrative with reality for any of ODOT’s major projects. As we’ve pointed out, the 2017 Legislature didn’t authorize funding for the I-205 Abernethy Bridge project; instead, it required ODOT to develop a very detailed “Cost to Complete” report. ODOT took six months, spent $12 million, and had a consultant advance project design to the 15–25 percent level. The consultant even met with prospective contractors to validate its estimate, built in inflation and escalation, and claimed that it was “pretty confident” in its estimate.

That did nothing to control the cost of the project: the Cost to Complete report said the project would cost $250 million; the current price tag is $885 million, and counting. The same can be said for the I-5 Interstate Bridge Replacement Project: when the Legislature authorized $1 billion in general fund-backed bonds in 2021, ODOT said the project would cost about $4.8 billion. That was wildly wrong; costs escalated first to $7.5 billion in 2023, and then to $15 billion in 2025. All of these projects have long gestation periods: the IBR dates back to 2004; Rose Quarter planning started in 2010; and these processes were run by ODOT (and its consultants), not the Legislature.

Time and again, it’s ODOT that sells projects to the Legislature based on low-ball cost estimates, and then looks to stick the Legislature with the bill (and now, also the blame) when costs soar. ODOT staff and consultants routinely delay confessing their errors: IBR staff publicly admitted in 2024 that their cost estimate was too low, but delayed almost two years before telling the Legislature how much the price tag had increased. As we’ve noted, combining low-ball cost estimates with promising anything just to get construction started is a classic Robert Moses scam for extracting money from the Legislature.

3. LIE: Cost overruns are due to local officials and the Legislature causing “scope creep”

The second lie is that local officials and the Legislature are responsible for “scope creep,” the implication being that ODOT has a carefully researched, affordable design that local officials insist on gilding. The claim is that somehow, after a project has been approved, these local officials keep adding to project size, scope, or features. Here again is Lee Beyer at the September 9, 2026 Transportation Vision meeting:

“One of the problems with that is that often those numbers are not based on what the project finally becomes, because the work with the community and defining the scope of the project changes a lot. And I use the example of the Rose Quarter as one of those. When the legislature decided that, it was a much narrower project than what’s conceived today based on what the community said: ‘If you’re going to do this, this is what we need to do,’ and so the costs go up a lot.”

This, again, is a creative retelling of history. ODOT worked on the I-5 Rose Quarter Project for the better part of a decade before seeking funding from the Legislature in 2017. Planning started in 2010 and produced a “Broadway-Weidler Interchange Plan” in 2012. ODOT’s preferred design included a “highway cover” that was paraded as a way of repairing the damage freeway construction had done to the Albina neighborhood.

Beyer’s description of ODOT’s recommendation as a “much narrower project” is an Orwellian description of the Rose Quarter Project. ODOT’s plans—which it kept secret—called for widening the 82-foot-wide highway to 160 feet. The project’s massive width, not the “covers,” was responsible for its skyrocketing costs. ODOT’s own internationally recognized consultants (ARUP Associates) said the freeway was so costly because it was at least 40 feet wider than it needed to be. ODOT concealed the width of the project, ignored the ARUP finding, and obstinately refused to consider “right-sizing” the project, even as costs exploded and federal funding evaporated. Ironically, one of the conditions of the City of Portland’s approval of the Rose Quarter project was that it include congestion pricing, which would have helped pay its costs; but ODOT terminated the congestion pricing program, further widening the project’s funding gap.

The Rose Quarter was not a project foisted by the Legislature onto an unwilling ODOT—in fact, ODOT was leading the charge for the project as early as 2010, and its staff were the chief advocates for the project, not local officials. When it comes to scope creep, ODOT is responsible, not local officials. The project’s “caps” are a classic example of ODOT being hoisted by its own petard: ODOT, not the community, came up with the claim that building oversized overpasses would repair the damage ODOT had done to Albina. It was only after ODOT persisted in claiming that the objective of the project was to restore the neighborhood that local groups took them at their word and held them accountable for that promise.

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Data centres are straining the insurance market

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Stephen Clark - Ars Technica

NASA chief: I'm only interested in "good deals" from international partners

Stephen Clark
Updated

NASA must be more selective in the way it forges international partnerships as the race to the Moon transforms from a battle for national prestige between the United States and China into a high-stakes competition for extraterrestrial real estate and resources, the agency's administrator said.

Jared Isaacman, now in his 10th month at the helm of the world's largest civilian space agency, told a gathering of military leaders and defense contractors last week near Washington, DC, that the 21st-century race to the Moon is more than a battle of ideologies. The sweet spot for a Moon base, Isaacman said, is a relatively small region near the lunar south pole, and there are tangible implications for who gets there first.

The Moon's south pole harbors substantial quantities of water ice concentrated on the floors of craters away from the reach of sublimating rays of sunlight. The ice inside these eternally dark craters could be used to supply water, air, and rocket fuel for a Moon base, supporting a permanent settlement and providing a springboard for future expeditions to Mars.

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The Cross Section

AI Genius President Invents Superstupidity

Paul Waldman
Updated

The Cross Section is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Last July, I wrote a piece here on The Cross Section arguing that conceiving of the development of artificial intelligence as a “race” between the United States and China is deeply misguided in every conceivable way, and actively leads us toward poor decision-making. For some inexplicable reason, the world did not heed my words, and if anything the metaphor of an AI “race” has become even more ubiquitous since then.

As he so often does, Donald Trump took something stupid and made it even stupider. His formulation, which he now repeats on an almost daily basis, is this: “Whoever wins AI, wins.”

A series of questions would occur to any sentient person, including: What precisely do you mean by “wins AI”? And what does the second “wins” mean? Wins what? Trump has not been asked these questions, and there’s no telling if he would have any answer at all. But if all you know is that we’re in a race and we have to win, that means that anything that slows down the headlong development of the technology will only make it more likely that we’ll “lose,” even if he doesn’t know what losing would mean either.

In the face of a rapidly growing backlash against the tech industry, Trump has clearly become convinced that everyone is wrong, and if he becomes the loudest and most obnoxious AI booster in the world — even more than the leaders of the AI companies themselves — eventually he will be the winner of whatever it is that is being won. I suspect that someone — or many someones — have been whispering into his ear that if he promotes AI with enough vigor, thousands of years from now, everyone will say he was the man who secured the winningest winning in the history of winning.

This is an appeal aimed right at the heart of Trump’s rancid worldview. Even apart from his desperate and pathetic quest for immortality, he sees everything in life as a zero-sum conflict in which there is no such thing as cooperation for mutual benefit. Either you’re the winner or the loser, the con man or the sucker, the abuser or the abused, the conqueror or the subjugated. And he knows who he’s going to be.

Another appalling performance at the UN

On Tuesday morning, Trump went to the United Nations and delivered another speech that left attendees alternately puzzled and horrified. There were plenty of deranged parts, but let’s just take a moment with this:

“The United States also rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now, hereinafter officially called ‘superintellgence,’ changing the name, in that the use of the word ‘artificial’ makes intelligence fake, it makes it sound fake, and it is not fake. It’s actually amazing, but we have to be careful. In fact, it is exactly the opposite of what it purports. From this point forward, all of United States documents and hopefully the world’s will be changed to use the much more accurate term “super” as opposed to “artificial.” So it’s “superintelligence.” In other words, welcome to the new world of superintelligence-dash-SI. SI. Let’s see if that goes, it sounds much better, it is much better, and it’s much more accurate. Let’s see if I have any power. Maybe I do and maybe I don’t, we’re gonna find out very soon.”

“Superintelligence” is the latest “Gulf of America” or “Lake America,” in that administration officials will indeed banish the term “artificial intelligence” from all documents and statements, no matter how stupid they all understand it is, because if the Mad King says that’s what they must do then that’s what they must do.

But as anyone who knows anything about AI knows, the term “superintelligence” is not simply another word for AI. It refers to something particular. It’s a word used interchangeably with artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which is the thing the tech industry is reaching toward but hasn’t yet achieved. AGI, or superintelligence, is a system that is better than human intelligence at everything humans can do.

We can argue about how we’ll know if we get superintelligence, or whether it will take five years or ten years or a thousand years to reach it, or whether we already have it in some form (as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says we do, though nobody really agrees with him). The point is, absolutely no one thinks every AI system is superintelligence. There are a million AI applications that are extremely limited and built for specific purposes. They’re not superintelligence. It’s like saying my desk chair has wheels so it can move across the floor, and that means it’s literally a Bugatti Chiron Super Sport. They both have wheels, but my desk chair’s top speed is somewhat less than the Bugatti’s 260 mph, and it would be inane to declare that everything with wheels now must be officially referred to as a Bugatti Chiron Super Sport.

It’s impossible to believe that anyone not in Trump’s direct employ is going to stop saying AI and start saying “superintelligence.” Is OpenAI going to change its name to OpenSI because Donald Trump doesn’t know what words mean? He couldn’t even get people to do that with regard to the Gulf of Mexico or Lake Ontario, and it’s not like millions of people are having conversations every day about those bodies of water.

China knows it’s not a race

Let’s return to the idea of an AI “race” that is driving Trump’s belief that we must move as quickly as possible with no guardrails around AI, because “Whoever wins AI, wins.” As I explained last year, in a race, everyone runs for the finish line, and then when one participant crosses, the race is over and everyone stops running. There is one winner. But this is not what will happen with AI.

All these different companies will continue to develop their systems, even after one company claims it has achieved AGI. One company and one country is not going to capture all the money AI sucks from the rest of the economy (or to grant the tech industry’s debatable claim, all the new wealth AI will create). You know who won’t stop their AI development if OpenAI or Anthropic or Google or Microsoft says they’ve created Digital Jesus? Their competitors, of course. And also: China!

In fact, this is perhaps the most important distinction between China’s approach to AI and ours. They are very focused on practical applications of AI, especially in manufacturing but really in all facets of their society and economy. That brings with it a host of problems, but Chinese people use AI more than Americans — 80% of Chinese use AI on a weekly basis — and seem much less worried about it.

So in one sense, China is already “winning” whatever you want to call the AI competition: They’re having to be creative about improving and deploying the technology (since they don’t have the computing resources we do), they think about it in highly practical terms, and their population is more excited than terrified about it.

That may change in the future; nothing is forever and little is certain. But this isn’t a race in the way everyone thinks it is. Whatever dumb name you want to attach to it.

Thank you for reading The Cross Section. This site has no paywall, so I depend on the generosity of readers to sustain the work I present here. If you find what you read valuable and would like it to continue, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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charity.wtf

Where do AI norms come from?

Charity Majors
Updated

After I posted “Confessions of an Unrepentant Slop Snob” on LinkedIn last week, with links to the Honeycomb AI norms and values docs, I got this question from Niklas Lochschmidt:

I am curious if you could share more light on the process? Any guidance you would give people in companies that have the friction and internal debates, but maybe haven’t arrived at shared norms and values yet?

That’s a great question, and I will answer in just a minute.

I feel like this is a great way to kick off something I’ve been looking forward to all year — an old fashioned bloggy dialogue between myself and Dr Cat Hicks, research psychologist to the stars engineers, on the topic of norms, ethics, and learning in the era of AI.

In which Cat and I were both writing books at the same time

When Cat’s publisher reached out to me in November of 2025 about reviewing her book, “The Psychology of Software Teams”, I .. didn’t notice the email for a month, then put off reading it for another two months, because I was in the middle of my own private hell trying to get the second edition of Observability Engineering written, then rewritten, then written again.1 🫠

But once I did pick up her book, I downed it in a sitting. Then I wrote a long and gushing fan letter to Cat and her publisher, with bullet point lists (yes plural) of ideas for ways that we could collaborate or I could support her work.2 What struck me, reading her book, was how much overlap and resonance there was between what she was writing and what I was writing, despite being radically different books in almost every conceivable way.

Hers: a slim, disciplined 150 pages of text, plus another fifty pages of reference notes and citations, presenting common misconceptions about high-performing teams, what the research actually says, and how to integrate these learnings into practice, all neatly organized by theme.

Mine: a sprawling 600-page O’Reilly book on observability engineering, of which I was responsible for the first section, introducing the history and principles of observability, and the last, a guide to observability for technical decision-makers. It is…less disciplined, which is to say it is all over the fucking map. Instrumentation, evaluating costs and value of observability tools, making the case for investment, systems thinking, build vs buy, partnering with vendors, and more.

These books appear to have nothing in common besides the word “software”.

And yet.

The case I am making in the first and last sections of “Observability Engineering”3 (2nd ed) is the same case Cat is making in “Psychology of Software Teams”, from different angles.

What feeds greatness, in people and in teams? What are our responsibilities to each other? How do we engage with complex sociotechnical systems, as builders and caretakers, and leave them better off than we found them? How do we build systems of governance and accountability, a work environment that is supportive and pleasant, and a culture that equips us to successfully compete in the market? Are these things even compatible?

And now, of course, there’s AI in the mix. You might be delivering twice as much twice as fast, yet falling far short of expectations, if your managers, execs, or investors are expecting 10x, 100x or more. Are their expectations unreasonable, or has your output not sufficiently caught up or adjusted for what is now table stakes ? The only honest answer is that no one really knows yet.

How should we navigate this moment in our own workplaces?

So here we are. The stakes are high. There’s a vast sense of unsettledness and insecurity in our industry, with ecstatic possibilities coexisting alongside existential dread, and we’re all along for the ride with our meat sacks and Paleolithic psychologies. Surely there has never been a less boring time to be a psychologist who studies software engineers. I’m really looking forward to chatting about this with you, Cat, and grappling with some of these practical and/or existential questions together.

Let’s start off by circling back to the question we started off with. If other companies are interested in writing down some of their norms and values around AI usage, where should they start?

My response:

Start by listening. I put a few discussion hours on my calendar, opt-in, open door, each one capped at 10 people, and asked wide-open questions like “What AI-related thing has annoyed you lately?”

Themes began to emerge early on, and I followed those threads in later sessions to get a fuller picture of what was happening around the org. It was really helpful. It also felt like an excellent steam valve to release some of the pent-up anger and frustration people were feeling, to the point that when we did eventually release the AI norms and values documents internally, it felt like the heat had simmered down quite a bit.

Cat, where would you advise people to start?

(Watch for her response at her newsletter site, fightforthehuman!)

1

Never write a book. Unless you love misery.

2

Reading it now makes me reflect, “was I off my meds? or did I double dose?” Who knows! (This has been Deep Thoughts with ADHD.)

3

Honeycomb is a sponsor, so you can download for free at honeycomb.io/book!

Letters from an American

September 21, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

On September 18, while White House chief of staff Susie Wiles was out of town, Trump suddenly announced he was banning CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House. “Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they’re covering the President of the United States, the Trump Administration, or the United States of America,” Trump wrote. “Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose deep unpopularity means he is likely eager to curry favor with Trump, promptly posted that the Defense Department fully supported Trump’s decision. He claimed that the same outlets, which recently have reported that Russia has been helping Iran target U.S. troops and that the Defense Department has not fully accounted for deaths of servicemembers or destruction of U.S. military bases, “endangered our troops with false stories, leaks, and trafficked in fiction and lies about the President, our Warriors, and their mission.”

The next day, reporters from those outlets attempting to enter the White House complex where the press facilities are located were denied entry, and Secret Service agents confiscated their press badges.

On Sunday afternoon, Trump posted an image of three full black trash bags, labeled “CNN,” “MSNBC,” and “Politico,” outside the White House.

This morning, after the weekend’s backlash, he posted: “The White House is not instituting an assault on the Free Press, something which I cherish. It is instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS, something that has grown like Cancer in our beloved United States of America. It is corrupt, purposeful, pervasive, fully coordinated, and totally out of control. It is a threat to our National Security, and must be stopped, NOW!”

There’s that “national security” claim again: the same justification he’s using for building his ballroom and now his triumphal arch. It is also, not coincidentally, the excuse President Richard M. Nixon floated for covering up the Watergate break-in in June 1972.

In any case, no one’s buying it. MAGA Republicans have tried to claim that President Joe Biden cancelled 400 press passes. In fact, in 2023 the Biden administration tightened the rules to get a “hard” press pass that allows repeated, unaccompanied access to the press area of the White House. To have one, a reporter had to renew it annually, be employed full-time as a reporter, have a Washington, D.C., area address, and have had recent access to the White House. With that change, the number of White House hard passes fell from 1,417 to 975 because many of those who held passes didn’t reapply. Those people could still get day passes. In any event, these changes regarded individual reporters, not entire media outlets.

The Biden White House did not identify the one journalist whose hard pass application was denied.

Today CNN, MS NOW, and Politico sued Trump, Trump’s communications director Steven Cheung, Secret Service director Sean Curran, and White House chief of staff Wiles for violating both the Fifth and the First Amendments. “This ban could not be a more direct assault on the First Amendment, nor a more blatant violation of our most fundamental constitutional principles,” the lawsuit says. It says Trump banned the outlets and the reporters to retaliate against the reporters for their past news coverage “because he deemed it ‘negative’ and chilling future reporting about him and his administration’s policies and actions.”

They are suing for the restoration of their press credentials for their coverage of the White House.

U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, appointed by Trump to the bench in 2017, was assigned the case. Although Trump appointed Kelly, in 2018, the judge ruled that Trump’s revoking of journalist Jim Acosta’s hard press pass likely violated his due process rights. Trump groused that the news outlets “have drawn a great Judge, for them, a man who ruled in favor of Jim Acosta.” Apparently anticipating a loss, he has already vowed to appeal.

He ranted that journalists were demeaning the Oval Office by reporting negative stories about him. “Virtually every story about me, or anything having to do with me, is negative, wrong and, in many cases, DANGEROUS for our Country! No matter how GREAT my Achievements, they trivialize and demean,” he posted. “I have an obligation to fight for the Success and Safety of our Country. FAKE NEWS IS A THREAT TO DEMOCRACY, and I will do whatever is necessary to make sure that the U.S.A. thrives.”

Podcaster Allison Gill noted that Judge Kelly ordered the government to respond to the lawsuit by tomorrow, and that he has set a hearing for Wednesday afternoon at 3:30.

Perhaps of even more concern to Trump is that the major news networks are refusing to cover him on television, starving him of media oxygen.

ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, and NBC News take turns providing the television coverage of the president, and CNN was supposed to be in charge of the TV pool today. With CNN banned, the other networks refused to take its place, leaving television coverage of Trump suspended. A.J. Katz of The Wrap reported on their joint statement, in which they said: “The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government. No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.”

This afternoon, Trump held an event at the White House, but without a press pool, there was no audio. It was just footage of Trump standing with a group of people and apparently talking.

The White House advertised “The White House App” on social media, claiming users could “[g]et real-time updates and live events streamed DIRECTLY to your phone. No noise. Just the news that matters most—straight from the Trump Administration. DOWNLOAD NOW,” it said.

Users were not kind. One commented: “I’d rather launch my phone into the sun than install a government propaganda app.” Others noted that the administration is eager to get its hands on user information, and only a fool would install what could be spyware on their phone.

Peter Alexander of MS NOW had his own response to Trump’s attacks on the press: “This is not normal. This is not business as usual,” he said.

“What’s happening right now is different. The latest threat against our cherished freedoms protected by the U.S. Constitution. The media is not perfect. There’s a debate to be had about who you trust, where you should get your news.

“This is something bigger, though. Among the privileges, the duties of a free press, are to hold power to account, to ask the difficult questions, to document history as it happens. The president says fake news is reporting that is untrue. In fact, it’s reporting that he finds unflattering.

“And here’s the reality. A little more than seven weeks until the midterms, many of the facts are unflattering. Where to begin? Gas prices, now $4.48 a gallon on average, $1.50 more than where they were before the war with Iran began. Ask farmers about the price of diesel, now at a record high, nearly $6.50 a gallon.

“All of it due to a war the president started, a war he vowed would be done within weeks but is now in its seventh month. Eighteen American service members dead, if not more, and that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface.

“A trade war with Canada, an obsession with the Kennedy Center, if it’s not demolished like the East Wing, then there’s the grift, the self-dealing, a Russian oligarch paying for Trump’s son’s wedding party, billions of dollars made by the Trump family.

“Those are the facts. They may be unflattering, but they are not fake.

“I’ve been there since the beginning. Trump’s frustration, this fury, it didn’t happen overnight. On the campaign trail, I remember, before he even took office, he would yell at us in the bullpen in the back of those large rallies, riling up the MAGA crowd. Once elected, he would insult reporters to their face—I’ve been there—and he would call journalists the enemy of the people. As one of my former colleagues described it, Trump is trying to discredit the messenger, to create a vacuum where his version of reality fills that void.

“But the answer from journalists is simple. To report more, with more sources, more digging, more facts.”

Trump has his own answer. The White House YouTube channel announced this afternoon that at 7:00 tonight it will launch “TRUMP TV: The Essentials Station.”

The comment feature on the channel is turned off.

—

Notes:

https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/21/politics/cnn-politico-msnow-sue-white-house-access

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2026/09/19/inside-the-white-house-media-ban-01085092

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/major-tv-networks-stand-cnn-141408995.html

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/west-wing-playbook/2023/08/02/simons-no-longer-got-a-hard-pass-00109526

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/jon-karl-steve-scalise-battle-221303649.html

https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/national-international/after-trump-ban-ms-now-cnn-say-journalists-denied-access-white-house/4465973/

https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/21/politics/cnn-politico-msnow-sue-white-house-access

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-white-house-press-ban-media-app-b3053825.html

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/6101969-trump-appointee-judge-media-lawsuit/

YouTube:

watch?v=A4gNgHfZ-v4

Trump’s Truth:

statuses/41800

statuses/41814

statuses/41826

statuses/41836

X:

SecWar/status/2101069460396290454

atrupar/status/2102093387281088592

WhiteHouse/status/2102075720692330684

Bluesky:

​​ronfilipkowski.bsky.social/post/3mvte22gta22m

northjules.bsky.social/post/3mvwvy3mde225

atrupar.com/post/3mvxeq3jfp22z

muellershewrote.com/post/3mw2cvemof22g

kamimagic.bsky.social/post/3mw27x4qqi22u

willmckinley.bsky.social/post/3mw2uz2ejtk2n

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Letters from an American

NATO 3.0

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

Market Design

There's life after tenure denial: Emily Oster (on Mary in America)

Al Roth
Updated

 That there is life after tenure-denial is robustly proclaimed and manifested by Emily Oster, in the opening minutes of an interview by Mary Childs on her podcast Mary in America.  There is also, apparently, a Tshirt advertised on the internet saying "Emily Oster is wrong."

 

x 

 

 

The Aviationist
Oklahoma Watch
SpaceNews

Commercial Space Federation (CSF) Welcomes Two New Members

Commercial Space Federation
Updated
Commercial Space Federation 20th anniversary logo

September 21, 2026— Washington, D.C.—The Commercial Space Federation (CSF) is pleased to welcome ORBITInsure and Renaissance Strategic Advisors (RSA) as its newest members. ORBITInsure joins CSF as a Space Supply […]

The post Commercial Space Federation (CSF) Welcomes Two New Members appeared first on SpaceNews.

Astronomy Picture of the Day

When does a nebula look like a comet? When does a nebula look like a comet?


xkcd.com

Stargazing 5

The sun and the moon appear the same size in the sky, even though in real life the sun is more than twice as big. Some call this lucky alignment coincidence; others say it's proof that sometimes things can be the same size.
Simon Willison's Weblog

Jev introduces a new shape of LLM - System One, aka Decision Models

Last week TypeSafe AI unveiled Jev, their first example of a new category of model that they are calling "System One models" (I'm with Maggie Appleton, I think "decision models" is a better name for these). Jev is an interesting variant on the usual LLM format: it still accepts text inputs, but instead of text output it returns floating point numbers corresponding to categories, yes/no questions, ratings, and associated confidence scores.

TypeSafe describe Jev like this:

Think of Jev as a frontier-intelligence function call: unstructured state in, typed probabilistic decisions out.

It's also very fast, and really cheap. Regular LLMs are priced in terms of input and output tokens, with output generally charged at significantly higher rates. Jev charges only for input - output is free - and the input price of their first model is $0.042 per million tokens - cheaper even than OpenAI's GPT-5 Nano ($0.05/million).

Jev lets you ask questions about text or semi-structured data. You compose a "state" object containing a string, array of strings, or set of name-value pairs - this might describe an article, or a customer, or any other kind of record. You then send that to their API with one or more questions, and get a reply back for each.

You can ask three kinds of questions:

  • Yes/No questions, which Jev calls "Noul" questions - their CEO confirmed on Hacker News that this is short for Bernoulli, from the Bernoulli distribution. You pose a statement and get back a floating point number between 0 and 1 for how confident the model is that the statement is true.
  • Choice questions, where the model picks one from a set of provided options - actually a confidence score plus a probability distribution across all of the options.
  • Score questions, where you provide sequence of numeric levels with descriptions and it provides a floating point score somewhere along that range.

The Jev API can accept a single document ("state") and as many questions as you can cram into the context window. Questions are evaluated in parallel, so sending many questions should take a similar time to sending just one.

I think the decision model framing is useful for understanding where to use Jev. It's great for anything that can be expressed as a classification task - think spam detection, suggesting labels, prioritization and ranking.

I've also been experimenting with it for search reranking, where you fetch 100 likely matches using an inexpensive algorithm like BM25, then have Jev score those 100 candidates for relevance against the original query.

Black boxes are back in fashion

Something I've found a little uncomfortable about Jev is how it very much represents a regression even further towards black box machine learning systems.

LLMs are black boxes already - you can ask them to justify their decisions, but you can't guarantee that what they say is useful or accurate.

Jev doesn't even give you that: put in all the text you want, the only thing you're going to get back is a floating point number. If Jev marks something as spam, which content signals tipped it off?

This also means that concerns about bias should be front and center. I really hope nobody uses Jev to rank job applicants - that floating point number could conceal all manner of unseen bias baked into the models, and experimentally picking that bias apart is going to be a tricky business.

(I tried one experiment where I had Jev score every city in the San Francisco Bay Area on a yes/no answer to whether they were a "Good city?" - it rated Cupertino top and East Palo Alto bottom. Huh.)

In practice, this all means that evals and structured experiments are even more important than they are for regular LLM projects. Thankfully, Jev is so cheap that running hundreds or even thousands of experimental prompts through it costs just a few cents.

Unconventional uses for Jev

It's been really fun watching the wider community come up with potential use-cases for Jev over the past few days. Here are some creative ones that caught my eye:

  • jevchat by Kyle Pena turns Jev into a (terrible) chat model. "At every step it asks Jev one question: Given the user's question and the reply written so far, which symbol comes next?". ericpruitt on Hacker News: "It's the digital equivalent of Morty speaking with the death crystal".
  • jev-leftpad by Fatih Kadir Akın implements left-pad with the prompt "How many spaces are needed before value to reach targetLength?" and a choice query allowing options from "0 spaces are needed" to "10 spaces are needed".
  • jev-2048 by Andy Gayton uses Jev to play the 2048 sliding puzzle game.

Open weight recreations

There's also been a flurry of projects attempting to create a model like Jev using on top of open weight models. Kev is one interesting example, using Qwen 3.5 to produce 0.8B, 4B, and 9B models. Here's the accompanying Hacker News thread, where someone linked to a JevBench benchmark that has already cropped up to compare "Jev-class decision models".

Given Jev was released just under a week ago, the amount of activity around it is extremely impressive.

Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms

Simon Willison's Weblog

Cloudflare Python Workers are now generally available

Cloudflare Python Workers are now generally available

After a two year preview, Cloudflare's support for running Python code in their server-side Workers platform is now stable: "Python is now a first-class, fully supported language on the Cloudflare Developer Platform".

A neat thing about this is how it works. Cloudflare are running Python compiled to WebAssembly via Pyodide in their V8-based workerd runtime.

This comes with some limitations, documented here - most notably both multiprocessing and threading are non-functional in the WebAssembly VM.

One particularly interesting detail of this is the local development environment story - their pywrangler development tool (confusingly packaged as workers-py on PyPI) runs a full local simulation of their stack, including executing code with Pyodide in WebAssembly in V8 in a 123MB workerd binary, which for me ended up in node_modules/@cloudflare/workerd-darwin-arm64/bin/workerd.

Python Workers represent a significant investment in the wider Python ecosystem by Cloudflare. The release announcement is credited to Gyeongjae Choi, Dominik Picheta, and Hood Chatham - Gyeongjae and Hood are both Pyodide core maintainers.

Via Hacker News

Tags: python, cloudflare, webassembly, pyodide

Simon Willison's Weblog

MCP was always a bad idea?

My comment on MCP was always a bad idea? — Hacker News.

This article entirely misses the value that MCP brings today.

Sure, there's almost no reason to use MCPs if you are running a full-blown terminal agent (Claude Code, Codex, Meta Muse, OpenClaw etc) with unfettered internet access - just let it call APIs directly.

If you want to operate something that's less YOLO than that, you'll find yourself wanting:

  1. Control over exactly which external services it can access
  2. A way to handle authentication that doesn't allow the agent to directly access API keys
  3. A sensible UI to allow users to connect and authenticate further services
  4. Strong audit logging for what's going on

MCP makes all of that so much easier to provide.

Thinking MCP is obsolete because full coding agents don't need it misses out on all of the other things we might want to build.

Tags: hacker-news, model-context-protocol

Paul Krugman

Of Donald and Diesel

Paul Krugman
Updated

Plumes of smoke rise from fires (centre) at an oil refinery following what the authorities say is a Ukrainian drone strike in the course of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, in Moscow

A Moscow refinery burning

A little over a week ago Donald Trump, who has made many unreasonable demands on Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, added a new one:

Mr. Zelensky has to do one thing. He has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia. Let him go after targets but not diesel fuel, because he’s causing a shortage of diesel fuel.

Even for a New Yorker, the chutzpah was striking. For those not familiar with the term, chutzpah is when you murder your mother and father, then plead for leniency because you’re an orphan.

Trump has effectively created this situation by cutting off all aid to Ukraine, while in addition denying the Ukrainians even the ability to buy Patriot interceptors. Those missiles would have allowed them to fend off Vladimir Putin’s relentless missile attacks on civilian targets. Trump’s actions were clearly intended to leave Ukraine defenseless. But the Ukrainians — with help from the democracies of Europe — have survived, responding to Putin’s attacks by using their own, home-grown, drones and cruise missiles to make effective strikes against Russia’s energy infrastructure.

Last night, for example, a massive, coordinated Ukrainian assault set Moscow’s largest oil refinery ablaze.

Now Trump, having already betrayed Ukraine to Putin, is demanding that Zelenskyy commit strategic suicide. He wants the Ukrainians to go easy on Russia because the indirect effects of those attacks are hurting Republicans’ prospects in the midterm elections. As I said, chutzpah.

Aside from the outrageous nature of his demands, Trump’s remarks were interesting because they reveal the extent to which refined products, especially diesel, have replaced crude oil as the key bottleneck in the global energy crisis.

I still sometimes see commentators asserting that fears about the effects of Trump’s disastrous Iran war on energy prices were overstated, because the price of crude oil is “only” $102 a barrel, far above prewar prices but well below the $150-$200 range some analysts warned was possible. But nobody burns crude oil; they burn products refined from crude oil, mainly gasoline and diesel. And here’s what has happened to the price of diesel:

Diesel is currently selling at more than $200 a barrel. It’s true that there is always a “crack spread” between crude and diesel, but it’s typically on the order of $20. So the price of diesel is currently roughly what we would normally expect with crude at around $190.

The current world energy crisis, then, is largely a crisis in petroleum products, refined from crude oil, rather than in petroleum itself. And its proximate cause is a global shortage of refining capacity. As an informative report by Matthew Dalton in the Wall Street Journal put it, “Refineries Are Now the Main Chokepoint for Global Energy Supplies.”

Regular readers may recall that I’ve been making this point for a couple of months. And the shortage of refining capacity is, in turn, helping to keep crude prices down. As I wrote last month, “Buyers aren’t willing to pay extremely high prices for oil they can’t refine.”

So, chutzpah aside, is Trump right to attribute high diesel prices to Ukraine’s campaign against Russian refineries? No and yes.

Much of the world’s refining capacity is located in the Middle East, where it has been disrupted by Trump’s war. As Dalton notes,

the diesel blocked in the Persian Gulf is around three times as large as supplies missing from Russia compared with before the Iran war

However, the way refineries have replaced crude production as the world’s main energy chokepoint reflects the fact that refining capacity has been reduced more than crude production. And the disruption of shipments through the Strait of Hormuz has reduced world supplies of both crude and refined products. It’s at least arguable that Ukraine’s air campaign, which has done much more damage to Russia’s refining than to its crude production, has therefore played a disproportionate role in driving up diesel prices.

And expensive diesel is a big problem for the economy.

High diesel prices raise the cost of living, mainly through indirect effects. Relatively few passenger cars burn diesel — but diesel powers almost all large commercial trucks and two thirds of farm and construction equipment. So high diesel prices raise the cost of production across the economy, cost increases that eventually get passed on in the form of higher inflation.

Furthermore, rising diesel prices are even more likely than rising gasoline prices to drive up interest rates.

Why? The Federal Reserve, which sets short-term interest rates, normally focuses on “core” inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy prices. I’ve written many times about the reasons this focus makes sense. And the focus on core inflation typically leads the Fed to “look through” surges in gasoline prices, which affect headline inflation but not core inflation.

However, because surging diesel prices mostly raise inflation indirectly, via producer costs, they drive up core inflation in a way rising gas prices don’t. And this makes it hard for the Fed to avoid raising rates in the face of higher inflation.

One could argue that the Fed should adjust its measure of core inflation to exclude the effects of diesel prices too. But right now the Fed’s credibility is wobbly: It’s under constant pressure from Trump to cut rates, and many people are still suspicious about the motives of Kevin Warsh, Trump’s hand-picked Fed chair. So this is not a time when the Fed can afford to be seen changing its criteria for monetary policy in a way that might weaken its fight against inflation.

Between their direct effect on inflation and their indirect effect on interest rates, then, high diesel prices are an economic problem for America and a political problem for Donald Trump. Ukraine’s strikes on Russia are contributing to that problem. So Trump actually has good reasons to want Ukraine to stop its highly effective air campaign.

But he neither should nor will get what he wants. Remember the chutzpah factor. You don’t get to betray a nation, then demand that it help you politically, offering nothing in return.

MUSICAL CODA

Schneier on Security

Reverse-Engineering Flock Cameras

Bruce Schneier
Updated

Hackers captured a Flock camera and got a look (alternate link) at the software:

While much of the automatic license plate reader’s (ALPR) most sensitive storage remained encrypted and inaccessible, the joint analysis of the recovered data shows that software running on the device explicitly detects people as well as vehicles, license plates, and bicycles. The camera can produce dozens of images of a single passing vehicle and, according to several weeks of recovered logs, generated more than a million images. Its computer-vision software also sometimes isolated bumper stickers and other graphics, including, in one case, an American flag patch on a motorcyclist’s saddlebag.

If you’re wondering how the hackers got by disk encryption, one of the unencrypted partitions contained the key for an encrypted partition. That’s pretty bad security engineering.

Slashdot
Mike the Mad Biologist

Links 9/21/26

mikethemadbiologist
Updated

Links for you. Science:

Remembering Dr. Joe Romm
Outer membrane changes enable evolutionary escape from bacterial predation
Was the Teen Who Died From Measles Immunocompromised
‘Babies are dying’: How Pennsylvania’s measles outbreak changed the vaccine mindset of this Amish country midwife
Vought pushes for scrutiny of NIH grants and budget in Oval Office clash
There’s A Big New Crater On The Moon
AI is giving scientists more ideas than they can test. A new report from Google, Google DeepMind and M.I.T. finds that researchers are using AI—a lot. It’s just not helping as much in the lab

Other:

A.I. Is a Threat, but Not in the Way You Think
What if we’re wrong about party asymmetry? (excellent)
In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?
A.I. Risk And The End Of The Neoliberal Style In Politics
The Bullshit Machine Did Some Bullshit
Trump’s arch will harm historic sites but must proceed, federal officials say
Can Two Friends Complete a Game No One Has Ever Finished? The Campaign for North Africa, a staggeringly complicated World War II board game, has stymied players for decades. Now two guys in England are giving it a serious go.
Jared Kushner’s Dollar Diplomacy: Donald Trump’s son-in-law represents the kind of Washington figure for whom public office serves as a means to extraordinary wealth.
Immigrants’ Lawyers Say U.S. Is Redacting Documents Proving Legal Status
Those Viral Bodega Peptides Aren’t Actually Peptides
A Gender War Explodes in Utah Over the Courts, Abortion and Representation
Lauren Boebert accused of sex with three staffers in complaint alleging $200K hush payment
Trump Is a Runaway Train—and Nobody’s Pulling the Brakes
Inside the US ‘Kill Chain’ That Destroyed an Iranian School
A Hispanic Republican in Florida is facing her FAFO moment
LeBron James Wants Your Paycheck To Become His Paycheck, By Way Of Polymarket
MAGA Commentator Roasted For Suggesting Veggie Burgers Amid Rising Beef Prices
Voting groups sound alarm on funding shortfalls that they say could affect midterm turnout
CNN’s Dana Bash Takes Aim At ‘Gross’ Michigan Voter Bias In Poll
The working class face a ‘class ceiling’ in elite occupations
Robert Kraft Once Said He’d ‘Fight Like Hell’ for a Palestinian Homeland. Now He’s Fighting Against ‘Free Palestine’
Why Democrats Might Choose to Impeach Cabinet Members (yes, they should do this)
‘Doom Loop’: OpenAI and Microsoft Admits LLMs Are Destroying the Web and Built on Theft
Kash Patel’s attack dog act does more than please Trump. The FBI director’s testimony is part of a larger MAGA strategy to sow cynicism
University Rescinds Job Offer to Activist Who Allegedly Wiped Phone Before DHS Could Search It
Trump’s made man leaves the family without a single indictment
I Hijacked a Real Artist’s Spotify with AI Music. It Was Disturbingly Easy
White House doesn’t want voters to see the real Trump
How American Jews Find Meaning on Yom Kippur
The election experts and the models can’t both be right

Daring Fireball

Apple TV to Finally Air ‘The Savant’ in Early 2027, Supposedly

John Gruber
Updated

Nellie Andreeva, reporting for Deadline:

The release of The Savant is back on. A year after Apple TV put the thriller starring Jessica Chastain on hold three days before it was slated to premiere on Sept. 26, 2025, the streamer has rescheduled it for spring, 2027. The exact timing, which is still being finalized, will make the series eligible for the 2027 Emmys, I hear.

As Deadline reported at the time of the postponement, The Savant’s last-minute benching was due to its storyline about preventing extremist attacks and some imagery, including sniper attacks, that were considered potentially triggering two weeks after the assassination of right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk.

The only people who were potentially “triggered” by this would be whoever answers the phone in Cupertino when the White House calls. Variety and Dark Horizons both echo Deadline’s reporting that Apple TV is finally going to air The Savant early next year, but Apple TV’s own press page still lists it as “Premiere Date: Coming Soon”.

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

Yours Truly on CNBC’s ‘Squawk on the Street’ Friday

John Gruber
Updated

I genuinely enjoyed that Sara Eisen laughed a little when introducing me as having written a 5,000-word review of the iPhone 18 Pro.

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

Ichiro, at 52, Throws 127-Pitch Shutout Against All-Star Girls Team in Japan

John Gruber
Updated

Sofia Schwarzwalder, reporting for The Seattle Times:

Since turning 50, the Mariners legend has been inducted into the Hall of Fame, launched eight homers at the Mariners Alumni Home Run Derby this summer and, most recently, tossed a 127-pitch shutout with 17 strikeouts during an annual All-Star Game against the best high-school girls in Japan. [...]

The All-Star Game took place Sunday at the Tokyo Dome in front of a reported 25,000 fans. The game also featured former New York Yankees All-Star outfielder Hideki Matsui. In addition to his dazzling performance on the mound, Ichiro led off the game and had a pair of hits.

Speaking to reporters in Japanese, Ichiro said, “I wanted to see what my current limits were, and this gave me confidence in myself.”

Trung Phan, on X, posted a short video of clips. Ichiro was tossing some nasty stuff.

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

Glenn Fleishman on the Increasing Impracticality of Shipping From the U.S. to the E.U.

John Gruber
Updated

Glenn Fleishman:

Recent protectionist changes by the European Union further effectively exclude U.S. small businesses like mine from selling to EU customers. It’s a little complicated, but it has to do with how tax and customs fees are collected and extracted from low-value packages. This is not a tariff issue, unbelievably, but one about reducing competition.

The summary:

Delivering items under €150 per shipment into the EU now costs at least €3 per package, and may require hiring a specialty firm to manage time-of-purchase tax collection and payment because of the many differences in filing by EU nation. Shipping prices have swelled. No shipper currently offers rates close to affordable for modestly priced items, like books, while properly collecting the €3+ customs fee.

If these new rules were prompted by Chinese companies like Temu taking advantage of de minimis shipping exceptions (basically by shipping zillions of cheap items one at a time, rather than in bulk), the new rules ought to apply only for items arriving from China.

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

David Pogue: ‘125 Tests of the New AI Siri’

John Gruber
Updated

David Pogue:

The hardest part will be getting out of the habit of opening apps, and remembering that you have Siri. Give it a few tries. Learn to trust it. You’ll save incredible amounts of time and fumbling.

I used the beta-test version all summer, growing more and more excited. Now that the final version is out, I wanted to see how often it gets things right. It is AI, after all. So I ran it through 125 tests.

Some of these tasks are things Apple said are possible. Some ideas, I picked up from people on Reddit trying stuff. Some, I just wondered if Siri could do. It failed a handful of times. But a few other times, it absolutely blew me away. It did amazing things I bet you never suspected Siri could do.

I’ve been using iOS 27 with the new Siri AI since the week after WWDC, and the single biggest problem I have echoes Pogue’s: remembering that Siri is now useful. I keep doing things manually, then thinking “Hey, I should have tried that with Siri...”, trying it again with Siri after the fact, and realizing only then that Siri accomplished the thing.

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

Matthew Butterick: ‘Big AI to Humanity: Drop Dead’

John Gruber
Updated

Matthew Butterick:

So let’s not take the bait. Nor overcomplicate. We needn’t spin our collective wheels spitballing answers to big-picture, long-term Al-policy questions. We don’t know enough yet. The best next steps are the concrete ones: Big Al needs to follow all current laws — just like everyone else. So far — they haven’t. When Big Al breaks those laws, they must face prosecution and penalties — just like everyone else. So far — they haven’t. The state and federal agencies tasked with enforcing those laws need to apply them to Big Al — just like everyone else. So far — they haven’t. In short, we have to attend to the basic features of the rule of law. So far — we haven’t. If we can’t or won’t insist on that now, then we shouldn’t expect to be able to later.

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

‘Measuring Nothing (With Great Accuracy)’

John Gruber
Updated

Seth Godin back in 2014:

You can’t tell if a book is any good by the number of words it contains, even though it’s quite easy and direct to measure this.

(Vis-à-vis my sidenote over the weekend about Apple refusing to publish mAh battery specs for iPhones.)

 ★ 
Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

Things Fall Apart (in the Middle East): The Donald Trump Story

Josh Marshall
Updated

One of the key arguments for a great power — other than the great power itself wanting to be one — is that they act as a guarantor of stability and the status quo. That is far from the only public or global good. And a great power will ensure that status quo on its own terms and mostly to its own advantage. But if you have any acquaintance with history, you know you can do a lot worse than relative peace and the status quo. Trump’s Iran War has been a bracing illustration of all these realities. Once the great power starts letting things break, those breakages can start multiplying very fast. Eventually you’ll find a new equilibrium, of course. But eventually can take a long time. And again, even a passing acquaintance with history tells us that things can suck without end for extended periods of time.

There’s an interesting New York Times piece from over the weekend that illustrates all these things. We know the outline. But it provides new details. As a knock-on effect of the U.S. war with Iran, the ongoing battle between Saudi Arabia and the Houthi rebel government in Yemen has again become hot. In recent weeks, the Houthis have partly cut off Saudi Arabia’s other path to the ocean. Put simply, the Saudis can export oil through the Strait of Hormuz or the Red Sea. The former has been mostly closed for months. Now the Houthis are in de facto or near control of the second. That’s a big crisis for the Saudis. This is part of the larger U.S.-Iran battle because the Houthis are clients of Iran. And Iran’s core strategy has been to create enough pain for the U.S.’s regional allies that they will force the U.S. to end the war. Remember, each time the U.S. attacks Iran, they respond by attacking the various Gulf emirates.

The de facto leader of Saudi Arabia, Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), has been urging Trump to help Saudi Arabia beat back the Houthis. He’s mainly been refusing them. What the Times story details is that on Thursday MBS called Trump and apparently literally begged him for help, to the extent that Trump gave in and agreed to join the Saudis’ fight. Trump had told his advisors the day before he wanted to stay out. Then MBS convinced him. But by Sunday he was back to wanting to stay out. That’s where things stand. This is an inconstant, impressionable and weak man. This is the nature of personalized rule when the would-be autocrat is in physical and mental decline.

There’s nothing righteous about teaming up with the Saudis in this case. It’s two pretty nasty players who’ve been fighting for years and causing huge civilian carnage along the way. But Trump has been willing to help before. From what I can tell, at least some of Trump’s current resistance is tied to the fact that he’s miffed at MBS for not helping with opening up the Strait. (Put a pin in that for a future post; it’s probably playing a bigger role than we imagine.) But he also doesn’t want more escalation of his politically and electorally disastrous war before the midterms. That pitiful and comical back-and-forth also demonstrates the role of personalism. The U.S. doesn’t really have a policy. It has the mindset and top fears, on any given day, of Donald Trump.

If my narrative above was a documentary, this is where you freeze the shot and say: this is why you think long and hard before you launch a war like this for essentially no reason. Lots of things can go wrong and you may end up needing to do things you don’t want to do and really shouldn’t do. But you have to because you’ve created a set of circumstances where you have no choice.

Here’s another thing to consider. The Saudis have a huge, huge amount of military hardware. On paper, they should have one of the most potent militaries in the world. But it’s always been known or mostly suspected that it’s vastly weaker than the price tag would suggest. U.S. reporting sometimes gives you the sense that the Houthis are some mountain folk on horseback. That’s not true. They control most of the country and have for some time. In practice, they’re an internationally isolated government. But Yemen is still a poor and war-torn country. The fact that the Saudi military can’t prevent them from basically blockading Saudi Arabia tells us the story. The truth is what everyone has always suspected. The Saudis have a paper army (let’s be generous and call it cardboard); when it gets into trouble, they have to call the U.S. Now they’re calling because of a crisis the U.S. started on its own. But the U.S. isn’t helping. And now Saudi Arabia is mostly blocked off from the sea.

Let me be emphatically clear: MBS isn’t some valiant player who has become yet another victim of Trump’s perfidy. He is awful in basically every way you can imagine. And the Saudis’ war in Yemen has been horribly destructive. Tens of thousands of Yemenis have died in the conflict.

But the supply of oil rests on that promise that the U.S. will take care of things if its regional allies — with their generally feeble militaries — get into trouble. The U.S. is now failing that promise two or three times over: by starting the war in the first place, by letting the Gulf kingdoms deal with the blowback on their own. That’s a reality that can’t hold. These patrimony states will either find other protection or build real militaries themselves.

In a way, it is a more brutal and militarized version of the breakdown in relations with America’s NATO and EU allies in Europe. The U.S. has become a chaos power which is not meeting the terms of the regional deal, and the other players are trying to figure out what to do in its place, what Plan B is — only there’s no immediate Plan B available. It’s not that there aren’t any downsides to the U.S. global hegemony or that it doesn’t have its critics. But what we’re seeing here isn’t the U.S. global hegemony being replaced by some more inclusive, less militarized successor. We’re seeing it just disappear. Perhaps Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney will make some progress with his “middle powers” banding together to create a new and more just world order. But it’s definitely not here yet.

What is telling, of course, is that the Trump White House is filled with people with all sort of culture war hang-ups about Western Europe. They like sticking it to the Europeans, even if they’re not quite clear on the longterm consequences. But the Saudis and the other Gulf emirates are Trump’s guys. They’re supposed to be top oligarchic players in the new Trumpian, regional, spheres-of-influence world. But they’re getting hosed too. And Trump is doing things that will lead to even more chaos and even higher prices down the line because he mostly wants to avoid them in the next six weeks.

Simply put, when dumb leaders do impulsive things and then leave the consequences to others to clean up, things can degenerate really, really fast. And that’s exactly what’s happening.

Daring Fireball

GM Confirms They’re Still Smoking Crack

John Gruber
Updated

Joanna Stern, on X:

GM has confirmed it is NOT rolling phone projection to GM EVs. Instead this announcement is specific to JUST their new gas powered light-duty pickups, which have always supported Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

America’s Decline Can Be Measured by the Names of Ballparks and Arenas

John Gruber
Updated

MLB:

Comerica Park has had several alternate identities since it became the Tigers’ home in 2000. Some have called it Comerica National Park for its spacious dimensions. Some fans simply came to call it Comerica, or abbreviated it to CoPa, as they grew comfortable with it over the years.

Starting next year, the Tigers’ ballpark will have a new formal name: Fifth Third Park.

Filth Turd Park.

 ★ 
Spaceflight Now

SpaceX’s Super Heavy booster arrives at pad ahead of first orbital Starship launch

Will Robinson-Smith
Updated
SpaceX rolled its Super Heavy booster, tail number B21, out to Pad 2 late Sunday night, Sept. 20, in preparation for the launch of Starship Flight 14 no earlier than Sept. 28. Image: SpaceX

SpaceX placed a Super Heavy booster on the launch pad at Starbase in Texas Monday, as it continues testing and preparations for the first planned orbital flight of Starship, scheduled for launch as soon as Sept. 28, pending final approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

The Super Heavy booster, with the tail number B21, departed its assembly building shortly before midnight local time and was placed on the launch mount at Pad 2, roughly two hours later. The stainless-steel booster stands 236 feet tall (72 meters) and boasts a diameter of 9 m (29.5 ft). By comparison, a Falcon 9 rocket has a diameter of 3.7 m (12 ft). The downcomer pipe that carries methane fuel down the center of the Super Heavy Booster’s liquid oxygen tank to the Raptor engines at its base is roughly the size of an entire Falcon 9 rocket.

SpaceX hasn’t said whether it intends to perform a fully integrated wet dress rehearsal tanking test of the rocket once assembled prior to the upcoming launch attempt.

As of Monday morning, there were no road closures published for the City of Starbase, suggesting that it may be a day or two at least before the Starship upper stage, tail number S41, is rolled out to join B21.

Although SpaceX is targeting the launch for Sept. 28 at 7:15 a.m. CDT (1215 UTC), it can only proceed once the FAA approves the license modification needed for SpaceX’s orbital flight plan.

This would be the first time that the FAA grants an orbital license for an object the size of a Starship upper stage (171 ft/52 m in height).

If something were to go wrong that prevented Starship making a planned deorbit burn, it could pose a danger during an uncontrolled reentry. Its heat shield and bulk could result in large portions of the craft crashing to Earth. The FAA wants to ensure that the vehicle and SpaceX are truly ready for this next step.

“In addition to completing the environmental review, license applications must also meet FAA safety, policy/payload, and financial responsibility requirements to receive authorization for flight,” the FAA said in a statement.

SpaceX rolled its Super Heavy booster, tail number B21, out to Pad 2 late Sunday night, Sept. 20, in preparation for the launch of Starship Flight 14 no earlier than Sept. 28. Image: SpaceX

Orbital flight is at hand

Depending on when Starship Flight 14 takes place, it very well may be the next Starlink mission for SpaceX and has been given the additional designation of Starlink 31-1. The company recently ceased launches of its V2 mini broadband internet satellites from Florida, but continues to build and replenish its fleet with missions from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

SpaceX needs Starship in order to begin launching the larger and more capable Starlink V3 satellites.

During the most recent test flight in July, SpaceX deployed several Starlink V3 satellites along the same suborbital trajectory as the Ship 40 upper stage. Those satellites were able to deploy their solar arrays, capture imagery of the Starship’s heat shield, and briefly connect with the broader Starlink constellation using laser links before they met their planned demise.

On Starship Flight 14, SpaceX aims to deploy 26 Starlink V3 satellites into orbit a 171-mile (275 km) orbit, with an estimated orbital inclination of 30 degrees to the Equator.

“Each Starlink V3 satellite will add 1 Tbps of capacity to the constellation, for a total of 26 Tbps of capacity added on this mission alone. That’s ~10x the capacity compared to a single launch of V2 mini Starlink satellites on Falcon 9,” SpaceX said in a prelaunch mission writeup.

“After deploying from Starship, the Starlink V3 satellites will unfold their antennas and deploy their solar arrays and make initial contact with the ground and the rest of the Starlink constellation via radio frequency and laser links. The satellites will then begin raising their orbits with their onboard thrusters. Following their on-orbit checkouts, the satellites should begin serving customers as soon as a few weeks after launch.”

The Aviationist
Hacker News
Letters from an American

Bacon’s Rebellion

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

Letters from an American

September 20, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

Thousands of people gathered outside the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Friday evening to protest Trump’s takeover of the building and his threat to shut it down or even demolish it unless his name goes onto the facade. U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper of the District of Columbia has ordered the board of the center to give 30 days’ notice before making any major physical changes to the building.

Recognizing the leeway the courts have given him over anything that falls under “national security,” Trump this morning decided to take a proactive approach to making sure the courts don’t stop his triumphal arch. He announced on social media:

“At the strong request of the United States Military, and for National Security purposes, I have agreed to convert the magnificent Triumphal Arch, planned since the Civil War Era many years ago, at the Receptive Circle adjoining the Arlington Memorial Bridge, into a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch, to house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage. There will be no facility like this anywhere in the World. Out of the 59 top cities and Capitals, Washington, D.C., IS THE ONLY ONE IN THE WORLD THAT DOES NOT HAVE A TRIUMPHAL ARCH, but it will now and, by far, the greatest of them all!”

This is the same justification he made for his ballroom where the East Wing used to be. When it became clear that his claim to need an entertainment space up to his aesthetic standards would not fly, he began to claim that the ballroom is imperative for national security. We have since learned that there already is a secure space under the White House, built in secret during President Barack Obama’s administration.

Dan Diamond reported in the Washington Post last Wednesday, September 16, that officials from the National Park Service have agreed that the construction will adversely affect Arlington National Cemetery, the Lincoln Memorial, and several dozen other historical sites, but urged those concerned about historic preservation to sign on to the project through a memorandum of agreement that will stand as approval by noon tomorrow anyway.

The document asserts that the arch is supposed “to celebrate 250 years of American independence by honoring America’s founding principles.” Now Trump says the arch is imperative for “National Security purposes” and will have drones and snipers.

Rebecca Miller, executive director of the DC Preservation League, responded to the request to sign the document: “This is not consistent with NPS practice, NPS regulations, or the intent of the National Historic Preservation Act.”

While Trump suggests he will defend the United States from atop his triumphal arch, our European allies are much more concerned with Russia’s drone strike last Sunday on a passenger train traveling from Kyiv, Ukraine, to Warsaw, Poland. The train was just over a mile—two kilometers—from the Polish border when the drone hit at a border crossing. The drone hit just after a convoy carrying former leaders and high-level diplomats, including former U.K. prime minister Boris Johnson, had passed through.

The train operators were warned of the coming drone and no one was hurt, but European leaders widely interpreted the strike so close to Poland as, in the words of Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s high representative for foreign and security policy, “clearly a message to the western world.”

Poland is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Twelve nations founded NATO in 1949 to resist Soviet aggression. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, NATO’s mission shifted toward crisis management, and then to resisting the aggression of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin.

Over the years, NATO has grown to include 32 countries, 30 of which are in Europe (the U.S. and Canada are the two NATO countries in North America). The success of their collective defense system rests on Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which states that an attack against any one member of NATO will be treated as an attack against all of them. So a threat to Poland threatens all the NATO countries.

Russia has been pushing NATO countries with what European leaders call “hybrid attacks.” Rather than launching classic military attacks, Putin has been allowing drones to go into NATO airspace, cutting undersea telecommunications networks on which European countries depend, and possibly placing bombs on a train in France.

Russia has been a bad actor for years, destabilizing NATO countries by flooding them with disinformation that affects elections, paying for political parties, bribing politicians, and so on. But the increase in Russian provocations now seems to be related to Putin’s attempt to undercut European support for Ukraine as Ukraine’s drones have brought the war home to Russia’s oil industry and to the Russian people.

In a speech on Wednesday, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, former prime minister of the Netherlands, noted that “Russia wants to stop us helping Ukraine—but their actions will only lead us to do more for Ukraine.”

Kurt Volker, who served as U.S. ambassador to NATO under President George W. Bush, told NPR’s Elissa Nadworny that President Trump “has largely looked at all of this and said, that’s a European problem. He doesn’t feel a threat to the United States from Russia, and he doesn’t see a need for the U.S. to increase its pushback on Russia at all.” “I disagree with this,” Volker said. “I think that we have a vested interest in freedom and free people everywhere being safe and prosperous. It creates a better world for us.”

Trump’s stand is interesting in light of news that Russia has been helping Iran in its fight against the United States, sending upgraded munitions as well as satellite imagery and targeting data to hit U.S. forces in the Middle East.

Last week, CNN reported that fourteen Russian spy satellites moved over the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, used by the U.S., two days before a devastating March 27 attack by Iran. A CNN investigation showed that the spacecraft had access to a large spectrum of data. U.S. officials and international intelligence sources told CNN that the information the satellites gathered helped Iranian forces conduct some of its most precise attacks against American forces and assets.

Two months later, a Russian close to Putin footed the bill for a three-day celebration for Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding to Bettina Anderson. According to Justin Elliott, Brett Murphy, Joshua Kaplan, and Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica, Umar Kremlev spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the event, held on private islands in the Bahamas.

On Tuesday, September 15, the Department of Justice announced charges against five people working for Russian intelligence “to conduct attacks and murders around the world, including in the United States.” The indictment alleges that a network of Russian hit men has operated since at least 2024 and has recruited U.S. citizens to surveil and murder people, intending to target “all the countries that are helping Ukraine.” As Daniel Boffey and Andrew Roth of the Guardian note, it was an unwritten rule of the Cold War that Russia would not attack people in the U.S. (although Russian agents are widely believed to be behind the murder of U.S. journalist Paul Klebnikov in Moscow in 2004).

On September 16, Congress passed a major sanctions package targeting Russian officials, the energy sector, financial institutions, and the “shadow fleet” of tankers that get around sanctions by using shell corporations and flying under the flags of countries with a loose regulatory system. The measure is named the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, in honor of the late South Carolina senator.

But on Thursday, September 17, Anton Troianovski of the New York Times reported that Trump is suggesting Putin will be more willing to end his war if the U.S. makes business deals with Russia regardless of whether it stops its assault on Ukraine. In February, Troianovski reported that Gentry Beach, a Texas investor with ties to the Trumps, signed an agreement last fall with one of the biggest energy companies in Russia to develop Alaska’s natural gas resources.

According to a September 14 piece by Dexter Filkins in the New Yorker, the Trump administration has essentially privatized U.S. foreign policy for their own interests. The “generally held view,” a former U.S. official told Filkins, is that Russia has offered administration officials and their allies business deals in exchange for their supporting Russian demands against Ukraine. A classified report a European intelligence agency provided to Filkins lists Trump, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, special envoy Steve Witkoff, former envoy Richard Grenell, and Gentry Beach as people who might participate in any of ten money-making ventures on the table.

The world, and the place of the United States in it, is changing fast. In June, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called it “shameful” that European allies did not help the U.S. attack on Iran and said the U.S. would review its military commitments to Europe. On September 17, Dan De Luce, Gordon Lubold, Courtney Kube, and Abigail Williams of NBC News reported that the Pentagon is weighing a plan to pull tens of thousands of troops and weapons, ships, and planes out of Europe despite the warnings of NATO allies about Russia’s increasingly aggressive moves.

In Wednesday’s speech, Rutte outlined what he called NATO 3.0. If NATO 1.0 was the phase of the organization that pushed back against the Soviet Union and NATO 2.0 was the period from then until now, he said, NATO 3.0 is one in which the weight of NATO shifts away from the United States and toward the United Kingdom, Europe, and Canada.

—

Notes:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/thousands-join-protest-outside-kennedy-center-expressing-concern-that-trump-might-tear-it-down

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/judge-orders-kennedy-center-to-provide-30-days-notice-before-making-any-major-physical-changes

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/09/16/trump-officials-say-planned-arch-will-harm-historic-sites-must-go/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/b432bfa4-ff64-4fed-8543-337490a98a5a.pdf

https://www.nato.int/en/news-and-events/events/transcripts/2026/09/16/annual-lecture-by-the-nato-secretary-general

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2026/09/15/russia-and-iran-deepen-weapons-partnership-amid-wars-in-ukraine-middle-east/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/03/06/russia-iran-intelligence-us-targets/

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/09/16/world/video/russia-spy-satellites-iran-intelligence-strikes-us-assets-digvid-invs

https://www.npr.org/2026/09/19/nx-s1-5974199/worries-swirl-that-russia-is-planning-to-test-nato-with-direct-attacks

https://www.propublica.org/article/donald-trump-jr-wedding-bankrolled-russian-oligarch-umar-kremlev-putin

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/17/us/trump-putin-russia-sanctions.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/19/us/politics/trump-russia-deals-novatek.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/pentagon-weighs-pulling-nearly-third-us-forces-europe-rcna597722

https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/us-troops-europe-nato-3tpm5hqw2

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/09/21/jared-kushners-dollar-diplomacy

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/members-russian-intelligence-services-network-charged-conspiring-finance-terrorism-and

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/20/the-rules-have-changed-has-russia-begun-to-order-assassinations-on-us-soil

https://www.rferl.org/a/us-congress-sweeping-russia-iran-sanctions-bill/33857946.html

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/14/ukraine-kallas-not-scared-russian-strike-train

Trump’s Truth:

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AskThePilot.com

Commemoration Done Right

Patrick
Updated

September 11, 2026

On the morning of September 11th, 2001, American Airlines flight 11, and United Airlines flight 175, took off from Boston’s Logan International Airport, only minutes apart. Both were bound for Los Angeles. Neither, of course, ever got there.

The idea of constructing a memorial to the 2001 terror attacks, at the airport from which two of the four hijacked planes departed, was perhaps to be expected. But it needed to be done just right. There’s a fine line sometimes between commemorative and jingoistic. What they came up with, I’m pleased to say, is superb, and ought to serve as a model for such memorials everywhere.

Reached along an ascending pathway that twists upward amidst grass and trees, the main structure is a sort of open-topped glass chapel, inside of which are two vertical slabs, one for each of the two aircraft that struck the World Trade Center — and mimicking the shapes, one can’t help noticing, of the twin towers themselves — engraved with the names of the passengers and crew. There’s one for flight 11, the 767 that struck the north tower, and the other for flight 175, which hit the south tower minutes later.

The glass and steelwork allow the entire space to be flooded with silvery light, creating an atmosphere that’s quiet and contemplative without feeling maudlin or sentimentalized.

There are no flags or any of the crudely patriotic touches one might expect (and dread). It’s everything it should be: beautifully constructed, understated, and respectful.

Officially it’s called the “Place of Remembrance,” and it was built by the Boston-based firm of Moskow Linn Architects, as part of a public competition. The final design was chosen by airline workers, airport representatives, and family members of the victims.

The engraved names are separated into columns of crew and passengers, and the names of off-duty United employees on the flight 175 plate include the small “tulip” logo of United Airlines. This might seem a strange touch, but this memorial was built primarily for the community of people who work at the airport. Among the passengers and crew killed on the two jets were more than a dozen Logan-based employees.

But anyone is welcome, of course, and I wish more people knew about it. Although it’s easily accessible from terminals A or E, it’s not well advertised. It sits on a knoll just to the southern side of the central parking garage, across from the Hilton hotel.

The easiest way to find it is to follow the signs to the ride-share pickup point for terminals A and E. There are two pickup points; go to the one closest to terminal A. Once you step out of the elevator it’s just a one-minute walk around the corner.

An event was held this year on the 25th anniversary of the attacks, during which a sculpted wreath and plaque were added.

Related Stories:
THE DAY OF THE COCKROACH
WELCOME TO HIDDEN AIRPORT

Photos by the author

The post Commemoration Done Right appeared first on AskThePilot.com.

Casey Handmer's blog

How deep is Tulainyo Lake?

cjhandmer
Updated

Regular readers may recall that I put a visit to Tulainyo Lake on my bucket list a few years ago. Last week I did it.

Impossibly remote, otherworldly beauty, and an enduring mystery. Just how deep was this lake? Wikipedia claims not to know. Measuring it is non-trivial. A worthy challenge.

The skinny: This relatively small alpine lake is about 117 m deep! That makes it the 25th deepest natural lake in North America, and by far the deepest lake on Earth for its size.

Enjoy our interactive report here.

Astronomy Picture of the Day

If you went outside at the same time every day and If you went outside at the same time every day and


The Map Room

Georeferencing Fire Insurance Maps

Jonathan Crowe
Updated
Dan Vanderkam: “Over the past few months I’ve been working on mapsnap, a program to automatically georeference old insurance maps. This post explains why these maps are interesting, how mapsnap works, and why this is worth… More
The Map Room

Mapping Tariffs

Jonathan Crowe
Updated
Mapping Tariffs visualizes the impact of U.S. tariffs on Canadian businesses. “Since May 2025, Tara Vinodrai and Karen Chapple have led a team of researchers at the School of Cities to develop interactive mapping and… More
Simon Willison's Weblog

datasette-explain 0.2.2

Release: datasette-explain 0.2.2

  • Explain plans now work on read-only stored-query pages.

I upgraded datasette.simonwillison.net to Datasette 1.0a40, which inspired me to ship a new version of this explain plugin.

Tags: sqlite, datasette

Paul Krugman

Why Does Everyone Hate Trump’s Tariffs?

Paul Krugman
Updated

President Trump Unveils 'Liberation Day' Tariffs｜Daily News Digest｜2025-04-03｜web only

On April 2, 2025 — “Liberation Day” — Donald Trump imposed high tariffs – ranging from 10 to 48 percent — on imports from virtually every one of our trading partners. With that announcement the United States abruptly turned its back on generations’ worth of solemn international agreements, effectively voiding a rules-based international trading system the U.S. itself had largely constructed.

Although the Supreme Court eventually ruled that most of the tariffs were illegal, the Trump administration reinstated many of them using other dubious legal strategies. Businesses are, to say the least, unhappy about the uncertainty created by these unilateral, unstable actions. However, the consequences of Trump’s liberation tariffs have been very different from what both supporters and opponents originally expected.

Contrary to Trump administration expectations and predictions, there has been no revival of U.S. manufacturing employment, and investment in manufacturing — at least as measured by construction spending — has fallen off a cliff. And import prices, even excluding petroleum, have gone up, not down, belying claims that foreigners would pay the tariffs.

However, the Trump tariffs haven’t caused a recession, either in the U.S. or globally. Nor have they led to a 1930s-style global spiral into protectionism: Retaliation by other nations against U.S. tariffs has been limited, and there has been hardly any sign of emulation — of other nations deciding to follow Trump’s lead by imposing their own high tariffs on trading partners. Instead, a number of countries have made substantial moves to strengthen their trading relations — e.g., after decades of stalled negotiations, India and the European Union agreed to a free trade deal. And Canada, of course, is trying to compensate for its now-troubled relations with the U.S. by becoming an “associate member” of the EU (although nobody quite knows what that might mean).

Yet for me the biggest surprise arising from the Trump tariffs has been the complete absence of a significant domestic political constituency. This failure has been driven home by polling on Trump’s confrontation with Canada, which appears to be nearly as unpopular as his war with Iran.

This is not, I believe, what most economists or political analysts would have predicted. Conventional economic analysis, while arguing that free trade raises real income for a nation as a whole, also suggests that tariffs can nonetheless benefit significant groups within a nation. Moreover, because the beneficiaries from tariffs are often localized and organized while the costs are dispersed, tariff advocates often wield disproportionate political influence. Indeed, one of the main purposes of world trade rules has historically been to strengthen governments’ hands against their own domestic anti-free-trade constituencies.

However, the actual political response to Trump’s tariffs hasn’t followed this traditional model. Rather, support for the tariffs appears to be limited to that segment of the population — around 20 percent — that supports almost anything Trump does.

Beyond the paywall, I will address the following:

1. Why conventional economics says about tariffs

2. Polling on the Trump tariffs

3. Explaining low support I: Value chains

4. Explaining low support II: The service economy and affordability

5. Explaining low support III: The Trump factor

6. A policy without a constituency

Read more

Simon Willison's Weblog

Quoting voxium

It has been half a month since I started a new role at a big company. Nobody knows anything here. The specs, code, tests, PRDs, tickets, resolution of those tickets, reports, etc., everything is made by Claude Code. Nobody on my team likes this. They are being forced to ship as much as they can. I have heard multiple times from higher management that pushing code is not a bottleneck, so why are we slow? People are working 12 to 13 hours a day just to press enter. Nobody is reading anything. Everyone, literally everyone, from an L1 to an L7 engineer here is doing the same thing. Talk to Claude.

— voxium

Tags: ai-misuse, llms, ai, generative-ai

Simon Willison's Weblog

llm-keys-ui 0.1

Release: llm-keys-ui 0.1

This plugin solves a very specific problem.

I've started using Codex Remote to run coding agents on various machines while controlling them from my phone.

Sometimes I use those machines to hack on LLM projects, and occasionally that means I need to configure an API key.

I don't like pasting API keys into agent sessions, so I wanted a way to get those keys onto a machine without pasting them into the ChatGPT app directly.

With this plugin, I can tell Codex to run:

uvx --with llm-keys-ui llm keys-ui --all

Then have it tell me the URL - including local network or Tailscale device IPs - for an interface to save additional API keys.

Then later it can use a command like llm keys get anthropic as part of a shell command when it needs to use a key.

Chat conversation requesting uvx --with llm-keys-ui llm keys-ui --all, with a response listing four server URLs on port 8010 and confirming the server is still running. LLM keys web interface listing anthropic, openai, openrouter, and qwen-dummy as stored keys, with a form containing Key name and New value fields and a Save key button. Existing key values are never displayed.

Tags: llm, coding-agents, codex

Boston Red Sox – MLB Trade Rumors
Mike the Mad Biologist

Links 9/20/26

mikethemadbiologist
Updated

Links for you. Science:

New wild cat species is identified for first time in 100 years
This Is Your Brain on Short-Form Video. Scientists know very little about how TikTok and its copycats affect human cognition, but the signs aren’t good.
Boreal and subarctic freshwaters harbour a diversity of jumbophages
RFK Jr. Bolsters Vaccine Skepticism at Children’s Health Defense Conference
The Next Gene-Editing Technology May Also Be the Oldest
The State of AI Antibody Design
Amid measles outbreaks, RFK Jr. headlines anti-vaccine conference

Other:

The Mistakes That The Democrats Keep Making. Author Ed Burmila says Democrats must get out of the pattern of winning elections based on anti-GOP sentiment but then governing in a milquetoast way that helps Republicans get back in power.
Trump’s Debt Crisis Will Be Easy to Fix. All that’s needed is the political will to staff the government and nudge up taxes.
When is a river no longer a river?
Trump Aides Are Prepping an AI Takeover of Government Services
Loopholes For The Lesser People
Neighbors Are Upset Over Federal Agents’ Presence at a D.C. School
Textured
How Purple-State Democrats Should Talk About Trans Issues
Urgent motion filed to stop carving of Trump’s name into US Institute of Peace building
He’ll Burn It All Down
NYC deploys robotoilets. The public bathrooms have a strict 10-minute time limit.
An empty lot in Ward 7 was due to get a grocery store decades ago. What’s happening now?
Step through this magical portal to a DC with 800,000 people
Pennsylvania’s Amazon data center boom is fueled by a lucrative tax break
A Path to a Texas Breakthrough
RFK Jr.-Linked Group Offered Access to US Officials for Fee
Error by AI scribe during medical appointment leaves patient devastated
Noncitizens Don’t Sway Elections, Even in a Pro-Trump Tally
The Census Bureau Is Overrun With Staffers From a MAGA Think Tank
Build columns, not Trump’s arch, D.C. official tells administration
Not just a river in Egypt
American Principles Project Warns Republicans That Targeting Trans People “May Not Be Sufficient” To Win 2026. The organization is one of the leading anti-trans political organizations in the United States.
How Three Brothers Built an AI Slop Empire by Buying Legitimate News Sites and Turning Them Into Zombie Content Farms That They Say Get 50 Million Page Views per Month
US military had close call after using AI for false intelligence report, sources say
Trump Reportedly Plans To Blow $84,000 To Publicly Shame The Smithsonian
Urgent motion filed to stop carving of Trump’s name into US Institute of Peace building
Judge demands ’emergency’ answers as forklift rams Kennedy Center after Trump threat
Everyone hates Workday
Trump administration has cut or frozen $177 billion in grants across every state
Oh what a beauty! How the mangelwurzel is making a comeback

Mike the Mad Biologist

In Case You Missed It…

mikethemadbiologist
Updated

…a week of Mad Biologist links:

As Part of Early ‘Detrumpification’, Democrats Should Investigate the ‘Optimus Prime’ Scandal

The Singularity, Such As It Is, Will Be Boring and Mundane

If Democrats Take Back the House, They Should Impeach Hegseth, Kennedy, and Vought

Yet Another OK Week for D.C.’s Crime Stats

Noahpinion

How we can beat China

Noah Smith
Updated
Art by GPT-6, original by Zhang Zeduan

In 1946, George Kennan, who was acting as the head of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, wrote a message to the Secretary of State, known as the “Long Telegram”. In the Long Telegram, Kennan laid out a theory of how Soviet power could be defeated. He argued that Soviet leaders would always be hostile to the U.S., but that they were also cautious — they wouldn’t recklessly start a world war like Germany had. He also argued that the Soviet system was weak and unstable, and that given enough time, it would collapse from its own internal contradictions. This became known as the doctrine of “containment”, and it ended up being exactly the strategy that the U.S. used to win the Cold War. It took 45 years for the strategy to work and the USSR to fall.

I am certainly no George Kennan. I’ve never lived in China, I haven’t been there in many years, I don’t speak Chinese, and I certainly don’t talk to any leaders there. I’m also not a career diplomat or a professional geopolitics guy of any kind. So although I’m going to write a blog post with the same general goal as Kennan’s Long Telegram, I don’t want to suggest that it’s anywhere near as authoritative or insightful.

But I’m still going to write a post about “how to beat China”, because I think it’s useful to think through these sorts of big strategic questions. This post is also an important follow-up to a series of posts I wrote about geopolitics during the Biden years, about U.S.-China competition:

(There were more, but I figure your appetite for clicking through old posts is limited.)

The basic premise of those posts was that the competition between a China-led New Axis and the U.S. and our old allies — Europe, Japan and Korea, hopefully India, etc. — would define the upcoming era of geopolitics. And my conclusion was that we should use an updated version of the basic strategy we used against the USSR in Cold War 1. I recommended that we should build up economic power within our bloc of allies, establish military deterrence, and wait for China’s internal contradictions to do the heavy lifting of removing the threat.

That strategy was always going to be harder than it was in Cold War 1, because China A) is a lot bigger than the USSR, B) has a better economic model, and C) is a lot more globally integrated. The strategy I recommended was much tighter economic cooperation between the U.S. and a maximally large set of allies, to build up a bloc capable of overmatching even the mighty Chinese manufacturing juggernaut. This is the approach that’s being promoted by experts like Rush Doshi and Kurt Campbell. If you’re interested in reading about how that approach would work, and why it would be helpful, I recommend Doshi’s interview with ChinaTalk:

ChinaTalk
Allied Scale: Net Assessment with Rush Doshi
How should America maximize its odds when competing with China? Can Trump’s approach to alliances succeed in strengthening deterrence? And what will it take for China to diplomatically capitalize…
Read more
a year ago · 48 likes · 17 comments · Jordan Schneider and Lily Ottinger

Anyway, I still think building up an anti-China economic juggernaut would be a great thing to do, and I still think the U.S. would benefit from closer economic integration with its friends and allies. But I think the election of Trump shows why this strategy probably isn’t going to work. The United States is simply too internally divided to engage in the sort of far-seeing, purposeful, smart kind of international competition that we pursued so effectively in the 20th century. Americans care more about fighting other Americans than about fighting the Chinese, and that state of affairs will persist for a while.

Donald Trump’s presidency is an outgrowth of America’s internal divisions; he cares much more about fighting his own internal enemies than about prosecuting international rivalries. He has willfully degraded or torn up America’s key alliances, especially with Europe, and created enmity where friendship once reigned. He has flagrantly trampled on every principle of human rights, mutually beneficial economic cooperation, democracy, and international non-aggression that the post-WW2 U.S.-led international order fought to uphold. He has, in short, made it impossible to prosecute the sort of Cold War 2 strategy that I spent the Biden years advocating.

This doesn’t mean America’s alliance system is necessarily dead forever. As Doshi and Campbell pointed out in a recent article, the old alliances could be reconstituted, if America credibly overcame its internal divisions and returned to being the mostly unified, stable, reliable great power that it was last century. But overcoming those divisions is going to take decades at the very least, and that’s exactly the window of time during which China will be at its peak of relative power.

So I think we’ve basically missed the chance to use that strategy effectively, and I’ve recalibrated my thinking. This post is meant to explain my recalibration. I do think there’s a path to defeating Chinese power, but it doesn’t look like what I previously had in mind.

Who is “we”, what does it mean to “beat” China, and why should we even care?

Before getting to the question of how to beat China, we need to answer the questions of who and why should do this “beating”. In 2024 the answer was obvious — the U.S. and its erstwhile allies still represented a far more liberal power than China and its allies, so ensuring that the former was more powerful than the latter would further the cause of global liberalism. China threw minorities in concentration camps, threatened its neighbors with invasion and war, supported Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and repressed free expression all over the world. That was — and is — behavior worth resisting.

But the election of Trump changes that calculus. Trump threatens other countries with invasion, and sometimes even attacks them if he thinks they’re weak enough. He can’t throw minorities in camps just for being minorities yet, but he’s building a sort of gulag archipelago under the fig leaf of immigrant detention. His foreign policy is increasingly based on “civilizational” concerns1 instead of human rights or democracy.

Trump has thus forfeited America’s claim to moral superiority over China. It’s true that Trump and his ragtag movement are far less competent than the Chinese Communist Party, but that doesn’t mean that increasing American power will lead to a more liberal world. At this point, it probably won’t. And of course Democrats will try to undo some of Trump’s geopolitical shifts, but if past experience is any guide, they will have only marginal success. Moreover, the GOP is not going to revert back to Reaganism after Trump leaves office; they will keep fighting for their illiberal visions both at home and abroad for a long time to come.

None of that means, however, that liberalism as an idea is dead. Europe, Japan, and many other countries that were on America’s side in the Cold War still uphold the basic ideas of democracy and human rights, as do many developing nations. The average person living in Tokyo or Paris or Bangalore still enjoys far more personal freedom and dignity than does the average person in Shenzhen or Shanghai.

And even leaving aside the relative merits of different social and governmental systems, there are plenty of people in plenty of countries who simply don’t deserve to be trampled on by the bootheel of the CCP. Japanese people, Indians, Filipinos, Koreans, and so on deserve to be able to determine their own destiny without being subject to the whims of the powerful men in Beijing. And Ukrainians, Estonians, Poles, etc. deserve to be free from the Russian tyranny that China quietly backs.

So when I say “how we can beat China”, what I actually mean is how we can keep China from dominating other countries. This doesn’t mean we should try to make China collapse, or impoverish the Chinese people, etc. Instead, it just means how smaller nations — and nations who value human rights and democracy — can resist Chinese power.

And at some point, if the U.S. ever does manage to tamp down its internal divisions and return to being a liberal power, it will still mean the same thing.

Many hegemons eventually beat themselves

Read more

Daring Fireball

GM Revives CarPlay for 2027 Trucks

John Gruber
Updated

Natalie Neff, Autoweek:

General Motors is reversing course after having begun to remove Apple CarPlay from its vehicles, showing off instead a redesigned infotainment interface for the 2027 Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickups that melds the smartphone apps with the truck’s native vehicle controls on the same screen.

The new system, which will roll out later this year, marks a significant walk-back after the automaker faced widespread criticism for removing Apple CarPlay and Android Auto from its Ultium-based electric vehicles beginning with the 2024 Chevrolet Blazer EV.

One of the dumbest own goals in recent memory. Tesla gets away with not supporting CarPlay because they created their own system that’s so good that many Tesla owners prefer it, or, at least find it good enough as an alternative. GM tried to replace CarPlay with a system that no one liked.

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

Marques Brownlee’s iPhone 18 Pro Review

John Gruber
Updated

He takes the same “this is pretty much exactly what Apple used to label an ‘S’ year” angle I did, so, unsurprisingly, I think his review is spot-on. Brownlee emphasizes one point that I should have, but didn’t: according to Apple’s published specs, the regular iPhone 18 Pro gets longer battery life than the iPhone 17 Pro Max. That’s just a year-over-year spec that anyone can understand, for an attribute that everyone cares about.

Sidenote, per that point: Brownlee wonders why Apple still refuses to publish the capacities of iPhone batteries in mAh. We eventually find out when people take new iPhones apart, so why not publish the numbers? Brownlee only mentions batteries but I’ll point out that Apple still does the same thing with RAM. There is no spec on the tech specs page for any iPhone telling you how much RAM it has. In some ways this is a little silly, but the way Apple thinks about it is that they only publish specs that they think are useful for comparison. Storage is useful for comparison, so Apple dutifully publishes storage capacities. In fact that is the spec by which they price higher tiers. Battery life is useful for comparison, so Apple publishes that as a spec, based on multiple use cases. But mAh capacity of the battery, to Apple’s mind, isn’t useful for comparison. Not for comparison to Android phones, especially, and not even for comparison to other iPhone models. If they published a spec that says iPhone A has a 4,000 mAh battery and some Samsung phone has a 5,000 mAh battery, one could conclude that the Samsung phone “wins”. Obviously a bigger battery leads to longer battery life, but battery capacity alone doesn’t tell the battery life story for any device. The main reason that the year-over-year iPhone Pro battery life has improved so much that the regular iPhone 18 Pro gets longer battery life than the 17 Pro Max isn’t related to battery size — it’s the increased efficiency of the A20 Pro SoC (and perhaps secondarily the improved thermal system). Same thing for RAM. To Apple’s mind, iPhones perform much better with less physical RAM than Android phones do, so they don’t think RAM-vs.-RAM is a useful comparison. In fact, they think looking at RAM would be misleading. So they don’t publish it. They know that those of us who care are going to learn how much RAM is in these phones (12 GB, just like last year’s 17 Pro models), and how big the batteries are in mAh. But they’re only going to list the specs that they think are useful for comparison purposes.

 ★ 
Hacker News
Slashdot
Astronomy Picture of the Day

This shot captured an unexpected silhouette. Which is it? This shot captured an unexpected silhouette. Which is it?


Finance & economics

House prices survived the last interest-rate rise. Will they this time?

Supports that shored up the housing market when borrowing costs last rose are gone
The Aviationist
Letters from an American

September 19, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

On September 19, 1676, three hundred and fifty years ago today, Nathaniel Bacon and his followers burned Jamestown, the capital of the Virginia Colony. The destruction of the seat of government was the culmination of a year of conflict between Governor Sir William Berkeley and poor settlers in the colony. Fears of another such uprising in the future led Virginia lawmakers to make sure poor men would not make common cause, passing laws to divide them along racial lines.

The crisis had begun a year before, in the fall of 1675, when Thomas Mathew refused to pay members of the Doeg tribe what they believed they were owed for goods they had sold him. They raided his farm on the Northern Neck of Virginia, taking some of his pigs. A number of Doegs were killed in the skirmish.

The Virginia militia retaliated for the raid but mistakenly fell on a village of Susquehannocks, who were actually allied with the Virginia government. Blindsided and furious, the Susquehannocks began to raid local farms.

The raids set a smoldering power struggle within the colony ablaze.

Since the colony’s beginning in 1607, both English custom and the drive to produce cash crops had created a clear line between men who had land and power and those who worked for them. Horrific death rates made those men who had paid for the passage of workers from England to North America drive them hard to get as much labor out of them as possible before they died.

After the arrival of Africans to the colony in 1619, those enslaved people joined indentured white workers to make common cause against their “masters.” They worked and socialized together and, according to advertisements and court cases, ran away, committed crimes, and had children together.

They also suffered similar punishments when they ran afoul of the law. And those few who lived past the deadly early years of their servitude shared similar access to the benefits of freedom, although slaves could not simply outlive their contracts but had to buy their way out of bondage with money they earned in their spare time.

At first, so many poor Virginians died in the colony that the few who survived posed little threat to their former masters. But by the 1660s, the survivors had grown into a large population of poor men, white and Black both, who were free but could not afford prime land in the eastern part of the colony, so they migrated to the western frontier hoping to become farmers.

There, these settlers thoroughly resented the eastern government that seemed to ignore their interests. In 1675 they saw the increased fighting with the local tribes as an opportunity to weaken those tribes and take their lands.

But Governor Berkeley disagreed. He wanted to avoid an expensive war and he wanted to honor a 1646 treaty under which allied tribes paid an annual tribute to the colonial government and fought alongside the English against tribes that didn’t have such an agreement.

Nathaniel Bacon had arrived in the colony in 1674. He was well connected and wealthy—he was actually related to Berkeley by marriage—but was frustrated that Berkeley wasn’t following his advice. Bacon began to speak for the angry westerners and by spring 1676 had welded them into a powerful coalition that was attacking local Indigenous tribes without the government’s blessing. Finally, Berkeley declared Bacon a rebel.

Under Bacon, vagrants and poor farmers, including former slaves and servants, went to war against the Pamunkey tribe and the Indigenous tribes who lived around them. And then they marched on Jamestown. On July 30, 1676, Bacon issued the Declaration of the People of Virginia, complaining that the governor had raised taxes too high, was corrupt, had put his own “ignorant” judges in place, and had failed to protect settlers against Indigenous Americans. He included a list of Berkeley supporters he called “Confederates, aiders, and assisters” of Berkeley’s perfidy. Bacon ordered them all to surrender to him within four days and declared that he and his men intended to confiscate their estates.

In a dramatic affront to the colonial system in which leaders held their positions by virtue of the Crown, Bacon signed his name “Nathaniel Bacon, Generall by Consent of the people.”

Bacon’s men held control of Jamestown from July through September before Berkeley’s forces forced them to retreat. Berkeley’s men abandoned the town when Bacon’s men tried to recapture it. Aware that more of the governor’s men were on their way, Bacon’s forces burned the town down on September 19.

On October 26, Bacon died from dysentery, the “Bloodie Flux,” and the rebellion fell apart. But the crisis had left the colony in ruin with its people dead or wounded, farms plundered or burned, crops ruined from lack of care.

In the wake of Bacon’s Rebellion, Virginia’s wealthy elite set out to preserve their control over the colony. They pushed Indigenous Americans off their land and enslaved those who fought back. From 1670 to 1715, colonists enslaved between 30,000 and 50,000 Indigenous Americans. Entire tribes disappeared, and white farmers moved onto their lands.

And the elites set out to drive wedges between Black slaves and white servants, establishing greater punishments for Black Virginians. In 1705 the Virginia Slave Codes pulled all those regulations together and went further. They prohibited Black Americans from owning cattle, hogs, or horses. They made it legal to kill an enslaved Virginian in the process of “correcting” them. And they made enslavement hereditary.

At the same time, they gave white servants new legal rights and limited the length of white indentures. The assembly passed laws requiring masters to provide white servants with food and clothing, as well as money to set themselves up after they earned their freedom. This, combined with a booming tobacco market, enabled more white men to buy land. The assembly also reduced the poll taxes for voting, making it easier for poor white men to vote.

And they made it costly for white and Black Virginians to socialize. Any white person attempting to marry across race lines would be fined and sent to jail, and the minister performing such a marriage would be fined the astonishing price of ten thousand pounds of tobacco. White servant women who had mixed-race children had to either pay a whopping fine or have their term of service extended for five years. And the child would be a slave until they turned thirty-one.

As leaders bound Black Americans more tightly into slavery, they courted white Virginians into joining the cultural and social world from which they had previously been excluded. Wealthier Virginians reached out to their less-prosperous neighbors, rubbing elbows with poorer white men in taverns and welcoming them into their imposing homes to emphasize that they were all friends.

Indeed, the needs of poor white landowners were not all that different from those of wealthier planters, and it was easy to believe that all Virginia voters had the same interests. They understood what it meant to be under the thumb of a tyrant, for they saw enslaved people and their enslavers all around them. They believed that owning land made a man independent, for that was their experience. And, unlike the royal officials who used their offices to enrich their friends, Virginia voters could argue that they had the best interests of the country at heart. They were free and independent.

They were, one might say, created equal.

—

Notes:

For more information about Jamestown, check out the work of my friends at

https://historicjamestowne.org/

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Declaration_of_the_People_of_Virginia

https://www.jyfmuseums.org/learn/research-and-collections/essays/a-history-of-bacons-rebellion-in-six-sources

https://www.nps.gov/jame/learn/historyculture/bacons-rebellion.htm

https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/bacons-rebellion-1676-1677/

Share

Market Design

Market Design Impact Award to Yan Chen

Al Roth
Updated

 Here's the announcement from INFORMS:

Announcing the Winner of 2026 Market Design Impact Award

 "The Auctions and Market Design section of INFORMS is pleased to announce that Yan Chen, Daniel Kahneman Collegiate Professor of Information at the University of Michigan School of Information, has been selected as the recipient of the 2026 Market Design Impact Award. The award will be presented at the AMD Business Meeting at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in San Francisco, tentatively scheduled for Monday, November 2, 6:45–7:45 PM.

Award citation:
"For pioneering behavioral market design-combining theory, digital experiments, and large-scale field experiments-with lasting impact on the practice of market design, including the reform of Chinese college admissions, the organization of gig workers on ride-sharing platforms, and the design of recommender systems that increase contributions to digital public goods."

Now in its second year, the Market Design Impact Award recognizes major contributions to market design-original research from the past fifteen years that has had a lasting impact, directly or indirectly, on the field and/or the practice of market design.

Award Committee:
Eric Budish, The University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Tim Roughgarden, Columbia University
Nicolas Stier, Meta

Conflicts of interest were carefully handled such that they would not influence the committee decision. "

#########

Here's last year's (inaugural) award:

Friday, October 31, 2025 Market Design Impact Award to Hassidim, Romm, and Shorrer

 

Los Angeles Angels – MLB Trade Rumors
Daring Fireball

WorkOS: How SSO Works and the Fastest Way to Add It

John Gruber
Updated

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring this last week — a big week — at DF.

SSO is table stakes for enterprise deals, but building it into your app yourself means writing SAML controllers, parsing XML assertions, and handling IdP-specific quirks for each provider. Learn how SAML flows work, the tradeoffs between building or buying, and best practices for security, routing, and UX.

Or, skip the hassle and add SSO with WorkOS. Read their developer’s guide to learn more.

 ★