Decoding Ediacaran fossils
Ancient specimens reveal how animals began to move half a billion years ago – and even the first known example of ‘handedness’
- by Aeon Video
Ancient specimens reveal how animals began to move half a billion years ago – and even the first known example of ‘handedness’
- by Aeon Video
Release: llm-gemini 0.36
Gemini 4 Carbon was announced two weeks ago for "a subset of cyber defenders", but today it's available to everyone else.
This is Google's best ever Gemini, priced at $2/million input and $10/million output at launch (that's GPT-6.1 Sol / Claude Sonnet 5.5 prices) but scheduled to double in price to $4/$20 on December 1st (same as Opus 5.5).
Here are three pelicans for the low, medium and high thinking efforts (it defaults to medium). This is the pelican I got for high:
Gemini pelicans have all been great for a while now, so I also tested it out using Google's Antigravity IDE with a prompt I first tried with Claude Fable 5.2 yesterday:
Make a three js animation where yonkers stands up as a big mech (cool stand up motion) and stomps around manhattan and queens and Brooklyn, use openstreetmap mapping data
Here's the HTML result (I had to prompt "build that into a standalone HTML file" to get a version with no external dependencies). I then screen-captured that as a video:
Update: Huh, just saw this on YouTube (and tweeted by Sundar Pichai):
Using Google Antigravity’s /swarm feature, Carbon built an open-world 3D game where you explore Google’s Mountain View campus as a pelican riding a GBike — coordinating subagents to model 3D assets in Blender from Omni and Nano Banana references, build the browser game in Three.js with WebGL shaders, and pair procedural Web Audio sound effects with Lyria music.
Here's the playable version in AI Studio.
Tags: llm-release, gemini, llm, google, generative-ai, ai, llms, pelican-riding-a-bicycle
My last post was about how for the first time, I’m becoming bearish on China’s continued economic and technological outperformance. A number of people asked me whether I was similarly bearish about India. The answer is no — I’m actually more bullish on India than I have been in a while. In fact, I had been meaning to write a post about that, so this gives me a good opportunity to do so.
The reason I’m bullish on India and bearish on China is that we’re asking the two countries to do two different things. When we think of China’s future success, we think of whether it’ll eclipse the combined economies of the U.S. and its allies, seize the lead in artificial intelligence, reach Taiwan or Korea’s level of income, or dominate Asia. I’m increasingly skeptical about its ability to do all of those things. But India’s job right now is a lot simpler — it just has to escape poverty and become an upper middle income country. And this I think it can do.
In both GDP terms and in terms of the Human Development Index (which combines GDP with education and health), India is around where China was in the late 2000s.
It’s easy to forget, but in the 2000s, people still thought of China as a basically developing country — its cities choked with smog, its rural areas still mired in poverty, its economy driven by cheap labor and lax environmental protections, and so forth. The challenge now for India is to make the leap that China made in the 2010s — to build abundant high-quality roads, trains, housing, and energy, provide decent jobs and livelihoods to the majority of its people, and catch up to the frontier of technology.
A lot of people don’t seem to realize how good of a start India has made. For one thing, extreme poverty in India has mostly been conquered over the last two decades:
This is an incredible accomplishment — a full tenth of humanity saved from deprivation. And what’s remarkable is that — unlike China — India managed to do this incredible poverty reduction while also reducing inequality:
How did India manage this feat? The World Bank says that it was due to the two usual suspects — economic growth and redistribution:
Over the past decade, India has made remarkable progress in reducing poverty across both monetary and non-monetary dimensions, recording one of the fastest poverty declines in the world…This progress was mainly driven by strong consumption growth, rising employment, especially among women, and expanded social transfers, including food subsidies. [emphasis mine]
A strong welfare state is certainly important, but economic growth has to take the lion’s share of the credit here; without growth, there’s simply less of a pie to redistribute in the first place. And India’s growth has certainly been impressive. Ever since the pandemic, India has been growing faster than China:
Now, India isn’t growing as fast as China did when China was at $10,000 of per capita GDP. Back in the late 2000s and early 2010s, China was still growing at close to double-digit rates; it didn’t slow down to India’s current rate until 2014, at which point it was 40% richer than India is now. But 6.5% is still a very healthy growth rate — it represents almost a doubling of living standards every decade.
And Bloomberg expects Indian growth to accelerate even further, to 8% by the end of the decade. Neelkanth Mishra, the executive director of the World Bank, points out that because India’s recovery from the pandemic recession is still incomplete, there’s plenty of room for a growth acceleration.
You’d expect this kind of growth to transform every part of Indian society and culture, and this appears to be exactly what’s happening. Arjun Ramani has a great in-depth report from his travels across India, focusing on how economic development is changing life on the ground:
How is India producing this rapid growth? India is long past the point where you can tell a simple story about the country’s economic progress — manufacturing, finance, real estate, business services, IT, and a bunch of other sectors are all growing at once.
How is India managing to grow so fast? The Economist mostly credits liberalizing reforms and prudent macroeconomic policy:
A programme of fiscal consolidation has cut the budget deficit from 9.2% of gdp in fiscal 2021 (when it was bloated by pandemic spending) towards a target of 4.4% for fiscal 2026. Excluding interest payments, the deficit will be only around 0.9% of gdp…With inflation under control, interest rates have been cut by 1.25 percentage points over the past year…
The decline in inflation is not just limited to food, points out Sonal Varma of Nomura, a bank. Earlier reforms, such as the creation of a digital-payments infrastructure, which made prices more transparent, as well as the RBI’s shift to an inflation-targeting regime in 2016, have helped reduce inflation expectations and are now paying off. The RBI has also built up its stock of foreign-exchange reserves. A banking sector clean-up and reforms to the bankruptcy code have kept the financial system stable…
The longer term looks even more promising, thanks to a vigorous reform effort…A long-mooted cut in the number of labour codes, from 29 to four, was enacted in November. A cap of 74% on foreign direct investment in the insurance industry has been lifted. Nuclear power has been opened up to the private sector. Financial-market regulation has been overhauled…The states have also pursued reforms. Allowing women to work after dark, for instance, means textile and electronics factories can stay open later.
I have to say, I’m skeptical of this story. Fiscal probity is well and good, but India’s long-term borrowing rates haven’t come down all that much:
A stable financial system is very good, but it’s not clear how that automatically accelerates growth. And most of the real structural reform The Economist mentions is in the future. It’s possible for businesses’ expectations of structural reform to drive growth, but as the article mentions, domestic private-sector investment isn’t really driving the boom. FDI is sluggish too (or at least was until this year).
One bright spot is government investment, which has increased by a factor of four since before the pandemic, in spite of the country’s falling debt levels:
The Indian government has been on a tremendous infrastructure-building boom — correcting one of the country’s notorious chronic deficiencies. Highway spending has increased by a factor of five over the last decade. Central government railway spending has risen eightfold.
This is boosting growth in the short term, but in the long term it’ll make both manufacturing and consumption a lot easier in India. It’s also changing the physical look and feel of the country, much as China’s own modernization did in the 2000s and 2010s (if not as rapidly). India is now building its own bullet trains:
I recently saw an example of a Japanese man who declared that he was impressed by how clean and quiet Indian subways were, compared to Japanese ones!
Another important factor in India’s growth story — and another long-standing deficiency that’s now beginning to be corrected — is the growth in Indian manufacturing.
The old story of India’s economy is that it had “leapfrogged” manufacturing and gone straight to services — call centers, business process outsourcing, software outsourcing, and the like. That concealed a quiet disappointment that India hadn’t managed to get on the same industrialization bus that has carried so many other countries out of poverty. But India’s current growth is very broad-based — manufacturing is growing right alongside services. The Economist has some details:
Manufacturing output in August, the most recent figure available, was 9% higher than the year before, thanks in particular to surging production of cars and electronics…India’s rising manufacturing output…reflects its growing appeal as a place to make things. In dollar terms India’s electronics exports were up by 90% in August, year on year, with American-bound iPhones accounting for a large share of that.
Another encouraging sign is the breadth of India’s manufacturing growth. Whereas Bangladesh’s manufacturing boom last decade was powered mostly by the garment industry, India is making and exporting a bunch of different high-tech products:
The strength of India’s engineering exports lies partly in the diversity of its product segments. Automobiles remained the largest contributor in FY 2025–26, accounting for 21.9% of total engineering exports. Industrial machinery followed with an 18% share, while iron and steel products accounted for 16.9%…Electrical machinery contributed 12.5%, other engineering products 12.7%, and non-ferrous metals and products 11.6%.
And keep in mind, this is all in spite of China’s attempts to throttle Indian industrialization by denying them key technological exports and factory expertise. Competitive pressure from a more established economic power is not something China itself had to deal with, since the U.S. wholeheartedly supported China’s industrialization in the 1990s and 2000s.
Whether India’s growth boom can continue past the next couple of years is an open question. Private investment will have to rise, and probably FDI as well. India is also going to need to correct its bigger structural issues at some point — especially bad rural education, female underemployment, and incomplete urbanization.
But for now, India looks like a big economic success story — perhaps the brightest in the entire world right now. It’s less visible than China’s rapid rise two decades earlier, but it’ll be no less world-shaking when it happens. More people should be taking notice.
UK panel data, 1991-2019. Couples who support different parties separate more often. The effect is as strong as some other mismatches, like education. Disagreement over Brexit mattered even more than party preference.
Here is a longer Nikolaus Haufler thread on European fertility, with a variety of interesting observations about other countries.
The post UK fact of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Something went wrong with Substack, and this post seems to have gone out blank for many readers and isn’t on the app. Trying again.
Marketing note: I have a new ebook, Navigating the Chaos: Chronicles of Economic and Political Madness, which uses material from this Substack to construct a thematic narrative of the past two years and the issues that Democrats must now address to build an enduring progressive movement. Available from Amazon, Kobo, Bookshop, and Nook.
A few years ago my wife and I were driving in New Jersey, when she suddenly exclaimed, “What’s that incredibly ugly car?” It was her first sighting of a Cybertruck in the wild.
Now Tesla is finally pulling the plug on the vehicle, which one person quoted in a New York Times report describes as looking like a mechanical cockroach — an image one can’t unsee.
So what’s the big deal? Businesses make bum investments all the time. It’s true that the Cybertruck’s failure was spectacular — Dave Phillips, the author of the piece, who was clearly having fun, pointed out that it’s unfair to compare the Cybertruck to the Edsel, which had much bigger sales.
Beyond that, however, the Cybertruck was, as the article says, “a culture war on wheels.” The 7-year arc of the Cybertruck coincided with the transformation of Musk’s public image from that of a planet-friendly innovator to that of a racist, conspiracy-theorizing, African-children-killing oligarch. Once upon a time driving a Tesla was a way to signal that you were rich but environmentally conscious. But driving a Cybertruck became a signal of MAGA fealty.
Yet there is an even wider cultural context here. The Cybertruck was the physical embodiment of a dystopian ideology that has become dominant among billionaire tech bros — an ideology that draws heavily from cyberpunk novels and movies.
Wait, can fiction really have major political consequences? Of course it can. Fifteen years ago, you couldn’t really understand the behavior of many right-wing influencers until you realized how their thinking about the world was shaped by reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged in their youth. Well, today’s tech billionaires grew up reading William Gibson and watching Blade Runner. But rather than taking cyberpunk’s visions of dystopia as cautionary tales, they saw them as manifestos. And with the great power that flows from great wealth, they have been trying to turn their adolescent dreams into reality.
For those unfamiliar with the term, cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction usually set in a not-too-distant future that combines advanced technology with social collapse. Predatory corporations and artificial intelligences rule the world — challenged only by morally ambiguous hackers, who live mainly in the virtual world of what Gibson called cyberspace — while homeless people sleep in piles of trash.
On immediate reflection, the cyberpunk influence on the tech broligarchs is obvious and overwhelming. For example, Elon Musk wasn’t trying to design a mechanical cockroach; he was clearly trying to build a car that looked like the vehicles in Blade Runner. Mark Zuckerberg wasted $80 billion — 40 times what Musk wasted on the Cybertruck — trying to sell the world on his Metaverse, a virtual space modeled on Gibson’s cyberspace. He even changed the name of his company to promote the doomed venture. Should we be surprised that Zuckerberg’s wild spending spree on AI is running into serious headwinds and that even the WSJ believes that Meta is doubling down on loss-making AI bets?
Furthermore, the cyberpunk influence on tech bros goes beyond bad investments. It’s also crucial for understanding the seemingly bizarre public relations strategy of the AI frontier labs: “Our technology will lead either to mass unemployment or to the extinction of the human race. Now, invest in our IPO.” To some extent this is a way of hyping the potential of what they are selling. But it also, I believe, reflects the mindset of middle-aged guys who grew up on cyberpunk and believe that it truly predicts our inevitable future.
Crucially, while you or I might read Neuromancer or watch Blade Runner and shudder at their visions of the future, billionaire tech bros surely picture themselves living in that future not as unemployed and homeless, but as edgelords ruling the world. Technological dystopia may sound like a nightmare to most of us, but for the broligarchs — despite their occasional expressions of concern and mumbling about Universal Basic Income — it’s basically a dream, which they are trying to use their financial and political power to make come true.
But the public isn’t buying it — literally in the case of Cybertrucks and the Metaverse, figuratively in the form of overwhelming voter opposition to data centers and AI in general.
So, will public opposition be enough to stop the cyberpunking of America? Stay tuned.
MUSICAL CODA
Marketing note: I have a new ebook, Navigating the Chaos: Chronicles of Economic and Political Madness, which uses material from this Substack to construct a thematic narrative of the past two years and the issues that Democrats must now address to build an enduring progressive movement. Available from Amazon, Kobo, Bookshop, and Nook.
A few years ago my wife and I were driving in New Jersey, when she suddenly exclaimed, “What’s that incredibly ugly car?” It was her first sighting of a Cybertruck in the wild.
Now Tesla is finally pulling the plug on the vehicle, which one person quoted in a New York Times report describes as looking like a mechanical cockroach — an image one can’t unsee.
So what’s the big deal? Businesses make bum investments all the time. It’s true that the Cybertruck’s failure was spectacular — Dave Phillips, the author of the piece, who was clearly having fun, pointed out that it’s unfair to compare the Cybertruck to the Edsel, which had much bigger sales.
Beyond that, however, the Cybertruck was, as the article says, “a culture war on wheels.” The 7-year arc of the Cybertruck coincided with the transformation of Musk’s public image from that of a planet-friendly innovator to that of a racist, conspiracy-theorizing, African-children-killing oligarch. Once upon a time driving a Tesla was a way to signal that you were rich but environmentally conscious. But driving a Cybertruck became a signal of MAGA fealty.
Yet there is an even wider cultural context here. The Cybertruck was the physical embodiment of a dystopian ideology that has become dominant among billionaire tech bros — an ideology that draws heavily from cyberpunk novels and movies.
Wait, can fiction really have major political consequences? Of course it can. Fifteen years ago, you couldn’t really understand the behavior of many right-wing influencers until you realized how their thinking about the world was shaped by reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged in their youth. Well, today’s tech billionaires grew up reading William Gibson and watching Blade Runner. But rather than taking cyberpunk’s visions of dystopia as cautionary tales, they saw them as manifestos. And with the great power that flows from great wealth, they have been trying to turn their adolescent dreams into reality.
For those unfamiliar with the term, cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction usually set in a not-too-distant future that combines advanced technology with social collapse. Predatory corporations and artificial intelligences rule the world — challenged only by morally ambiguous hackers, who live mainly in the virtual world of what Gibson called cyberspace — while homeless people sleep in piles of trash.
On immediate reflection, the cyberpunk influence on the tech broligarchs is obvious and overwhelming. For example, Elon Musk wasn’t trying to design a mechanical cockroach; he was clearly trying to build a car that looked like the vehicles in Blade Runner. Mark Zuckerberg wasted $80 billion — 40 times what Musk wasted on the Cybertruck — trying to sell the world on his Metaverse, a virtual space modeled on Gibson’s cyberspace. He even changed the name of his company to promote the doomed venture. Should we be surprised that Zuckerberg’s wild spending spree on AI is running into serious headwinds and that even the WSJ believes that Meta is doubling down on loss-making AI bets?
Furthermore, the cyberpunk influence on tech bros goes beyond bad investments. It’s also crucial for understanding the seemingly bizarre public relations strategy of the AI frontier labs: “Our technology will lead either to mass unemployment or to the extinction of the human race. Now, invest in our IPO.” To some extent this is a way of hyping the potential of what they are selling. But it also, I believe, reflects the mindset of middle-aged guys who grew up on cyberpunk and believe that it truly predicts our inevitable future.
Crucially, while you or I might read Neuromancer or watch Blade Runner and shudder at their visions of the future, billionaire tech bros surely picture themselves living in that future not as unemployed and homeless, but as edgelords ruling the world. Technological dystopia may sound like a nightmare to most of us, but for the broligarchs — despite their occasional expressions of concern and mumbling about Universal Basic Income — it’s basically a dream, which they are trying to use their financial and political power to make come true.
But the public isn’t buying it — literally in the case of Cybertrucks and the Metaverse, figuratively in the form of overwhelming voter opposition to data centers and AI in general.
So, will public opposition be enough to stop the cyberpunking of America? Stay tuned.
MUSICAL CODA
That is the theme of my latest Free Press article, here is one excerpt:
It may look like merely the latest story of a wealthy, powerful man making an irresponsible decision. But below the surface, it is also a harbinger of the erosion of privacy today, as well as the acceleration of espionage and the increasing value of secrets. More time and resources are going to be devoted to uncovering secrets, with honeypotting only one part of a larger picture: more spying, more attempted honeypotting, more private surveillance, more attempts to record (and search, using AI) conversations, more hacks of phones and computers, and more attempts to use AI to figure out the details of people’s lives and plans. Life is going to feel much more cloak-and-dagger, especially for the wealthy and influential…
The wealthy and influential are likely to take ever-greater care to minimize public scrutiny, protect their digital privacy, prevent journalists from going through their trash, and travel incognito, and their language in (supposedly) private conversations will have to be more guarded as well. We now live in an era where NDAs for hookups and even dinner dates are a thing.
Worth a ponder, as in the pending world secrets will be more valuable than before. The super-wealthy and their companies can be decisive actors, there are more prediction markets than before, and AI is equalizing the value of high-quality but publicly available information.
The post Spying makes a comeback appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
My first memory of strategy computer games was at a friend's house, playing Civilization, circa 1998.
"I'm currently fighting a war with Greece."
"How is it going?"
"Well, I have gunpowder and they don't, so..."
In Civ, technology decides almost everything. A musketman beats a spearman nearly every time, no matter how many wonders stand behind the spearman.
Energy is the gunpowder of our Civilization. Europe seems to have forgotten that. If you want energy you have to build mines, wells, solar fields, battery factories, power plants, uranium enrichment plants. In short, energy is industrial policy.
This is addressed to the people in Berlin and Brussels who can change that. I want Europe to not die.
AI runs on electricity, but so does the rest of our industrial civilization.
Over the next decade AI will become a core input to science, industry, and defense. Countries that own the compute will develop and run the models on their own terms. Everyone else will rent them, on terms set somewhere else, and pay for the privilege of ceding their national sovereignty to minds and ideas that reflect other cultures and different, often competing, interests.
Europe has lived through a version of this already. In 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine and for all their stringent rhetoric, Europe continued to wire Russia $1b per day to avoid the icky inconvenience of developing fracking within its own borders. To this day, Russia can continue its lawless rampage on the frontiers of Europe and there's not a damn thing Brussels, or Berlin, can do about it.
In AI, the future, by which I mean 2027, will run on AI owned by private American labs, or 100% totally independent private Chinese communist labs that definitely don't have CCP commissars in their executive suite. The US does not typically invade its neighbors and it's possible China will leave Taiwan alone, but Europe's inability to participate in this latest, greatest, and perhaps final, industrial revolution, is mind boggling. I reserve the right to revise this paragraph if Mistral ships a frontier model.
The gap today is large. According to Bitkom, Germany, the largest data center market in Europe, has about 3.3 GW of IT load. The US had about 47 GW in 2025. Bitkom forecasts Europe as a whole at 37 GW in 2035 and the US at 160 GW. On that trajectory Europe ends the decade further behind than it started.
Berlin has set the right target. The national data center strategy adopted in March aims to double compute capacity by 2030 and at least quadruple AI compute, and to host at least one EU AI gigafactory, whatever that means.
In physical terms that means about 3 GW of new IT load, or roughly 21 TWh a year. AI capacity, about 15% of the German total in 2025, goes from about 0.45 GW to 1.8 GW.
That's about 4% of German electricity demand. Texas adds more generation than that in most years. A country with Germany's engineering base can do this, if it decides to act.
The other bills passed or proposed this year push the opposite way.
The EEG 2027 rewrite and the Netzpaket tie new wind and solar to the pace of grid expansion and shift curtailment costs onto generators. The nuclear shutdown has been declared irreversible, even as dozens of US startups are designing and commissioning new reactors and Brazil is developing nuclear submarines. New firm capacity means gas plants burning gas imported as LNG from the US, where consumers will have to bid against the superior buying power and superior strategic positions of both US domestic consumers and east Asian demand growth. In other words, not a great position to be in!
By Q3 2025 Germany's four transmission grid operators (50Hertz, Amprion, TenneT, TransnetBW) held 717 connection requests totaling about 270 GW, against a national peak load of around 80 GW. At the current rate of German natural gas power expansion, 270 GW will be built by the year 2475! This isn't some third world country at the back of the queue begging for turbine allocation. Germany co-invented the jet engine and has multiple domestic turbine factories!
On the demand side, the Energy Efficiency Act amendment moves the 100% renewable deadline for data centers from 2027 to 2030 and loosens the Power Usage Effectiveness limits. That helps operators on paper, but it adds no generation and no connections. It's still an unfunded mandate that adds additional marginal constraints to a power construction sector already paralyzed by regulatory inertia and capital scarcity.
Normatively, Germany is desperate for additional power supply, without which its industrial economy grinds to a halt, closing plants, shedding jobs, and undermining the fiscal core of the entire European bloc.
Descriptively, Germany is creating additional constraints on deployment, demanding additional concessions from a previously powerful industrial base that's already dead in the water, closing nuclear plants, banning innovation, paying hundreds of billions in tribute to Russia, and acting surprised that each winter doesn't quite manage to finish it off entirely.
Germany's power situation is dire and requires a serious response. This means aggressive supply side interventions to loosen, or ideally delete entirely, entire tranches of regulatory clutter that prevent construction. Germany's solar construction effort is eclipsed by Pakistan, a country with GDP per capita 36x lower.
Let large loads bring their own power. A data center that builds its own solar, storage, or gas behind the meter shouldn't wait years for a permit or pay grid fees on electrons that never touch the grid. When I drafted this, Claude suggested we give Berlin a 12 month permitting deadline. Time kills deals. This is a decision that could be made over a cup of coffee. In terms of Germany's challenges, the decision has already been made. xAI, in its first time datacenter construction effort, stood up Colossus I in a few months, and Germany's acquisition process alone will take longer than that. We're all desperate to see some sign of life from the coma-stricken patient. If Germany doesn't get its act together in the next few weeks, why maintain hope?
Connect now, firm up later. Offer flexible connections that can be curtailed when the network is stressed, instead of making projects wait for guaranteed firm capacity. A training cluster can drop load on short notice. Very few other industrial customers can. Texas has been doing this for years. It's not rocket science.
Site by power. The EU gigafactory call already treats a high voltage connection as a gating criterion. Meanwhile US hyperscalers are building power plants in parking lots and generating value. Rank bids on gigawatts and time to power, not national quotas. Iberia has about twice Germany's solar resource and plenty of land, and the Nordics have hydro. European sovereignty doesn't require the GPUs to be in Hesse. At this point, just landing them anywhere in the bloc and turning them on would be a win.
Allow same-day permits for solar installation on agricultural land. Solar is an agricultural-style land use. Crops and solar are both inanimate quiet sun-absorbing entities. Provide 20 year waivers on food production or grazing, centralize a fund for removal of solar plants after 20 years if the waiver is not extended, and deploy. Spain is in a forever-drought, so exclusive agricultural zoning just takes its single greatest economic virtue (large tracts of cheap, dry, sunny, undeveloped, unpopulated land) and permanently quarantines it from providing economic salvation to the country and the bloc. Singapore is short of land, southern Europe is not!
Electricity is not a vice. Taxes, levies, and network charges are a large part of the German industrial price. Subsidizing that price back down for a few sectors treats the symptom. Cut the charges for everyone. Cheap electricity is the lifeblood of the economy. If we're going to mandate something, mandate over-production.
Keep every working firm megawatt. Don't close a functioning reactor anywhere in the EU. Europe has closed 18, UK 7, and Spain is still planning to close another 7! Why do I have to spell this out?
Don't mistake efficiency rules for a supply plan. Relaxing Power Usage Effectiveness limits is cargo culting. It feels like work, it feels directionally correct, but it's a distraction from the correct move: Deleting this requirement and another 1000 pages of regulations that are strangling the cradle of Western Civilization to death. Re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic is not a substitute for building.
Europe has everything else it needs. It has world-class engineers, ASML, regulated capital markets, sun in the south, wind in the north, and competent power grid operators. What's missing is a permission slip.
The timing is tight. Gigafactory applications close on 12 November, with selection in early 2027 and first facilities due in 2028. Frankly, this is nowhere near fast enough. By 2028, SpaceX will have put more compute into space. It's not that hard to build it right next to the autobahn.
If Europe doesn't build this capacity, it will still get built, in Texas, Virginia, and the Gulf. Europe will rent it, the way it bought Russian gas, and permanently cede what remains of its sovereignty to the US and/or China.
Berlin has to simply decide that Europe will not die on its watch.
The US military is taking a new approach to prop up commercial launch companies as SpaceX looks to wind down its Falcon rocket program, suggesting defense officials see the workhorse rocket's retirement as a potential national security risk.
The Pentagon's Office of Strategic Capital has twice in the last two weeks announced it was sending cash to two of SpaceX's competitors in the launch business. First, on October 26, the office announced a $150 million conditional loan commitment to Stoke Space. Military officials revealed a second $150 million Pentagon loan Tuesday for Rocket Lab.
Stoke Space and Rocket Lab are the first two launch companies to receive significant support from the Office of Strategic Capital (OSC), an organization established in 2022 to infuse companies developing "vital" national security technologies with capital. OSC has been on a loan spree in recent weeks, committing hundreds of millions of dollars to companies specializing in batteries, drones, and semiconductors. In the space sector, the office also provided a $150 million loan to LeoLabs, a commercial satellite tracking company, for production and deployment of radar units.
Over my (fairly brief) time covering local politics, there were few candidates—on paper, at least—who were worse than Linda Shepard.
The Capistrano Unified School Board aspirant was pretty much a nobody. Low name recognition, low visibility. I’m pretty deep into Capo Unified, and six months (or so) ago I’d never heard of Linda Shepard.
There’s also the matter of her social media game—which is brutally, brutally, brutally bad. As you read this, Linda has 68 Instagram followers. Sixty. Eight. For comparison’s sake, there’s an IG account for dogs pooping in pretty places that boasts a following of nearly 400,000 peeps [That being said, excreting animals are far more sparkly and dazzling than the dull, pedestrian, plodding Shepard].
Lastly, a fleet of Republicans who endorsed Linda Shepard went to social media and literally misspelled her name. Time and time again …
But here’s the thing, if we’re gonna be real: Linda Shepard knocked on doors.
Lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of doors.
I heard this from multiple people throughout election season. Linda in the heat. Linda in the cold. Linda in the rain. Was Linda Shepard exciting? No. Innovative? No. Is she someone who will meekly go along with Linda Davis and Jennifer Adnams and the nut brigade? Yes. But did she knock and knock and knock on the doors of her district?
She certainly did.
And, honestly, you can dislike a candidate and respect some grit. All politics, ultimately, are local, and while signs work and mailers work, nothing beats a face-to-face introduction and handshake. Those things stick with voters. They matter. “I met Linda, and. …”
So, props to Linda Shepard.
I wanted her to lose. But she won.
She walked a lot.
I first observed Dr. Paula Swift on July 30, 2025. We were both at the Norman P. Murray Community Center in Mission Viejo, attending an event for Democratic candidates running for the CA-40 congressional slot.
I was new to this website; Paula was one of a large handful of people trying to land a spot in public office. These were the quaint and innocent days of Perry Meade and Christina Gagnier; of a seemingly sane Esther Kim Varet and a polite Joe Kerr and—across the board—no knowledge of the redistricting madness that was on the horizon.
Each candidate had a chance to fluff their feathers, and of the newbie Swift I wrote: “There was one clear winner—Dr. Paula Swift, the CEO of her own consulting firm and a woman wise/savvy/smart/keen enough to offer [a bowl of candy] to the masses. As a sucker for candy (literally any candy), I feel compelled to not only throw my full backing behind Swift, but volunteer the pages of this website in return for her entire stash of sweets.”
Truth be told, however, Swift didn’t resonate with me. Or with the attendees I spoke with. She was friendly and engaging, but—in the shadows of the overly aggressive Varet and the perky Meade—reduced to the deepest shadows. A bunch of months later we met for coffee, and I wrote, “I don’t see an avenue for Paula Swift to win this election. Literally, it’s not there.”
And with that, I wrote Paula Swift off.
She was done.
Toast.
Burnt toast.
•••
Orrrrrrr … maybe not.
Shortly after our java, Paula stepped away from the CA-40 race and decided to gun for a slot in the State Assembly. And it seemed, well, silly. Trite. Insane. How would a woman who couldn’t paddle in the CA-40 waters manage to topple an incumbent Republican in the 70th district? How in God’s name would she beat the seemingly safe, normal, secure Tri Ta? How could this even be a thing?
Well, last night Tri Ta turned to Instagram to post this …
Paula Swift is a member-elect of the Assembly.
Being honest, I’m not 100-percent sure how this happened—but I’m thrilled it did. Maybe it’s just that type of election season, when wild and wacky stuff rolls in with the fog. Maybe Paula Swift was better suited for a slightly smaller race. Maybe candy was her superpower.
Whatever the case, Paula Swift is about to be spending a whole lot of time in Sacramento.
I’m thrilled for her.
•••
Some other random election thoughts, right after the Nov. 9 updates arrived …
• Ken Calvert has won the CA-40, and I’m filled with regret. In hindsight, we could have challenged for this. Not in normal times, perhaps, but certainly in 2026. But we (Democrats) got hijacked by Esther Kim Varet’s bullshit bling bluster, and never rallied behind a single candidate. A Lisa Ramirez-Ken Calvert race would have been interesting.
Alas, it didn’t happen …
• The Huntington Beach City Council race is … weird. As you read this, Republican incumbents Casey McKeon, Pat Burns and Andrew Gruel seem likely to retain their spots. But the fourth slot is a barn burner between three Democrats (Ben Davis, Erin Spivey and Taryn Palumbo) and a profoundly douchey Republican, Brian Thienes.
The council is, at the moment, entirely MAGA Republicans, so even a single Democrat would be a great boost.
• The Chris Kluwe-Gracey Van Der Mark race is agonizingly tight. Gracey is insane, but it remains highly conservative turf. So … let’s hope for the best.
• I live in the Capistrano Unified School District, and shit is depressing.
We all knew Mandy would likely win, but Caldwell-Carralero is waaaay too tight—especially considering Marco’s status as a carpetbagging gun zealot.
The one that shocked me the most, though, is Shepard-Ruef. I genuinely thought Ron would pull it out, especially when I scrolled Linda’s IG feed and found her to be doddering and flat, like a 1979 tweed sweater. That said, she walked and walked and walked and knocked on doors and knocked on doors and knocked on more doors.
So, hey—elbow grease. It’s a thing.
• Connor Traut and Katrina Foley will likely hold on in their Supervisor races—but they are a bit closer than I expected …
• Cynthia Vasquez is about to lose (handily) to a tomato can named Bryan Zahn in a fight for Mission Viejo City Council—and it sucks. Cynthia was the one wise progressive voice, and her asshole colleague did everything to make her life miserable. Sometimes the bad guys win.
It is what it is.
PS: Just for kicks …
Let’s take a night of rest.
I’ll see you tomorrow.
Up and to the office, where we sat till noon, and then to the Exchange, where spoke with several and had my head casting about how to get a penny and I hope I shall, and then home, and there Mr. Moore by appointment dined with me, and after dinner all the afternoon till night drawing a bond and release against to-morrow for T. Trice, and I to come to a conclusion in which I proceed with great fear and jealousy, knowing him to be a rogue and one that I fear has at this time got too great a hank —[hold]— over me by the neglect of my lawyers.
But among other things I am come to an end with Mr. Moore for a 32l., a good while lying in my hand of my Lord Privy Seal’s which he for the odd 7l. do give me a bond to secure me against, and so I got 25l. clear.
Then, he being gone, to the office and there late setting down yesterday’s remarkable discourses, and so home and to supper, late, and to bed.
The Queene, I hear, is now very well again, and that she hath bespoke herself a new gowne.
Links for you. Science:
LLM Book (excellent explainer of LLMs)
Her Death From Dengue May Signal That the Disease Is Here to Stay
SlopShape: Identifying AI-Generated Commercial Web Content
Ecology and spread of the North American H5N1 epizootic
The Arms Race Between Bacteria and Their Viruses: Update on Phage Countermeasures Against Bacterial Defence Systems
Mutation and Recombination Rates in Free-Ranging Polar Bears
The flu strain driving this season’s unusually early spread
Other:
The reddest House seat Dems are poised to flip is TN-4, where Victoria Broderick, a progressive who backs Medicare for All and is openly pro-trans rights, leads. Trump won it by 24. She ran on a shoestring budget with no party support. Here are other Democrats who flipped deep-red seats.
The Much Maligned “Groups” Are the Reason Democrats Won the Midterms
Affordability or Accountability? Dear God, Democrats. Do Both—and More
Total System Failure: U.S. Government Networks Will Need To Be Torched And Rebuilt
Trump Has a Secret Plan to Evade Accountability. Will Dems Defeat It?
Major media outlets sanitize Stephen Miller’s white nationalist ideas
Don’t Let Trump Up Off The Ground. Democrats are already reverting to the approach that has let Trump escape in the past: treating accountability as a sideshow, even hoping to cut deals with him.
The Trolls’ Comeuppance: How the attention economy turned on Republicans
What Won the Democrats the Midterms?
Understanding the Grand Theory of Trumpism
White House Network Possibly Exposed to Hackers Via Proxy Services (more details here)
Honey Pot Huang
Commerce Dept. Chip Inquiry Was Halted After Nvidia Intervention
Ahmed Moor, a Gaza-born Philadelphian, is John Fetterman’s first 2028 challenger
Silicon Valley and Trump rally behind Nvidia CEO after his affair with alleged Chinese spy
Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries Are Not Meeting the Moment
The tortured pollsters department: I said regularly that I thought polls were underestimating Democrats. They did. Here’s why I had my doubts.
Palantir hires a former Democratic senator as it faces scrutiny in new Congress
Mar-a-Lago Face Won’t Save You
Utah gambling crackdown continues as prediction markets halt operations in the state
Immigrants Are Being Systematically Returned Home Despite Court Orders
He Ran on Fighting Data Centers. Now, He’s Going to Congress
Inside the Operation That Helped Ukraine Turn the Tables
A Stunning Rebuke Of Anti-Trans Politics: Republicans Spent $200 Million Attacking Trans People And Lost Everything
540-Plus Seats Flipped, 6 New Trifectas: Dem Wins At The State Level Keep Piling Up
The Honeypot That Might End the AI Boom
D.C. developers weigh in on Janeese Lewis George’s housing promises
DC Votes to Ban Foie Gras. Now What?
Metro weighs higher fares and service cuts amid rising costs
What the 2026 Exit Polls Signal for Democratic Investigations in Congress
There should be no doubt about the importance of massive Black voter turnout in the South in the 2026 election (boldface mine):
We can use this chart to estimate the voter turnout rate both for Black voters and for other voters in the South. According to Strength In Numbers’ estimates, Black voters turned out at about 96% of presidential-year levels in the Deep South, compared to about 71% for white and other voters…
This has contributed not just to a possible — perhaps even likely — Senate victory in Mississippi, but to Democrats doing well across the South. Democrat Annie Andrews beat (appointed) South Carolina Sen. Darline Graham by about 4.5 points, 51.3% to 46.8%, in a state Trump carried by 18 points just two years ago.
Without the surge in Black voter turnout, Andrews would have won by under a point.
Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures was able to hold on to his seat in Alabama’s 2nd Congressional District this year, despite GOP lawmakers diluting the Black vote after the Supreme Court gave their blessing to Republicans to gerrymander Black voters and Democrats in Louisiana v. Callais in April.
In 2024, under a court-drawn map, Alabama’s 2nd District was 48.7% Black by voting-age population. Figures won it with 54.6% of the vote. For 2026, Republicans cut the district’s Black voting-age population to 39.9%.
Yet Figures still won 53.8% of the vote. Because of a relative increase in Black participation, Republicans cut the district’s Black voting-age population by nearly 9 points, but Figures’ vote share fell by less than 1 point.
It is inspiring to see this, but at the same time, should lead to some caution about claims about the death knell of the Republican Party. There is no way that a similar gap will occur in 2028, which is a presidential election year. There still might be a gap, but it will be narrower, and that can make all the difference. In Mississippi, the NY Times estimated that, in 2024, the Black vote was thirty percent of the electorate, while in 2024, it was 33%. For Senator-Elect Colom, that’s the entire difference between winning and losing.
That said, it’s quite possible that the South settles into a pattern similar to that seen in Virginia ten to fifteen years ago, where parties succeed or fail based on whether the election is an off-year election or not. This would a marked improvement over Republican dominance, but it’s not a death knell for Republicans. But taking victories where we can get them is still a good thing and worth doing.
Aside: The real question remains if white evangelicals will either be less likely to vote Republican or if they vote less often. I’m assuming neither of those things happens over the long term.
Fred Lambert, writing for Electrek:
Tesla painted a very different picture just two years ago. At its 2024 shareholder meeting, it showed this slide of its lineup: the Model 3, Model Y, Model S, Model X, Cybertruck, and Semi, plus three vehicles under covers that Musk said were “going to be pretty special.” Of the five consumer vehicles on that slide, three are now dead or on their way out. [...]
At Tesla’s Investor Day at Giga Texas on March 1, 2023, Musk mostly stayed out of the spotlight. Instead, Tesla paraded more than a dozen executives on stage to present its plans, a rare move for a company long criticized for being a one-man show. “We’ve obviously got significant bench strength here,” Musk said at the time.
Of the 14 executives named as presenters that day, seven are gone.
It’s kind of weird for a carmaker that’s currently the 11th-largest market cap company in the world to only have two vehicles in production.
SAN DIEGO, CA, November 10, 2026 – Kratos Defense & Security Solutions, Inc., a technology company in defense, national security, and global markets, today announced a long-term agreement with Seagate […]
The post Kratos and Seagate Space Partner to Advance Mobile Offshore Launch Capabilities for National Security Missions appeared first on SpaceNews.
Two NASA smallsats are headed toward Mars after completing flybys of Earth nearly a year after their launch.
The post ESCAPADE on its way to Mars after Earth flybys appeared first on SpaceNews.
Maybe so:
We study the statistical credibility of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in development economics and the optimal allocation of resources to replication. Using 745 principal-hypothesis tests from 190 articles in leading economics journals, we find that actual t-statistics peak well below the theoretical benchmark of 2.8 expected under 80 percent power, though above values associated with p-hacking. This suggests many RCTs are underpowered. Estimating an empirical Bayes mixture model that accounts for selective publication, we find that approximately 30 percent of published rejections are false discoveries, with average directional power at only 40 percent. At conventional significance thresholds, the posterior probability of a false discovery reaches 66 percent. Doubling original sample sizes lowers the average false discovery rate by five percentage points, whereas tightening the significance threshold to 0.005 yields a larger reduction at the cost of total discoveries. Finally, we characterize a funder’s optimal replication policy under a fixed budget and an evidence standard. Under standard regularity conditions, replications concentrate in an intermediate interval of original test statistics, and the optimal replication sample size is single-peaked in the original t-statistic. Illustrative calibrations show that successful replications reduce aggregate false discovery rates to 1.8–7.8 percent, depending on the evidence standard.
That is from a new paper by
The post Are RCTs underpowered? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Ana Swanson and Devlin Barrett, reporting yesterday for The New York Times (gift link):
Investigators at the Commerce Department were deep into a monthslong investigation of a Singaporean company that they suspected of smuggling Nvidia’s artificial intelligence chips into China when their work came to a sudden halt late last year. The investigation centered on Megaspeed, a data center company led by an executive who U.S. officials now believe to be a Chinese spy who had a relationship with Nvidia’s chief executive, Jensen Huang.
But the case was abruptly transferred to the Justice Department last year. The shift came after Commerce Department investigators working on the case received an email from Nvidia’s general counsel seeking information about the inquiry into Megaspeed.
It is not necessarily unusual for Commerce Department agents working on a case to speak with a company’s representatives about issues involving their firm. But what was unusual was the content of the message. Tim Teter, Nvidia’s general counsel, said that Jeff Kessler, a top official at the department, had given Nvidia permission to reach out about the case.
The agents were alarmed that Nvidia had invoked the name of Mr. Kessler, their superior, who was nominated to his role by President Trump. Some viewed Mr. Kessler’s interaction with Nvidia as violating government procedure and potentially tainting the case, according to current and former government officials and others familiar with the incident.
“Nice job you have there. Be a shame if something happened to it.”
If this is as abjectly corrupt as it sounds, it seems indefensible — and Congressional oversight investigations are now inevitable with both the House and Senate in Democratic hands. This isn’t just pocket-stuffing corruption — it’s a national security issue.
An agent’s job isn’t known until it runs, so a role assigned in advance is always too much or too little. Give the agent a task instead, and every call it makes gets checked against that intent, whether it’s reading a Linear issue or emailing a distribution list.
With WorkOS Airlock, you set the policies once. Each call is allowed, denied, or sent to a human for approval, and every verdict is logged.
Mackenzie Hawkins, Andy Lin, and Kari Soo Lindberg, reporting for Bloomberg last year on December 22 (Archive.today link):
In an industry run by titans, a Singapore AI firm called Megaspeed International Pte. is drawing an unusual amount of attention. In less than three years, the once-obscure spinoff of a Chinese gaming enterprise has evolved into the single largest Southeast Asian buyer of Nvidia Corp. chips — a rapid ascent that’s lifted hopes for a regional champion in the lucrative business of AI cloud computing.
Now Megaspeed finds itself a focal point of Washington’s long-held fears about semiconductor smuggling into China, an issue of escalating concern among national security hawks despite Nvidia’s repeated assurances that chip diversion doesn’t exist. [...]
Nvidia, which conducts regular spot-checks of data centers around the world, told Bloomberg that it went to Megaspeed’s facilities multiple times to verify that there’s nothing untoward. “Our visits confirmed that the GPUs shipped to Megaspeed by our partners are where they are supposed to be,” an Nvidia spokesperson said in mid-November.
It turns out these inspections were rather intimately thorough, conducted firsthand by Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang. Nothing untoward indeed.
One of several questions I have: When did Jensen Huang break off the relationship with Alice Huang? I get the impression that the affair was still ongoing at least as recently as May, when the whole weird thing happened with Huang being invited to join Trump’s envoy to Beijing mid-flight. It’s possible the affair was still ongoing until this weekend.
But how can Jensen Huang defend continuing the affair even after Bloomberg was reporting the above last December?
Culper Research is a short-seller that published a report (PDF and in a thread on X) in May alleging that Nvidia “had a China problem”. From the start of its report:
Nvidia claims that its business in China went to “zero” after April 2025 U.S. trade restrictions. We believe that in reality, over 20% of Nvidia’s FY 2026 compute revenues remained driven by China — supported both by illegal GPU diversion and Southeast Asian intermediaries.
Nvidia has repeatedly vouched for Megaspeed — its single largest Southeast Asian chip buyer currently under investigation by both U.S. Commerce and Singapore authorities — as “wholly owned and operated by a company based and headquartered outside China, with no China shareholders.” Nvidia has also claimed that it has “repeatedly tested and sampled data centers around the world and found no diversion.” Documents we uncovered, however, suggest that Megaspeed has been secretly financed by Alibaba via a series of apparent shell companies. Tellingly, Nvidia’s lawyered phrasing — that Megaspeed holds no Chinese equity — doesn’t seem to preclude Chinese financing.
From Culper’s report on X (replete with another photo of Huang and Huang alongside each other at a festive occasion):
$NVDA CEO Huang has walked alongside Megaspeed at every step, and seems to have a close relationship with Megaspeed’s Alice Huang. They partied together in June 2024 — same month as the Apex/Alibaba pledge, then dined together in May 2025 — just after U.S. trade restrictions.
Per a current Megaspeed employee, “every single time” $NVDA’s CEO visits their facility, Alibaba reps come too. One former $NVDA employee told us that internally, Nvidia employees speculated as to the seemingly special nature of the relationship with Jensen.
The jig was clearly up back in May. Short-sellers were hinting at the affair, and the CIA obviously knew about it. That was the time for Jensen Huang to get on top of the story. At that point it was certain that the details were going to come out. The only question was if the details would come out on Huang’s terms or someone else’s.
Remember back in 2019 when the National Enquirer tried to blackmail Jeff Bezos, who at the time was having an affair with Lauren Sanchez (now his second wife), unbeknownst to MacKenzie Scott (now his ex-wife)? Huang should have done something more like what Bezos did: which was just come clean, publicly. Instead, Huang allowed Nvidia spokespeople and legal counsel to make fools of themselves lying on his behalf.
Steve Jobs to 60 Minutes in 2003: “Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people.”
(I linked to this just a few months ago, but thought it worth a re-link today.)
Steven Levy at Wired, in a terrific post-event follow-up to his exclusive early look at the new MacBook Pros (News+ link):
I first met Ternus in 2015, when I spent a day with him at Apple’s Input Design Lab, a testing facility in Cupertino. He’d risen to VP for Mac, iPad, Ecosystem, and Audio Engineering, and he struck me as affable and knowledgeable. (He spent four years right out of college at a virtual reality company, but he’s been at Apple ever since.) The peg to my story at the time was how this unknown manager conducted a Javert-like investigation to fix the weird sound a redesigned mouse made when sliding on a table.
That attention to detail was a legacy of Jobs’ perfectionism, which Tim Cook sustained as the next CEO. In the decade when Ternus overlapped with Jobs, he says he had only “a handful of interactions” with the founder. “But I’ve always felt like sort of a student of Steve’s teachings,” Ternus said. “And then being able to work very closely with Tim, I’ve been very lucky.” [...]
The extent to which Ternus is a deep Apple insider became clear when I probed him on his views on being a corporate leader. I asked him which non-Apple CEOs he admires, and he was stumped. “I haven’t really thought about that,” he said. I asked whether any business books had an impact on him. “Not really,” he said. “Of course I’ve read books, but there’s so much to be learned from the people I get to work with.” Indeed, every time I tried to pin down Ternus on what mark he wants to make at Apple, he deflected the question and told me how he will continue Apple’s commitment to internal collaboration.
My thanks to OurCal for sponsoring last week at DF. You ever have a discussion that starts with “I didn’t see you put that on the calendar”? Could be with your colleagues, could be with your family. But the problem is familiar: Shared calendars solved scheduling, not communication.
OurCal connects any calendar, new or existing, to a group chat. Changes post there automatically, so nobody misses them. Because it’s a messenger, they made everything end-to-end encrypted, certified by France’s cybersecurity agency.
OurCal is native SwiftUI across Apple’s platforms, and the App Store just featured it in “Great apps on iPhone Duo”. They’ve got an Android app too, but they’re an Apple-first company. It’s really well done. Even the app icon is chef’s kiss.
OurCal is free to try, then a low monthly group subscription. No ads, no tracking.
Nick Heer, Pixel Envy:
There are a whole bunch of features and fixes coming to Safari with Apple’s OS 27.3 update. One that is not in the beta release notes but appears nevertheless is support for Global Privacy Control. This new standard is effectively a replacement for Do Not Track with legal muscle that should permit you to indicate your tracking preference one time and then, theoretically, never again see a cookie consent banner.
Charlie Warzel, writing for The Atlantic (gift link):
It is curious, then, that, as news came out that the Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang, had had a romantic relationship with a Chinese businesswoman who was also an asset of Beijing’s Ministry of State Security, notable factions of Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C., seemed nonplussed. “Even incredible humans make mistakes,” Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge-fund manager, posted on X yesterday. “We should all support him and his family. Onward.” The venture capitalist Shaun Maguire offered a five-point analysis of Huang’s situation, noting that the CEO did something “incredibly dumb” and “bad for America,” but that “my guess is there was no bad intention.” He then argued, “I believe Jensen is irreplaceable for America’s AI leadership.” Elon Musk agreed. From there, the posts, written before we know all the facts of the scandal, got only more absurd, including defending Huang’s affair on the grounds that his kids are adults now. [...]
Huang’s thinking on issues such as AI doomerism (he’s anti-doom) and chip allocation in China (he’s for it — a position that warrants examining, given this weekend’s revelations) influences U.S. policy. This centrality is why one tech analyst on CNBC this morning implied that replacing Huang was a comical suggestion. Huang is a singular figure: the linchpin of the company that is arguably the linchpin of the American economy. Framed another way, Nvidia has much of the financial system in a hostage situation. Huang is too big to fail. Which may be why so many people seem motivated to downplay or protect him right now.
Elbert Hubbard: “The graveyards are full of people the world could not do without.”
The Times’ Maggie Haberman is currently appearing on CNN to discuss the Jensen Huang story. She confirms that, according to Times reporting, Trump was first briefed on Huang’s relationship with suspected Chinese spy Alice Huang (no relation) late last year. She said about this time last year. So the key details here have been known and seemingly ignored for a whole year.
It’s hard to know how seriously to take the Pete Hegseth impeachment vote in terms of its eventual outcome. Are we actually going to have a trial? Will he resign? Now outgoing Speaker Johnson says he may not send the impeachment article to the Senate? What stands out most is what’s not happening. There’s no real defense from the White House or anyone else in the GOP/MAGA sound machine. The White House posted a couple videos on social media. Obviously they’re on record saying they don’t support it. But that’s really about it. You can imagine the thermonuclear (maybe literally) response to anything like this at almost any point in the last two years. But now? The vibe here is something like “rough what happened to Pete. I guess not everyone makes it after a rough midterm like that.” Oh well …
Electronic Materials Office is the brainchild of Andrew Emerson. Back in 2023 he launched the Altar I, a rather distinctive mechanical keyboard. Much thinner than most, very opinionated in its industrial design and keycap typography. I got one and I don’t regret it, but there was too much I didn’t like about it, so it’s mostly sat in a drawer.
Today on Kickstarter Emerson/EMO has launched a campaign for the Altar II. Same cool aesthetic, but with improvements that address everything I didn’t like about the Altar I. The Altar II has all new switches. It’s so thin it resembles the profile of Apple’s Magic Keyboard from the side. The dial — now called the M-Dial — now attaches magnetically, which means it’s easy to detach for putting the keyboard into a bag. And it has new features that never even occurred to me, like NiteLite — backlighting from “a long-wavelength amber-red light that won’t affect your body’s circadian rhythm, meaning you can sleep better at night.” The sleep benefits might be voodoo but red lights are undeniably easier on your eyes at night, and it looks cool as shit. (My favorite feature of Apple Watch Ultra is “Night Mode” — a handful of watch faces that switch to all-red in the dark.)
I love that mechanical keyboards have come back into vogue, and that the market for them is thriving. But most of them annoy me. Often because they aren’t really keyboards — they’re design-your-own-keyboard kits. Kits are fun, but I want someone else to do the hard work of making all the design decisions. Don’t make me choose between half a dozen (or more!) types of switches. You’re the goddamn keyboard designer, you pick the switches. That’s my thinking. Altar II is that type of keyboard — one that has been properly and thoroughly designed for you. You just choose the key layout — US or UK. That’s it.
Another thing I don’t like about most mechanical keyboards — that also makes them feel like a hobby, not a finished product — is that they’re designed for cross-platform use. If they’re customizable via software, the software tends to be confusing and poorly made. Altar II is designed for the Mac and is going to come with a native Mac app for configuration. Fuckin’-A right.
I haven’t tried the Altar II yet because it’s only at the preproduction stage. That’s why it’s on Kickstarter. You can wait and see what I think of it next year. But if you jump on the Kickstarter now, there’s a first-48-hours early bird price that will save you $70. Retail price is going to be $350; for the remaining 40 hours or so, you can book one for just $280. After tomorrow, Kickstarter pricing goes up to $300.
Mackenzie Hawkins, reporting yesterday for Bloomberg:
Despite that stance, in the months after Teter’s initial call with Kessler, Nvidia gave BIS an incomplete account of its business with Megaspeed. After several visits to Megaspeed’s data centers — 12 facilities owned by eight companies across three countries in Southeast Asia — Nvidia had sent inventory checks to the agency and declared to Bloomberg News in mid-November 2025 that everything was where it should be.
The company also said at the time that it had asked the US government whether it needed to cut off business with Megaspeed, and was told no.
But Nvidia’s tabulations, as relayed to the US government, undercounted the number of chips it had sold to Megaspeed via hardware partners by 50,000 units, according to trade records analyzed by Bloomberg. That’s worth billions of dollars. After being pressed about the gap, Nvidia told Bloomberg in December 2025 that it had checked additional Megaspeed warehouses that contained the missing hardware, while declining to state exactly how many chips it found in those facilities or provide any further details.
With Jim Jordan elected GOP leader, let’s remember that Jordan is part of a longstanding coverup of sexual abuse of student athletes at Ohio State by Dr. Richard Strauss. The story got a lot of attention a few years ago and it briefly seemed possible that it might derail Jordan’s position in the House GOP caucus. But he stonewalled, refused to credibly address the allegations and eventually his colleagues and conservative media gave him a pass. He’s never come clean about any of it. As recently as last year there was a whole new documentary about it. Multiple ex-wrestlers and even a ref describe how Jordan knew about it, turned a blind eye and has been lying about it ever since. “To say that (Jordan) knew nothing, that nothing ever happened, it’s a flat out lie,” said former Ohio State Wrestler Dan Ritchie in the documentary. You’d think House Republicans would be stung enough by Donald Trump’s main character status in the Epstein Files. But memories are short. Jordan was never the caucus leader until now. Democrats need to be certain everyone knows that his colleagues know about his stonewalling and the coverup and are fine with it.
The Information is reporting (paywall) that regardless of what multiple investigations unearth about NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s affair with a suspected Chinese spy, the scandal is likely to spur Congress to impose tighter export controls on the advanced processors used in AI data centers. There’s been a big bipartisan push for this in Congress for a while but it’s largely been headed off by White House resistance. That resistance seems to center on Trump himself and the small coterie of Silicon Valley advisors who run AI policy at the White House. As I noted in this post, the argument for tight export controls seems pretty strong to me, certainly if we’re operating on the premise that U.S. superiority in AI development is a critical national security interest.
When I say “to me” I’m noting the fact that tech export control policy is way outside any area of expertise for me. So I’m leaving open the possibility that there are good arguments I’m not considering. But I’m at least skeptical. The Information article notes that NVIDIA’s arguments against tighter restrictions is that blocking China from using these advanced chips will drive them to develop their own advanced chips and that future export of those chips to other countries will mean a lot of global AI doesn’t run on U.S. hardware and standards. With the same caveat that I’m new to this topic, that at least sounds a lot more like an argument for defending NVIDIA’s global market share than safeguarding U.S. security interests.
One additional point on this which goes to assumptions and premises. We’re told that AI development poses severe — and at least to some people, existential — dangers to society, economy, maybe even the species. But a major argument against any slowdown on development is that slowing down AI development in the U.S. means risking that China will catch up to or surpass the U.S.
I don’t see how you can have this both ways.
If it’s such a big deal that we’re willing to run additional risks of major or catastrophic societal harms to stay on top, I don’t see how there can be any good argument against very tight export controls on the hardware that is the basis of a lot of that U.S. superiority. Am I missing something? Could be. But it seems hard to figure. And given the mix of cravenness and corruption that operates in this administration, Huang’s apparently very close relationship with Trump and the fact that administration resistance to export controls seems to come down from Trump himself … well, it all sounds pretty iffy to me.
When I say iffy I’m not suggesting that Huang himself is compromised in some way or under some foreign influence through this suspected Chinese spy. It’s just that NVIDIA’s commercial interests seem pretty obviously in tension with U.S. national security interests. Add to that that Trump is corrupt and an ingenuous moron when cash is involved and this all requires a much closer look.
2. Hayek for our time, by Cass Sunstein, free download for two weeks.
3. Works in Progress is looking for business and finance writers.
4. Matthew Lilley on Harvard grad students. I believe they teach the permanent income hypothesis there?
5. Ethan Mollick on Fable 5.2.
6. John Cochrane on Brazil finances.
The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
The last time I posted about Inanimate, I mentioned that we’re building devices:
WORKS: five limited-edition devices for your AI agent and you.
(Five?? Yes five.)
We call them Promptable Products.
You can make apps for them. You can buy them, if you want to be part of our alpha community as we continue to develop them. You can… well, we’ll get to that.
We’re showing them to the world for the first time next week.
So if you’d like to join us in Shoreditch, London on 19 November, please sign up on Luma.
The gang will all be there and we’ll bring along old protos and new merch.
lmk if you can’t make it and you’re press or at one of the frontier labs, we can sort out a private demo.
Hey these are the names of the WORKS 26 family:
Pioneer, Candle, Session, Tempo and Oracle.
More posts tagged: inanimate (8).
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It’s been a while since I posted here. If all goes well, this will be the last post via this WordPress blog that you are reading.
I am not done. I’ve hardly started. My debt, the backlogs of things I mean to write, of things I egotistically imagine might do a smidge of good in the world if I did write them, is very long. This has been a hard year for writing for me, but I hope that there is a bit more time.
This website, www.interfluidity.com is not going anywhere. It will, in some fashion, become my front page.
The sites where I “actively” blog now are drafts.interfluidity.com and tech.interfluidity.com. As you can see, “actively” deserves its scarequotes.
One of many, many projects I’ve flaked on is creating means by which readers can comment on those sites. I still mean to do that. I wish I could promise a timeframe. I have ideas, though.
If you are subscribed to this blog by e-mail, you’ll become subscribed to drafts instead, unless I hear otherwise from you. E-mails from drafts are instant to unsubscribe. One click, I promise.
Past post aren’t going anywhere. All permalinks will be preserved, along with as many other links as I can manage.
This blog began in 2006. Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play more recently. It’s not over, but it’s been a long strange trip. Thank you for accompanying me. Thank you for reading.
It’s a bad one, and it’s been in the code for a decade:
A newly disclosed flaw involving OpenSSH and musl, dubbed “*sshole,” allows attackers to log in to certain Alpine Linux and other musl-based Linux accounts configured to block password authentication simply by entering an oversized password.
“Oversized” means longer than 256 bytes. Details.
Here's a call for papers for the 21st Matching in Practice Workshop in Budapest in December.
21st Matching in Practice Workshop
December 14 @ 9:00 am - December 15 @ 3:00 pm
"The MiP Workshop is an annual meeting organized by the Matching in Practice network of European researchers working in the research field of Matching Theory and Market Design.
The event has no registration fee, but invitation is needed for attendance. Catering and dinner will be provided to all participants, but the travel and accommodation costs are only covered for the plenary speaker. The host organisation is the Institute of Operations and Decision Sciences, Corvinus University of Budapest.
The plenary talk will be given by Irene Lo (Stanford), and the roundtable discussion will be on school choice.
We call for submissions for 12 selected contributed talks. The deadline for submitting the papers is 12 November, sent in pdf format to peter.biro@uni-corvinus.hu (title: “MiP workshop submission”), decisions will be made on 13 November by the scientific committee. We especially welcome submissions on school choice or other two-sided matching market applications."
We checked the anonymous AI audit of Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman’s research that Marginal Revolution featured on 28 Oct: all 147 problems it calls serious enough to change a headline number, against the papers, their sources and the authors’ own data. The audit’s facts hold up: for 131 of the 147, every fact we could check was right, and none had its core facts wrong. 21 of the 147 change a headline number; 98 depend on a disputed choice of method; 20 change no number; 8 we could not check on that question. A second pass graded the 99 flags we first counted as depending on a disputed choice of method: 11 standard, 70 defensible, 11 questionable, 6 we could not grade, and 1 contested. It found one, No. 54, that does change a headline number, which is why the counts are now 21 and 98. Saez and Zucman were sent our findings on 29 Oct and did not reply by 6 Nov.
Here is the audit of the audit, open code and data, kudos to the authors. Here was the original AI audit. Here is the October 30 revision of that audit.
Addendum: And a revised version with less jargon.
The post Checking the AI audit of Saez and Zucman’s research. appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
For a long time, SpaceX has been synonymous with the development of newer, larger, and ever-more-reusable rockets. But that began to change over the last decade with the introduction of Starlink, and the change has accelerated during the last 18 months as the company has pivoted to data and artificial intelligence.
At last week's UP.Summit conference in Florida, the vice president of launch at SpaceX, Kiko Dontchev, offered some of the most revealing comments to date about the company's changing focus, how it is embracing AI, and why the Falcon 9 rocket—which has dominated global launch for a decade and remains the world's preeminent launch vehicle—is firmly on the road to retirement.
"In the last couple years, when I talk about SpaceX, yes, we are a rocket company, but fundamentally we are an infrastructure company at this point," Dontchev said. "We're building infrastructure on the ground and low Earth orbit, soon on the Moon, and obviously eventually Mars."
Roshi Joan Halifax is an original, generous, gritty and profound Buddhist teacher. How does she look back on her life?
- by Ben Daitz
Claude Fable 5.2 responds closely to what the prompt says about who owns the code it works on. In Anthropic’s testing on small coding tasks, when a prompt said nothing about ownership or presented the code base as someone else’s, the model tended to add to the existing structure, even when that repeated existing code. [...]
If you want the model to improve the structure as it works, say that the code is its own:
This codebase is yours: what it's for and how it's built are your call, and you'll keep building on it.In Anthropic’s testing on small coding tasks, the model merged repeated code in about half of the tries with this sentence, and in under a tenth of the tries without it.
— Prompting Claude Fable 5.2, Anthropic documentation
Tags: prompt-engineering, anthropic, generative-ai, ai, llms, claude-mythos-fable
Tool: Yonkers Rises
I realized I didn't know where Yonkers was, so I looked it up on Google Maps and then, to help embed its location and shape in my head (and to try out Claude Fable 5.2's 3D modeling and animation skills), I prompted Fable 5.2 Medium to:
Make a three js animation where yonkers stands up as a big mech (cool stand up motion) and átomos around manhattan and queens and Brooklyn, use openstreetmap mapping data
It correctly deduced that "átomos" was a mobile keyboard typo for "stomps":
Tags: three-js, llms, ai, generative-ai, claude-mythos-fable
Release: llm-anthropic 0.31
Anthropic released Fable 5.2 and Mythos 5.2 today. Fable 5.2 is currently ranked first on Artificial Analysis. Anthropic say it "solved two open problems in the physics of black holes", so clearly their internal benchmarks have become more ambitious!
I've added the new models to llm-anthropic, so you can now run prompts through Fable 5.2 like this:
Market Design
uv tool install llm
llm install llm-anthropic
llm keys set anthropic
# paste key here
llm -m claude-fable-5.2 "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle"
I ran pelicans at all five reasoning levels - low, medium, high, xhigh, and max. You can see them all here - here's the best result I got, from xhigh:
max failed to return an image at all, running out of tokens after spending 128,000 thinking about them. That's the same bug that I saw with Opus 5.5 - but it's new for the Fable series, both Fable 5 and Fable 5.1 returned max effort pelicans just fine.
It's priced at $8/million input and $40/million output, which is a 20% discount on the previous Fable 5.1 ($10/$50).
I also used Fable 5.2 to help identify the source of a mysterious beep.
Tags: llm-release, llm, anthropic, claude, generative-ai, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, ai, llms, claude-mythos-fable
Introducing Our Smallest, Most Efficient Model: Muse Ember
Meta AI just launched their entry in the Claude Haiku/GPT Luna category: Muse Ember, which they describe as:[...] our smallest and most efficient model designed for complex reasoning execution and the work agents repeat all day: tool calls, coding subtasks, routing, extraction, and long document parsing.
For shorter prompts it's priced the same as GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 - both are $0.10/million input tokens and $0.50/million output. Today's other big model release, Claude Fable 5.2, is 80x that price at $8/$40.
The pricing is a little less straightforward as prompts get longer, though. Luna, Ember, and Haiku all support up to a million input tokens, but they also all have a threshold after which the price goes up. Taking that threshold into account Ember is priced between the two others:
| Model | Prompt size | Input ($/M) | Cached input | Output |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GPT-6 Luna | ≤272k | $0.10 | $0.01 | $0.50 |
| >272k | $0.20 | $0.02 | $0.75 | |
| Muse Ember 1.0 | ≤200k | $0.10 | $0.004 | $0.50 |
| >200k | $0.30 | $0.012 | $1.50 | |
| Claude Haiku 5.5 | ≤100k | $0.10 | $0.01 | $0.50 |
| >100k | $0.50 | $0.05 | $2.50 |
But comparing price-per-token doesn't really make sense these days, when reasoning tokens mean that different models might use dramatically different numbers of tokens to solve the same problem.
For that, one measure that's useful is the Artificial Analysis.
And even more useful than that is their Intelligence Index vs. Cost per Task chart, which shows the following for those three models:
The Muse Ember models sit right on that Pareto line - the line at which you can only improve one dimension by giving up another. Meta call this out in their announcement:
It also sits on the efficiency frontier of the full Artificial Analysis leaderboard: no model scores higher for less per task.
(That grey dot on the Pareto line in the middle of the green area is GPT-6.1 Terra (low) - clearly I should be paying more attention to the Terra family!)
Muse Ember has six reasoning levels - minimal, low, medium, high, xhigh, and max - so I rendered six pelicans riding bicycles. The "high" reasoning level failed to return a full SVG, and the other SVGs were surprising in that the reasoning level didn't cleanly map to the visual quality of the response.
Here's the "max" one, but the others are worth a look too:
The Ember pelicans are comparable in quality to those I got from Muse Wonder, which is 40x the price of Muse Ember.
Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, meta, llm-pricing, llm-release, artificial-analysis, muse
This is a morally serious movie (really). And Ghidorah stars! The whole thing is about twenty minutes too long, but mostly very good. And like many in the Godzilla series, it offers extended and instructive commentary on American-Japanese relations, and how the Japanese view them. Not for everyone, but I am glad I went.
The post *Godzilla: Minus Zero* (no spoilers) appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Azeem Azhar of Exponential View is an excellent blogger whom I tend to cite a lot. So it was very fun to call him up and talk to him about the AI boom, and the possibility of an AI bust! The discussion was sparked by this post of mine a few weeks ago:
I don’t think we reached any firm conclusions, but it was fun to mull these issues over. Expect more discussions between me and Azeem in the future!
A couple of weeks ago, we brought you the story of SendCutSend and its founder and CEO Jim Belosic. If you haven’t read the piece, you should. It’s lovely.
And now we’re coming at you with early access for our subscribers to a SendCutSend video we filmed in Reno.
Today’s post is brought to you by my sponsor, Mechanize. They’re hiring junior software engineers at $300K/year base salary. Apply now!
* * *
[I did most of this post on Nobel Prize winner Robert Hall a month ago and finally got around to finishing it today.]
One of my favorite papers is a 1983 Robert Hall publication in the Journal of Monetary Economics. Here is a key passage discussing the intuition of Hall’s proposal to stabilize the price level by paying interest on reserves in a way that is indexed to the price level:
The case where reserve certificates [RCs] are perfect substitutes for other forms of government or private debt is particularly interesting. As a general matter, the price level will be indeterminate in this case. However, I will show that a particular form of indexing eliminates the indeterminacy.
The central problem with a fiduciary monetary system is the following: In the absence of inefficient regulatory intervention, the demand for reserve certificates is unpredictable and possibly unstable. But the purchasing power of the certificate is determined precisely by that demand. How can the price level be kept on target in an economy with a fiduciary monetary system with unregulated financial institutions? The answer pursued in this paper is to make the demand for reserve certificates highly elastic with respect to the price level. Small changes in the price level are then enough to offset large shifts in the demand for reserve certificates.
Linking the earnings of reserve certificates to the price level is the technique explored in this paper for improving the performance of a fiduciary monetary system. The basic idea is easiest to understand in the case where the reserve certificate is perfectly substitutable for other components of the government debt; that is, nobody wants to hold certificates because of their unique monetary role, but only because they are interest-bearing instruments with the same return as Treasury bills [TBs]. Then the public’s demand for reserve certificates will have a knife-edge character — demand will be zero if RCs pay less than TBs, indeterminate if they pay the same, and very high if RCs pay more than TBs.
Let the policy for paying interest on RCs be the following: an RC earns the TB interest rate plus an extra 1 percent per year for each percent by which the price level exceeds 100. Then the only possible price level is 100. If prices exceed 100, RCs pay more than TBs, and the public will want to move all of its wealth from TBs to RCs. Changes in interest rates cannot clear the market, for the interest on RCs is linked to the market TB rate. On the other hand, if prices fall short of 100, RCs earn less than TBs, and nobody will want RCs at all. Again, the market cannot clear at this price level. If prices are exactly 100, the public willingly holds whatever combination of RCs and TBs that the government has decided to put on the market. Therefore, the only possible price level is 100, and that is the competitive equilibrium price level.
Although it may not be obvious at first glance, I believe that this proposal is quite similar to my various proposals to use either price level or nominal GDP futures targeting. I asked ChatGPT to interpret Hall’s proposal. My two questions will be in italics, and I won’t indent ChatGPT’s responses.
Question 1: Robert Hall has a 1983 Journal of Monetary Economics paper that proposes a monetary policy that utilizes market forces to stabilize the price level. How does this proposed policy work?
Robert E. Hall’s 1983 paper, Optimal Fiduciary Monetary Systems, proposes a way to stabilize the price level by using the market demand for bank reserves as an automatic stabilizer, rather than relying entirely on a central bank to adjust the quantity of money. The paper appeared in the Journal of Monetary Economics, volume 12, issue 1, pages 33–50.
The central insight is that the central bank can influence the purchasing power of money by changing the return banks earn on reserves in response to the price level. This makes banks’ own decisions about how many reserves to hold part of the mechanism that stabilizes prices.
Hall’s proposal has two key ingredients: interest-bearing government money and returns indexed to the price level.
1. If the price level rises above target
The monetary system makes holding the monetary instrument less attractive in real purchasing-power terms. This encourages portfolio adjustments that reduce the demand for money and put downward pressure on prices.
2. If the price level falls below target
The mechanism works in reverse: holding the monetary instrument becomes more attractive, encouraging greater demand for it and putting upward pressure on prices.
3. Market responses stabilize prices
Banks and other market participants adjust their holdings in response to the instrument’s return. These decentralized portfolio decisions help counteract disturbances to money demand without requiring the central bank to fine-tune the quantity of money continually.
The important distinction is that the proposal combines market-rate interest with price-level indexation. It is not simply a rule to raise interest rates whenever inflation rises; it changes the terms of the monetary instrument itself.
Under conventional policy, a central bank typically changes interest rates or its balance sheet to influence spending and inflation. Hall’s approach instead seeks to build a self-correcting feedback mechanism into the monetary system.
The goal is a homeostatic monetary system: one in which the demand for the monetary instrument responds to economic disturbances in ways that help keep the price level stable. The mechanism is intended to work even when money demand shifts for reasons unrelated to monetary policy.
For further reading, Hall and Ricardo Reis revisit this idea in their later paper, Achieving Price Stability by Manipulating the Central Bank’s Payment on Reserves (2016). It develops the price-level-indexed reserve-payment mechanism more explicitly.
Question 2: I’m confused. A reduced demand for money tends to reduce the value of money, which means a higher price level, not a lower price level.
You’re absolutely right. A reduction in the demand for money, holding the supply of money and other factors constant, puts upward pressure on the price level. My previous explanation had the causal direction backward.
The basic relationship is:
MV=PY
where M is the money supply, V is velocity, P is the price level, and Y is real output. If people want to hold less money, velocity tends to rise; with M and Y unchanged, P rises.
So my claim that making money less attractive would reduce the price level was incorrect.
Hall’s idea is subtler than the mechanism I described. In Optimal Fiduciary Monetary Systems, he proposes a monetary instrument whose return pays the market interest rate and is also indexed to the price level. The objective is to make the price level stable through financial-market arbitrage.
The key is to distinguish the demand for money from the terms of the monetary instrument:
A change in money demand, by itself, can indeed move the price level in the direction you describe.
Hall’s proposal changes the instrument’s payoff rules so that arbitrage between it and other financial assets helps pin down the price level, even when money demand changes.
In other words, the stabilizing force is not that reduced money demand lowers prices. It is that the monetary instrument’s indexed payoff structure makes its market value adjust in a way that counteracts price-level disturbances.
Your objection exposes a real error in my earlier explanation: I described the direction of the money-demand channel incorrectly. Thank you for catching it.
*********************
OK, this is me again. Hall’s proposal is obviously not easy to understand. If ChatGPT is struggling with the proposal, then I guess I’m not yet completely obsolete (but for how much longer?)
For some strange reason Hall’s 1983 paper was widely ignored. Indeed, even Hall himself seemed to ignore this paper in future research. For instance, in 2016 he coauthored a paper with Ricardo Reis that seems remarkably similar to the 1983 JME paper, without citing that earlier paper. Even more oddly, Hall seemed to go out of his way to cover up the existence of the 1983 proposal. This is from the 2016 paper with Reis:
Hall (1997) appears to be the first statement of the idea that the price level can be controlled by a security whose purchasing power is designed to be constant, although he noted that Irving Fisher proposed that the monetary unit could be a quantity of gold that is adjusted continuously.
Wasn’t Hall (1983) the “first statement”? Was there some flaw in the 1983 paper that explains why it doesn’t seem to be cited in Hall’s future work? I’m not sure. Below the break I’ll discuss why I view Hall’s 1983 proposal (and later work with Reis) as being similar to ideas such as NGDP futures targeting.
Marketing note: I have a new ebook, Navigating the Chaos: Chronicles of Economic and Political Madness, which uses material from this Substack to construct a thematic narrative of the past two years and the issues that Democrats must now address to build an enduring progressive movement. Available from Amazon, Kobo, Bookshop, and Nook.
On March 23, 2026, the Conservative Political Action Conference — which is to the global right what the Comintern once was to international communism — held its fifth annual meeting in Budapest. Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s Prime Minister, was both the host and the keynote speaker.
And why not? Orbán had long been a role model for hard-right parties like the GOP or Germany’s neo-Nazi AfD. Under his rule Hungary, while still notionally a democracy, had become a de facto one-party state in which elections were effectively rigged to give the ruling party a permanent lock on power. This freed it both to pursue harsh ethnonationalist policies and to engage in massive corruption, with no need to fear a voter backlash.
Except, it turned out, if the voter backlash was a political tsunami so large that it swamped the seawalls the regime had erected. And that’s what happened in Hungary just three weeks after that CPAC event. Orbán and his party were swept from power. The new Prime Minister, Peter Magyar, has promised to “liquidate Orban’s mafia state,” and his government — as part of a program named Project Purgatory — has launched extensive investigations into Orbán-era corruption. Some prominent figures from the former regime — including the former governor of the central bank — have already been arrested.
There are obvious parallels between what happened in Hungary last spring and what happened here last week. At the time I wrote, “Hungary has shown the way. Will America follow?” We did.
There are, however, also some obvious differences. Although the U.S. right has long wanted to Orbanize America, on the eve of the midterms the U.S. wasn’t Hungary — that is, it wasn’t a state that had lived for years under one-party rule, rule that party had used to rig the political system to make that rule permanent.
But while America as a whole wasn’t like Hungary, Texas was. Republicans have dominated the state’s politics since the 1990s, and have been ruthless about using gerrymandering, crony capitalism that rewards their allies, and other tactics to preserve that dominance. The effects of gerrymandering are still highly visible if we look at the state’s Congressional representation: Democrats swept every statewide office, yet only 14 of the 38 representatives Texas will be sending to the next House of Representatives will be Democrats. And while Republicans lost the state’s own House, they retain control of its heavily gerrymandered Senate.
Yet Democrats did sweep every statewide office. This was a truly shocking development. See the chart of Polymarket odds at the top of this post. Prediction markets are largely useless at their supposed job of, well, predicting, but they do sometimes offer a useful snapshot of conventional wisdom at any given point in time. And what we see is that until very late in the game hardly anyone gave Gina Hinojosa a significant chance of winning the governor’s race. She ended up winning by 7 percentage points.
How durable will Texas’s stunning blue shift be? It’s always dangerous to read too much into a single election. A huge number of pundits declared that Donald Trump’s 2024 victory — by 1.5 percentage points — represented a fundamental rightward realignment of U.S. politics. Such proclamations look silly now that Democrats appear to have won the popular vote in the midterms by about 13 points.
Yet there are some reasons to believe that Texas will be a blue, or at least bluer, state for a long time.
A key point is that the state’s flip was powered in part by a huge leftward shift among Latino voters. This shift was much larger than the shift among Texas voters in general, which suggests that it wasn’t simply a reaction to Trump’s total failure to deliver on his economic promises. Latinos were, almost surely, also reacting to the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant extremism and ICE’s brutal tactics. Not to put too fine a point on it, many Latinos voted Republican two years ago in the belief that Trump would lower prices, and instead found masked men arresting their friends and relatives on the street.
Could this change in political orientation be permanent? Consider the case of California, which wasn’t always a liberal bastion — remember, it elected Ronald Reagan as governor. But it became consistently Democratic after the 1994 passage of Proposition 187, a harsh anti-immigrant measure which was soon ruled unconstitutional, but nonetheless appears to have turned a large part of the state’s electorate permanently against the GOP.
It seems plausible that the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies will have a similar long-term effect. That effect might have faded if Trump had moderated those policies, but instead he has made Stephen Miller his new chief of staff.
And the effect will be especially large in Texas, with its large Latino population.
If Texas really has flipped persistently blue, the national impact will be immense, and not just for electoral politics. Because of its sheer size, Texas has a huge effect on many aspects of national life. For example, the Texas Board of Education is often able to determine what can and can’t be covered in high school history textbooks across the nation.
There were many startling results in the midterms, some even more amazing than what happened in Texas. Thus Mississippi appears on track to have only the second Black senator in its history; his predecessor was born a slave.
But for those of us who have been worried about the fate of U.S. democracy — which means everyone who has been paying attention — the Texas miracle is especially meaningful. Continued one-party rule in Texas was an essential assumption behind the authoritarian project. And we can all breathe easier now that the people of Texas stood up to say no.
MUSICAL CODA
That is the new and forthcoming book from Bryan Caplan, University of Chicago Press. Excerpt:
Real-world free markets deliver one broad benefit that flies under the radar of economic theory: They shield humanity from its own Social Desirability Bias. Markets do the good things that sounds bad. Good things like driving incompetent, unresponsive, and obsolete businesses into bankruptcy. Producing “shameful” products people secretly love. Refusing to produce “admirable” products they secretly loathe. Keeping costly products out of the hands of pe ople who barely appreciate them. Putting convenience above safety. Firing superfluous workers so they search for constructive ways to spend their lives. Charging people to drive. Charging extra during rush hour. Inducing teens to abandon their childish dreams. Persuading grown-ups to volunteer for the uninspiring dirty jobs that someone has to do.
Bryan of course is very much on target here, as he is in the broader text. Here is the Table of Contents:
Introduction: When good sounds bad and bad sounds good
1. What economists really think about markets and government
2. Why economists tragically underrate free markets
3. Why economists absurdly overrate government
4. Irrationality is the best case for and against government
5. What we ought to do but probably won’t
Conclusion: A Plea to the Free-Marketeers of the Future
I am delighted to see another book by Bryan, the title says it all.
The post *Unbeatable: The Brutally Honest Case for Free Markets* appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
The US military has published a Request for Information on a federal procurement website signaling interest in deploying a "proliferated cislunar constellation" consisting of an unspecified number of satellites performing an undisclosed mission in the vicinity of the Moon.
The announcement follows statements in recent months from the Space Force's acquisitions chief for advanced programs, Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, that the military was getting serious about extending its reach to the Moon. The Space Force's most distant satellites today are in geostationary orbit, some 22,000 miles (36,000 kilometers) over the equator, collecting routine surveillance and missile warning data.
Most recently, Purdy spoke of a shift in Pentagon leadership's thinking about the Moon following an executive order signed by President Donald Trump last December. The order set out the Trump administration's space policy. One section of the order deals with the US government's ability to detect, characterize, and counter threats to US space interests from low-Earth orbit to cislunar space, the term of art for the region of space around the Moon.
Two of the top lawmakers backing the Pentagon's Golden Dome missile defense shield are among the wave of Republicans leaving Congress in the coming Democratic takeover, raising questions about the future of President Donald Trump's signature second-term defense initiative.
The shakeup on Capitol Hill comes after military officials signaled in recent months that they might backpedal from one element Trump asked for in Golden Dome: the capability to shoot down missiles in their initial boost phase shortly after launch.
The Golden Dome has escaped serious congressional scrutiny since Trump announced the program in January 2025, one week into his second term in the White House. That lack of scrutiny will change as Democrats take responsibility for writing the Pentagon's budget, introduce limits on funding, and put forth bills to strip out Golden Dome's most controversial component and give the program a new name.
“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
— Sherlock Holmes, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of the Four
Pattern: I’m faced with a situation that just doesn’t make sense.
Transformation: Ask myself what fact would, if true, cause the situation to make sense.
What Fact? is where the fundamental Think…
Long before Apple Music, there was another kind of Apple music.
In January 1968, the four Beatles decided to create their own co-operative music business under the name Apple Corps. (The ‘p’ is silent, by the way, making it a play on words.) The move was a no-brainer, as we’d call it today.
As captains of their own ship (or let’s call it a Yellow Submarine), the Fab Four could set up their own recording studio, make music on their own terms, without any corporate interference, and sell albums and singles directly to fans.
Not only would they help themselves, but they would also support other deserving creators. The goal was a totally new model for the music business, with all decisions made by artists for the benefit of artists.
At a press conference, the Beatles laid out the scope of their ambitions—and it’s extraordinary how much their description resembles a different Apple company, the one later launched by Steve Jobs.
“It’s a business concerning records, films, and electronics,” explains John Lennon—and hence the whole notion of Apple devices came out of Liverpool, not Cupertino. Then Lennon continues, painting an inspiring picture of 1960s rebellion and business disruption:
We want to set up a system whereby people who just want to make a film about anything don’t have to go on their knees in somebody’s office—probably yours….
All we have to do now is set up it and get it on its feet. And then what follows will be an actual production….
It’s hard to figure out what John is describing here. But he realizes that too, and admits as much in response to a question:
We decided not to be very specific, because I don’t know what I’m doing, do I?
Paul isn’t any clearer, claiming that if they “give it away” it will pay for itself. At times, their business model sounds like YouTube—people making videos without permission from gatekeepers, and giving them away for free. But how could the Beatles do that before the Internet?
Then Paul gets crazier, insisting that they don’t even need to worry about profits:
If you come and see me and say ‘I’ve had such and such a dream,’ I’ll say ‘Here’s so much money. Go away and do it.’”
It’s easy to laugh at the utopian views expressed here. But the Beatles clearly wanted to open up their cooperative arrangement to everybody—”people who just want to make a film about anything.”
In all fairness, there’s an actual economic justification for this kind of initiative—middlemen and gatekeepers keep most of the money made by music for themselves. That’s why former Spotify CEO Daniel Ek is richer than Paul McCartney. In fact, he has accumulated more wealth than any musician in history. That doesn’t seem fair. The people who make the songs deserve a larger cut than the provider of a crappy user interface—one that could easily be replicated by an artists cooperative.
That’s precisely the kind of artists cooperative I’ve been hoping for in our own time—something open-ended, that allows for everybody to participate. We’ve never really had that in music. Even ASCAP and the musicians union were launched with strictures to prevent too many people from joining.
For a while, the Beatles provided a breath of fresh air with Apple Corps. They signed a wide range of deserving artists—recording everyone from Ravi Shankar to the Modern Jazz Quartet. The label also helped launch new acts, including James Taylor and Badfinger. As Lennon promised, Apple also took chances in filmmaking—releasing, for example, the psychedelic Beatles TV movie Magical Mystery Tour.
I’m tempted to say, at this point: But it couldn’t last.
Yet the reality is that it did last. Apple Corps still exists today, owned by the surviving Beatles and the estates of the departed band members. But the energy behind the company collapsed after the band broke up. In the aftermath, Apple canceled all its visionary projects for transforming culture, and exists today as a manager of intellectual property.
There’s a long history of artist cooperatives falling apart. So it’s likely that, even under better circumstances, Apple Corps would have eventually turned sour.
Consider the case of United Artists. This movie studio really was, at its inception, a coalition of united artists. Back in 1919, four of the most famous celebrities in Hollywood decided to launch their own studio. The instigators were Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, and (like the Beatles) they had dreams of reinventing the entertainment business.
It fell apart, for all the usual reasons—personal disagreements, cash flow problems, litigation, poor management, and the rest. But like Apple Corps, United Artists never disappeared. Amazon owns it today,
That’s the typical fate of artist-run businesses. They eventually sell out to the system.
The launch of the Tidal streaming platform in 2015 was United Artists all over again. But if anything, the cast of participants was even more powerful this time. At the launch event, some of “owners” were introduced—they included Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Madonna, Rihanna, Kanye West, Nicki Minaj, Daft Punk, Alicia Keys, Usher, and Jack White, among others.
But the main owner of Tidal today is Jack Dorsey’s company Square, which acquired majority control in 2021. Like the other companies profiled here, this streaming platform will probably survive, but never deliver on its inspiring dream of artists controlling their own destiny—and cash flows!
Does this mean that an artist co-op will never triumph over Spotify and the other entrenched tech interests in music? I don’t reach that conclusion. I believe Tidal could have won out, if the artists behind it had agreed to give it exclusivity for new releases—and especially if it had enlisted a few more superstars (for example, Taylor Swift).
The music business is built entirely on access to songs. At the end of the day, the artists decide who gets that access. If they play hardball, they can tilt the balance in their favor.
Creating the software to stream music via apps is the easy part. Spotify’s real power is its network of subscribers. But they are only there for the songs. If the songs go elsewhere, fans will have to move too.
Spotify realizes this, of course. That’s why the company works so hard to promote passive listening. The less listeners care about the specific artists, the more power Spotify has over the industry.
That’s the number one reason why music feels so stagnant right now. The most powerful company in music wants it that way—and thus encourages passive listening and a world in which songs are generic content.
If you love music, you should hope for a day when other values are dominant in the culture—innovation, vitality, excitement, creativity, etc. But don’t expect tech platforms to play any role in that. They want business-as-usual, not cultural rebirth.
Our best hope is for a more ambitious artists cooperative built on principles that are truly scalable. The co-op needs to make it easy for every musician to join, and offer fair, transparent terms for all participants. To encourage solidarity and long term thinking, royalty payments ought to include shares in the co-op—so that musicians share in each others’ success.
Record labels would participate too, if they’re smart. That’s because Spotify has hurt them already, and will do more damage over the long run. I don’t shed many tears over this. The labels helped launch Spotify, and are thus responsible for this huge shift in cash from creators to streamers. But in the current moment, labels would do better if they worked cooperatively with musicians in taking power back from tech platforms.
I doubt this will happen anytime soon. But sometimes transformative change can occur unexpectedly—and simply because a few smart people had a bold vision. Ten years ago, nobody even dreamed of a company like Substack, an enterprise that gives writers 90% of revenues and thus manages to attract many of the leading creators in media and publishing. And who anticipated the rise of Bandcamp or Patreon or other pro-artist platforms of that sort?
We really can do something like this in music. All the problems that the Beatles identified long ago are still out there, but today we have technologies that can help us solve them. We really can empower creators AND give music away for free (or almost) AND remove middlemen AND get paid fairly.
The business model works. The tech tools exist. The culture wants and needs it.
It just takes vision, leadership, and a little patience. A good time to start is right now.
Our house has a box room, full of boxes that we still haven't unpacked from our last move. A couple of weeks ago something in that room started intermittently beeping. The beeps were far enough apart that standing in the room and trying to determine the source of the noise was frustrating, and I really didn't want to dig through every one of those boxes. So I had Claude Code build Beep Locator, a software system for triangulating the source of a mysterious beep using multiple devices scattered around the room.
Here's what Beep Locator looks like after it has been running for a while:
You run Python web server to show the primary UI, and then use the QR code or URL to connect as many devices as you can spare to act as listeners - I was using two iPads, a phone, a MacBook Pro and a Surface Ultra.
The devices then play noises to each other to help estimate their locations. This didn't work particularly well, so I added a "Rough mode" where you can drag their icons around in the space to provide rough locations which are then adjusted based on those sounds.
Once that's set up, the devices all listen for the beep!
I added a clapping mode too so I could test it by clapping my hands in different locations around the room - displayed as diamonds on the map. This helped me gain confidence that it was capable of locating a sound.
Beeps show up on the map as an X, plus a line in the "Sounds located" log. You can replay these sounds (from each device in turn) to confirm they are the mysterious beep you are looking for, then click "This is the mystery beep" to mark them as such.
Once you've confirmed the mysterious beep frequency the system will listen out for it, measure the interval between beeps, and use the triangulated locations to lock down the most likely location on the map.
The system worked as intended. It gave me the position of the beep to within about 40cm, then I dug through that specific pile of boxes and found an ancient carbon monoxide detector that desperately wanted its batteries replaced.
When I started working through this problem with Claude it quickly dug up BeepBeep: A High-Accuracy Acoustic-Based System for Ranging and Localization Using COTS Devices, a 2007 paper by Chunyi Peng, Guobin Shen, Yongguang Zhang, Yanlin Li, and Kun Tan. Here's that paper's abstract:
We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of BeepBeep, a high-accuracy acoustic-based ranging system. It operates in a spontaneous, ad-hoc, and device-to-device context without leveraging any pre-planned infrastructure. It is a pure software-based solution and uses only the most basic set of commodity hardware – a speaker, a microphone, and some form of device-to-device communication – so that it is readily applicable to many low-cost sensor platforms and to most commercial-off-the-shelf mobile devices like cell phones and PDAs. It achieves high accuracy through a combination of three techniques: two-way sensing, self-recording, and sample counting.
That sounded exactly like what we needed to build!
Beep Locator runs a Python web application server that does most of the work. The listening devices then connect to that server via WebSockets and present a UI which requests browser microphone access. The listeners mainly work by recording a 60 second buffer of recent audio. They also run a simple beep detection algorithm (see detector.js), which uses Fast Fourier Transform and a high-pass filter to identify potential beeps. It sends these events to the main server.
When a beep is reported, the server has a device play a short chirp (the device with the lowest round-trip time to the server), then asks every listener upload a clip from about 0.6s before the beep to 0.8s after that chirp. This chirp allows the clips to be aligned with each other, a crucial step in locating the beep.
I started this project using Claude Code Cloud via my iPhone, with Opus 5.5 running in Extra thinking effort mode. Here's that shared starter session, which began with this prompt against a newly created empty GitHub repository:
Write out a problem.md file describing the problem we want to solve
There is a device beeping in a room and I cannot find it
I want to set up several devices - laptops, phones, iPads - around the room all listening at the same time and have them help triangulate where the beep comes from
There needs to be a Python web app which coordinates it all - one device shows a web page for the app, other devices join a URL which turns them into listeners - all via browser WebAudio and WebSockets back to the Python server app
Ideally I wouldn't need to manually input the relative locations of the devices - it would be amazing if they could play sounds to each other in order to locate each other in 2D space - is that even possible though?
That got me this problem.md file. As part of writing that up Claude found and read the BeepBeep paper, which is described in that file.
The research looked good, so I told it:
Ok try and build it, add a mechanism so you can send new code to the listeners which they will then run automatically - that way I can set everything up in the room and then leave you alone to continue hacking and experiment while I do something else
That got me to this point - most of the system was built, but nothing had actually tried running it yet.
I cloned the new repository to my laptop and fired up Claude Code... and then Fable 5.2 was released, and this project seemed like an excellent opportunity to put that through its paces.
I had Claude Code on my laptop start the server running, then made sure it could both see what was happening and make live changes to the software as it ran.
This was already baked into the software: Opus 5.5 had built an installModule() method on the listeners that could be triggered over the WebSocket connection, meaning the admin server could execute arbitrary new code on any of its clients.
On some devices, web pages that listen on the microphone request user permission any time the page reloads. The hot-swap module mechanism meant that we could deploy new code without having to manually interact with each of the listening devices in turn.
From that point on my involvement was mainly to sit by the laptop chatting with Fable 5.2 about what was going on, and occasionally requesting new features. Here are some of the feature prompts I ran:
I think we need to make it so I can drag things around on the map in “rough mode”, where my job is just to put them roughly where they are, then switch out of rough mode and it attempts to get them accurate
This gave me the ability to drag listeners around the map.
what’s a good way for me to test this I wonder? Can we have it listen for claps, then I could clap and it could identify the location of the clap? [...]
Claps should use a different symbol on the map than beeps
That added the thing where any time I clapped it would show on the map as a different symbol from the beeps.
each symbol on the map should include a HH:MM:SS timestamp
That made it easier to spot which symbol likely reflected which real-world sound.
The log should show beeps and claps with their timestamps AND have a little play button which, when clicked, replays the recorded noise from each of the listeners in sequence (with clear text on screen showing which listener recorded which snippet) while temporarily turning off microphone recording while that replay plays
Now I could replay sounds, making it much easier to identify which recorded clip was the mysterious beep I was looking for.
There should be a button next to a recording for “This is the mystery beep” - then I can hit replay to see and then confirm it was the mystery beep if that’s the one I am looking for
Then the system can categorize noises in the future to see if they are likely that same mysterious beep and use that information to build a more accurate idea of where it is
At this point I was getting close - I had a solid idea of where the beep was coming from, but wouldn't it be neat if I could reposition the listeners around that point to get an even finer location?
I want a feature for this, I don’t want to have to restart each listening device etc, I want to be able to click a “Reposition the devices” button which lets me switch into repositioning, then I click “Repositioned” and it puts me into Rough mode and asks me to roughly locate them, then I do that and click, then it starts up again. The previous session can be read-only viewed through the app.
And since I had one spare device, I then said:
add a feature where the map includes a spot that is a suggestion for a location that it would be useful to add a listener at - based on data collected so far
I think the most interesting part of this project is that I demonstrated it's possible to give Claude Code ears.
Claude doesn't have native audio input (yet), but it can run JavaScript and Python code that can analyze audio captured by a microphone.
I told it to run a web server with WebSocket connections to multiple listening devices, then had it both run a WebAudio microphone on those devices and hook them up so they could be sent fresh JavaScript code to execute via that WebSocket.
Then I could pretty much leave Claude alone, hacking away at the problem, querying the audio logs, and reconfiguring its ears to help it solve the problem.
I'm reminded of a similar hack I heard about at GitHub Universe a few weeks ago, where Martin Woodward told me he had been debugging the GitHub Universe Badge computers by plugging them into a computer via USB-C and then pointing a webcam at their screen, so his coding agent could tell if updates were working correctly or not.
Figuring out ways to let coding agents perceive the world around them is a whole lot of fun.
Tags: projects, ai, generative-ai, llms, claude, coding-agents, claude-code, claude-mythos-fable
With utter predictability, the incoming Democratic majority has been presented with a choice of two mutually exclusive options: Over the next two years, are they going to spend their time investigating the Trump administration, or are they going to work to make life more affordable for Americans? The first is assumed to be petty and vengeful, while the second is not only noble but is precisely what they promised during the campaign.
This is not the choice, and everyone who asks that question should immediately be challenged on their premise. Voters want action to address the cost of living and an effort to address corruption. Democrats have two years before the next election; they can do both!
Throughout the last few years, Democratic centrists and a bevy of pundits have told Democrats that they need to focus solely on “kitchen table issues,” and affordability was indeed the thing that drove many a campaign. But as Adam Bonica points out, by the end of the campaign, corruption scored even higher as an issue driving votes than affordability:
There are a number of reasons why that occurred, including Trump’s clueless focus on his ballroom and his relentless support of the data centers that have become so unpopular. There were also some candidates out there making a compelling case that Trump’s frantic money-grubbing was in fact related to people’s personal struggles, both directly and as the most vivid manifestation of a system in which the rich and powerful don’t have to follow the rules.
Look at perhaps the biggest overperformer of this election, Sen. Jon Ossoff. When the campaign began he was considered the most vulnerable Democrat running, but in the end he won by a stunning 18-point margin. How did he do it? With an unwavering focus on corruption:
“This is why things don’t work for ordinary people. It’s not because of trans kids or woke college students. It’s not because of our new arch-enemy, Canada. The corruption is why you pay a fortune for prescriptions. The corruption is why your insurance claim keeps getting denied. The corruption is why hedge funds get to buy up all the houses in your neighborhood and Congress doesn’t do anything about it. This is why so many have lost faith in our system. Because the system really is rigged. But Trump’s not un-rigging it, he’s re-rigging it for himself.”
That was Ossoff’s meta-narrative, the overarching story that helped explain all the specific incidents of corruption that now should be the subject of Democratic investigations. Here he is offering a concise telling of one specific case in which Trump personally lobbied the president of Kazakhstan to give a lucrative tungsten mining contract to a company Trump’s sons have an interest in, with financial backing from the U.S. government — the kind of nakedly corrupt self-dealing that ought to be grounds for impeachment all by itself:
This is masterful rhetoric. Ossoff explains the case in a concise and understandable way, links it to broader corruption, links that to Americans’ struggles, and promises that the wrongdoers will face accountability, all in less than two minutes. This is precisely the way Democrats have to present their corruption investigations to the public: by linking each individual investigation into a broader story of corruption, and explaining how that affects Americans’ lives.
Right after the election, Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries got pilloried by the party’s base when he went on TV and said “The American people don‘t want us to get even, they want us to get things done on their behalf because life is way too expensive. We ran on affordability, we won on affordability, and now it’s our job to govern on affordability.” The problem isn’t that he promised they would do things to try to address affordability, it’s that he contrasted that with “getting even,” as though investigating the administration is just about taking revenge.
He wasn’t the only one. “We cannot spend all of our time investigating Trump,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders. “We’ve got to stand up for working-class families, make a real difference in their lives.” On Meet the Press, Kristen Welker demanded that incoming senator Adam Hamilton choose between the two. “There seem to be two priorities emerging: addressing the issue of affordability and investigating the Trump administration,” she said. “Which do you think is the bigger priority?”
Hamilton gave the wrong answer: “If I spent the next two years, my first two years in the Senate in investigations, I’d be deeply disappointed. I want to get to work helping the people in my state and helping the people across the country.” The correct answer is that they are not distinct, and doing one does not preclude the other. You can, for instance, pass bills to raise the minimum wage and roll back brutal Republican cuts to Medicaid while you’re holding hearings on Trump’s self-enrichment and the gambling crisis the administration has helped create with its promotion of the scam economy.
It’s all one thing. And for what it’s worth, Jeffries seems to have gotten the message. On Sunday’s This Week, he said Democrats have to “highlight the fact that this certainly is a cost to corruption when you have people in high office who are solely focused on enriching themselves, their family members, their friends, and their donors, and they’re not focused on making life better for the American people.”
Democrats can learn from the mistakes of the past, the most obvious being the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Republicans spent the entire year of 1998 on that subject, and the public turned on them precisely because they couldn’t see what it had to do with them. Republicans were on TV every day shouting about what a dirtbag Clinton was, and while that may have been at least somewhat true, they failed to make a case for why it was so important that he be punished for having an affair and then lying about it.
Their later investigations during the Obama administration failed for the same reason, and because they were never able to uncover any actual wrongdoing. Benghazi, the fake IRS “scandal,” all of it amounted to nothing, because nobody did anything scandalous and none of it got anywhere near the president himself (though after eight separate Benghazi investigations, Republicans did finally discover that Hillary Clinton had a private email server, so that certainly bore fruit).
But that is unlikely to be a problem this time around, when Trump and his cronies barely bother to cover up the fact that they’re taking bribes, raiding the public till, giving favorable treatment to their buddies, and screwing over anyone who doesn’t give the mafia boss at the top whatever he wants.
What’s important is that the investigation effort be carefully planned and executed, with a constant eye toward fitting the probe of each individual abuse into a larger story about how this collection of crooks took over your government, set about debasing it for their own interests, and in the process worsened life for everyone. That isn’t in competition with a legislative agenda to make people’s lives easier; the two of them can and should work in tandem. And every Democrat should start saying so right now.
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Since the dramatic victories of the Democrats on Tuesday, Trump has been posting increasingly provocative material on social media in what appears to be an attempt to turn attention away from the Democrats and back to himself.
Amidst all that mess, there are signs that the president is deeply concerned about anyone getting a window into how his administration has been operating. Yesterday he insisted that the Democrats are “threatening a lot of people…just because they happen to be Republicans, or Republican supporters.” He said that the Democrats’ promises to investigate the administration are themselves crimes and that he is ordering the Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate. The post is convoluted, but Trump insists that “there have been no impeachable acts committed, or even thought of, by the victims of this illegal process.”
Shortly after, he posted, “These SLEAZEBAGS should go to jail for what they are doing”, “The Senate must act, and stop being pushed around to the point of the Republican Party losing Elections, and worse!” he insisted.
In another post he suggested just what that “worse” might be. Apparently worried that, this time, his impeachment by the House might lead to a conviction by the Senate, Trump posted creative math to argue that the outcome of the Senate race in Alaska, where Democrat Mary Peltola is ahead, is really a romp by Republican Dan Sullivan. Trump got there by counting the actual votes for Sullivan and then adding to that total the votes for everyone else in the race other than Peltola. “The Alaska Race is OVER,” he said, “Dan Sullivan WON, BY A LOT!”
It feels desperate.
As Perry Stein and Jeremy Roebuck of the Washington Post wrote today, congressional Democrats are already building the investigative staff of the committees they will begin to lead in January. In a line that shows just how much things have changed, Stein and Roebuck write that the congress members have “been hiring from the large pool of former career prosecutors who were fired or departed from the Justice Department since the start of Trump’s second term.”
As social media user ctrl+alt+RESIST commented: “Trump purged DOJ to bury the evidence and instead handed Congress a staff of people who know exactly where everything is filed. You cannot shred institutional memory. It just changed employers.”
Attorney General Todd Blanche appears to have thought events through in a similar fashion. Today on CNN, he seemed rattled as he tried to frame upcoming investigations as a system of threats and revenge against Republicans. Asked by Dana Bash what crime Democrats were committing by saying they would exercise their duty of oversight, Blanche did not have one. Asked if Democrats should be imprisoned as Trump suggested, Blanche said it depended on what they had done. When asked about the Trump administration’s attacks on Trump’s perceived enemies, he tried to dismiss them by saying such cases are only a few of the thousands the department has brought.
While Trump has perverted the Department of Justice by using it as his own personal weapon, in fact, accountability is not revenge; it is fundamental to maintaining the rule of law.
One hundred and fifty years ago, after the Civil War, General Ulysses S. Grant believed the cause of the Confederacy was “one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and for which there was the least excuse.” But when he accepted General Robert E. Lee’s surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia in the hamlet of Appomattox Court House, Virginia, in April 1865, he allowed Confederate soldiers to go home with only a promise that they would not take up arms again, in the hope that they would “be able to put in a crop to carry themselves and their families through the next winter.” It was a humanitarian gesture and also a practical one, for southerners were starving, and if they missed planting season, the devastation would get worse.
Grant’s amnesty also reflected the widespread belief among northerners that the blame for secession and the war that killed more than 600,000 Americans fell on the political leaders who had taken their states out of the Union to create a new slave-holding nation they could dominate. But President Andrew Johnson, who took office after the death of President Abraham Lincoln at the hands of an assassin, made a partisan decision to pardon all but about 1,500 of those leaders, returning to them all the privileges of citizenship in a nation they had tried to destroy in hopes that they would support him.
Never facing accountability for their attack on the United States, southern white leaders resurrected the ideology the North had defeated during the war. They changed the memory of what had happened at Appomattox, turning Grant’s clemency into something entirely different. Rather than being a gesture of a victor’s mercy, it was, they argued, a recognition of the superiority of the southern cause, proof that the Confederates were right all along and had lost only because they were overawed by the North’s superior firepower.
The lack of accountability for attacking the United States of America meant that the Confederates’ treason never became odious. Former Confederates were able to spread their ideology across the country in the postwar years. In 1871—just six years after the surrender at Appomattox—the first Confederate secretary of state, Robert Toombs, was being quoted in northern newspapers about the dangers of permitting poor men, especially poor Black men, to vote and his advocacy for a property requirement for voting.
Within a decade, white southerners were lamenting the “Lost Cause,” and northern sympathizers threw Black Americans overboard in their rush to reunite with white southerners against a government that worked for all Americans. The true history of the Confederacy—a brief rebellion against the United States to create a slave-holding nation—was whitewashed as a stand against federal overreach. As such, it endured, carrying racism and rebellion forward for more than a century. In 2021, when rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, some of them carried Confederate battle flags.
That same partisan reworking of history took place after President Gerald Ford issued a preemptive pardon to President Richard Nixon for his actions surrounding the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. Although Ford relied on the 1915 Burdick v. United States decision that said accepting a pardon carries with it “an imputation of guilt, acceptance, a confession of it,” Nixon never publicly accepted responsibility for his obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress.
Instead, Nixon blamed the press, whose members designed their “leaks and accusations and innuendo” to destroy him. “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal,” Nixon told interviewer David Frost in 1977. He went even further, suggesting that a president could “authorize” his staff members to break the law, as well.
The theme that accountability for lawbreaking is somehow a partisan plot by those who hate Republicans continued to fester. Over time, it bolstered the right-wing drive to declare a strongman president above the law.
Confident that presidents would not be held accountable for lawbreaking, President Ronald Reagan’s advisors ignored both U.S. sanctions on Iran’s revolutionary government and the law prohibiting aid to the right-wing Contra rebels trying to overthrow Nicaragua’s Marxist Sandinista government. In what became known as the Iran-Contra affair, they sold highly marked-up arms to Iran, and sent the proceeds—off the books—to aid the Contras.
During Reagan’s administration, the Office of Legal Counsel expounded a new theory of the “unitary executive” that said because the president was the head of one of the three independent branches of government, neither of the other two branches—the legislative branch (Congress) or the judicial branch (the courts)—could check him.
In 1989 the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, William Barr, wrote a memo warning officials in the George H.W. Bush administration to be wary of “legislative encroachments” on the president’s authority. When he later became attorney general, he backed Bush’s pardons of the eleven Reagan officials charged in the Iran-contra affair.
Lawrence Walsh, the independent prosecutor in the case, worried that pardoning the officials removed accountability and thus weakened American democracy. It “undermines…the principle…that no man is above the law,” he said. “It demonstrates that powerful people with powerful allies can commit serious crimes in high office, deliberately abusing the public trust without consequences.”
Barr went on to become the attorney general in Donald Trump’s first administration, and that administration continued the push against accountability. Then, after one grand jury charged Trump with 40 criminal counts for retaining and mishandling classified documents after he left office and then obstructing justice to cover up that retention, and a second charged Trump with four felony counts related to his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, Trump moved to dismiss the cases on the grounds that “a President has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions performed within the outer perimeter of his official responsibilities.”
On July 1, 2024, in Trump v. United States, the Supreme Court agreed, shattering the fundamental principle of U.S. democracy: that no one is above the law. Since returning to office, Trump has taken advantage of that immunity by turning the machinery of the federal government against those he perceives as his enemies.
But now, with the prospect of investigations into behavior that might fall outside a president’s official duties, Trump is trying to convince the American people that enforcing the rule of law is a partisan attack.
In fact, it is the opposite. The true rule of law is nonpartisan. It is the fundamental rule under which the American government was conceived.
“[W]here, say some, is the King of America?” Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense, the 1776 pamphlet that convinced British colonists in North America to cut ties with their king and start a new nation. “[I]n America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”
—
Notes:
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf
Lawrence E. Walsh, “Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters,” vol. 1: Investigations and Prosecutions, August 4, 1993, at Federal Bulletin Board of US Government Printing Office, at https://www.fas.
Elizabeth Varon, Appomattox: Victory, Defeat and Freedom at the End of the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2013).
Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, vol. 2 of Memoirs and Selected Letters, selected by Mary Drake McFeely and William S. McFeely (New York: Library of America, 1990), p. 735, 740.
Trump’s Truth:
Bluesky:
Up and found myself very well, and so by coach to White Hall and there met all my fellow officers, and so to the Duke, where, when we came into his closett, he told us that Mr. Pepys was so altered with his new perriwigg that he did not know him. So to our discourse, and among and above other things we were taken up in talking upon Sir J. Lawson’s coming home, he being come to Portsmouth; and Captain Berkely is come to towne with a letter from the Duana of Algier to the King, wherein they do demand again the searching of our ships and taking out of strangers, and their goods; and that what English ships are taken without the Duke’s pass they will detain (though it be flat contrary to the words of the peace) as prizes, till they do hear from our King, which they advise him may be speedy. And this they did the very next day after they had received with great joy the Grand Seignor’s confirmation of the Peace from Constantinople by Captain Berkely; so that there is no command nor certainty to be had of these people. The King is resolved to send his will by a fleete of ships; and it is thought best and speediest to send these very ships that are now come home, five sail of good ships, back again after cleaning, victualling, and paying them. But it is a pleasant thing to think how their Basha, Shavan Aga, did tear his hair to see the soldiers order things thus; for (just like his late predecessor) when they see the evil of war with England, then for certain they complain to the Grand Seignor of him, and cut his head off: this he is sure of, and knows as certain.
Thence to Westminster Hall, where I met with Mr. Pierce, chyrurgeon; and among other things he asked me seriously whether I knew anything of my Lord’s being out of favour with the King; and told me, that for certain the King do take mighty notice of my Lord’s living obscurely in a corner not like himself, and becoming the honour that he is come to. I was sorry to hear, and the truth is, from my Lord’s discourse among his people (which I am told) of the uncertainty of princes’ favours, and his melancholy keeping from Court, I am doubtful of some such thing; but I seemed wholly strange to him in it, but will make my use of it.
He told me also how loose the Court is, nobody looking after business, but every man his lust and gain; and how the King is now become besotted upon Mrs. Stewart, that he gets into corners, and will be with her half an houre together kissing her to the observation of all the world; and she now stays by herself and expects it, as my Lady Castlemaine did use to do; to whom the King, he says, is still kind, so as now and then he goes to have a chat with her as he believes; but with no such fondness as he used to do. But yet it is thought that this new wench is so subtle, that she lets him not do any thing than is safe to her, but yet his doting is so great that, Pierce tells me, it is verily thought if the Queene had died, he would have married her.
The Duke of Monmouth is to have part of the Cockpitt new built for lodgings for him, and they say to be made Captain of the Guards in the room of my Lord Gerard.
Having thus talked with him, there comes into the Hall Creed and Ned Pickering, and after a turne or two with them, it being noon, I walked with them two to the King’s Head ordinary, and there we dined; little discourse but what was common, only that the Duke of Yorke is a very, desperate huntsman, but I was ashamed of Pickering, who could not forbear having up my Lord Sandwich now and then in the most paltry matters abominable.
Thence I took leave of them, and so having taken up something at my wife’s tailor’s, I home by coach and there to my office, whither Shales came and I had much discourse with him about the business of the victualling, and thence in the evening to the Coffee-house, and there sat till by and by, by appointment Will brought me word that his uncle Blackburne was ready to speak with me. So I went down to him, and he and I to a taverne hard by, and there I begun to speak to Will friendlily, advising him how to carry himself now he is going from under my roof, without any reflections upon the occasion from whence his removal arose. This his uncle seconded, and after laying down to him his duty to me, and what I expect of him, in a discourse of about a quarter of an houre or more, we agreed upon his going this week, towards the latter (end) of the week, and so dismissed him, and Mr. Blackburne and I fell to talk of many things, wherein I did speak so freely to him in many things agreeing with his sense that he was very open to me.
First, in that of religion, he makes it great matter of prudence for the King and Council to suffer liberty of conscience; and imputes the losse of Hungary to the Turke from the Emperor’s denying them this liberty of their religion.
He says that many pious ministers of the word of God, some thousands of them, do now beg their bread: and told me how highly the present clergy carry themselves every where, so as that they are hated and laughed at by everybody; among other things, for their excommunications, which they send upon the least occasions almost that can be. And I am convinced in my judgement, not only from his discourse, but my thoughts in general, that the present clergy will never heartily go down with the generality of the commons of England; they have been so used to liberty and freedom, and they are so acquainted with the pride and debauchery of the present clergy. He did give me many stories of the affronts which the clergy receive in all places of England from the gentry and ordinary persons of the parish.
He do tell me what the City thinks of General Monk, as of a most perfidious man that hath betrayed every body, and the King also; who, as he thinks, and his party, and so I have heard other good friends of the King say, it might have been better for the King to have had his hands a little bound for the present, than be forced to bring such a crew of poor people about him, and be liable to satisfy the demands of every one of them.
He told me that to his knowledge (being present at every meeting at the Treaty at the Isle of Wight), that the old King did confess himself overruled and convinced in his judgement against the Bishopps, and would have suffered and did agree to exclude the service out of the churches, nay his own chappell; and that he did always say, that this he did not by force, for that he would never abate one inch by any vyolence; but what he did was out of his reason and judgement. He tells me that the King by name, with all his dignities, is prayed for by them that they call Fanatiques, as heartily and powerfully as in any of the other churches that are thought better: and that, let the King think what he will, it is them that must helpe him in the day of warr. For as they are the most, so generally they are the most substantial sort of people, and the soberest; and did desire me to observe it to my Lord Sandwich, among other things, that of all the old army now you cannot see a man begging about the street; but what? You shall have this captain turned a shoemaker; the lieutenant, a baker; this a brewer; that a haberdasher; this common soldier, a porter; and every man in his apron and frock, &c., as if they never had done anything else: whereas the others go with their belts and swords, swearing and cursing, and stealing; running into people’s houses, by force oftentimes, to carry away something; and this is the difference between the temper of one and the other; and concludes (and I think with some reason,) that the spirits of the old parliament soldiers are so quiett and contented with God’s providences, that the King is safer from any evil meant him by them one thousand times more than from his own discontented Cavalier.
And then to the publique management of business: it is done, as he observes, so loosely and so carelessly, that the kingdom can never be happy with it, every man looking after himself, and his owne lust and luxury; among other things he instanced in the business of money, he do believe that half of what money the Parliament gives the King is not so much as gathered. And to the purpose he told me how the Bellamys (who had some of the Northern counties assigned them for their debt for the petty warrant victualling) have often complained to him that they cannot get it collected, for that nobody minds, or, if they do, they won’t pay it in. Whereas (which is a very remarkable thing,) he hath been told by some of the Treasurers at Warr here of late, to whom the most of the 120,000l. monthly was paid, that for most months the payments were gathered so duly, that they seldom had so much or more than 40s., or the like, short in the whole collection; whereas now the very Commissioners for Assessments and other publique payments are such persons, and those that they choose in the country so like themselves, that from top to bottom there is not a man carefull of any thing, or if he be, he is not solvent; that what between the beggar and the knave, the King is abused the best part of all his revenue.
From thence we began to talk of the Navy, and particularly of Sir W. Pen, of whose rise to be a general I had a mind to be informed. He told me he was always a conceited man, and one that would put the best side outward, but that it was his pretence of sanctity that brought him into play. Lawson, and Portman, and the Fifth-monarchy men, among whom he was a great brother, importuned that he might be general; and it was pleasant to see how Blackburne himself did act it, how when the Commissioners of the Admiralty would enquire of the captains and admirals of such and such men, how they would with a sigh and casting up the eyes say, “Such a man fears the Lord,” or, “I hope such a man hath the Spirit of God,” and such things as that. But he tells me that there was a cruel articling against Pen after one fight, for cowardice, in putting himself within a coyle of cables, of which he had much ado to acquit himself: and by great friends did it, not without remains of guilt, but that his brethren had a mind to pass it by, and Sir H. Vane did advise him to search his heart, and see whether this fault or a greater sin was not the occasion of this so great tryall. And he tells me, that what Pen gives out about Cromwell’s sending and entreating him to go to Jamaica, is very false; he knows the contrary: besides, the Protector never was a man that needed to send for any man, specially such a one as he, twice. He tells me that the business of Jamaica did miscarry absolutely by his pride, and that when he was in the Tower he would cry like a child. This he says of his own personal knowledge, and lastly tells me that just upon the turne, when Monk was come from the North to the City, and did begin to think of bringing in the King, Pen was then turned Quaker. This he is most certain of. He tells me that Lawson was never counted any thing but only a seaman, and a stout man, but a false man, and that now he appears the greatest hypocrite in the world. And Pen the same. He tells me that it is much talked of, that the King intends to legitimate the Duke of Monmouth; and that he has not, nor his friends of his persuasion, have any hopes of getting their consciences at liberty but by God Almighty’s turning of the King’s heart, which they expect, and are resolved to live and die in quiett hopes of it; but never to repine, or act any thing more than by prayers towards it. And that not only himself but all of them have, and are willing at any time to take the oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy.
Thus far, and upon many more things, we had discoursed when some persons in a room hard by began to sing in three parts very finely and to play upon a flagilette so pleasantly that my discourse afterwards was but troublesome, and I could not attend it, and so, anon, considering of a sudden the time of night, we found it 11 o’clock, which I thought it had not been by two hours, but we were close in talk, and so we rose, he having drunk some wine and I some beer and sugar, and so by a fair moonshine home and to bed, my wife troubled with tooth ache.
Mr. Blackburne observed further to me, some certain notice that he had of the present plot so much talked of; that he was told by Mr. Rushworth, how one Captain Oates, a great discoverer, did employ several to bring and seduce others into a plot, and that one of his agents met with one that would not listen to him, nor conceal what he had offered him, but so detected the trapan. This, he says, is most true.
He also, among other instances how the King is served, did much insist upon the cowardice and corruption of the King’s guards and militia, which to be sure will fail the King, as they have done already, when there will be occasion for them.
In our 102nd episode, Lyle moves his mail, contacts, and calendar off Google and finds madness on the other side of the walled garden — Fastmail, two contact lists, a calendar his wife can’t see, Rands’s robot discovering royalties he was never paid, and why none of these services play nicely together (it’s triage, not malice).
We talked about:
Related Important Things episodes:
Enjoy it now, or download for later. Here’s a handy feed or subscribe via Overcast or iTunes.
Links for you. Science:
Silicon Valley promises AI will cure disease. Drugmaker CEOs aren’t buying it.
A Physicist at Israel’s Weizmann Institute Is Manipulating Light to Make Objects Invisible
How Earth Lost a Billion Years of Its History
Some Parts of the Ocean Are Turning a Weird Shade of Blue-Green. Scientists Suspect It’s Plastic
Is America on the brink of an animal-flu pandemic?
Other:
‘I’m a hard yes’: Hakeem Jeffries announces support for Hegseth impeachment
A year after the 100% AI mandate nobody understands our code
Psycho killer
Surge in voter turnout in urban, border counties carried Texas blue wave
It’s Education, Stupid (this ignore the role of religious affiliation; among whites, religious affiliation is a much better predictor than education)
Crowley says he’d sign bill redrawing congressional lines as he looks to first 100 days
Protest erupts at Boyle Heights hospital after ICE transports patient, blocks ambulance entrance
Democrats Want Their Party to Rethink Its Southern Strategy (though it’s worth noting they’ll do much better in off-year elections than presidential year elections)
‘That Stops When I’m Governor’: Dem Texas Governor-Elect Warns Big Tech And Elon Musk
Gina Hinojosa’s Win Was the Most Important of the Entire Midterms
Two Blue States Voted Against Trans Youth In Sports
To Win Back Americans’ Hearts, Israel Should Form a Government With Arab Parties
Meet the man who keeps many of Boston’s historic doors beautiful
U.S. Midterms Will Usher in a Radically Different Israel Policy. Israelis Aren’t Ready (though it really doesn’t discuss how much Republicans are going to blame Israel for Trump’s disastrous Iran policy, which is a whole ‘nother source of trouble)
Progressives Probably Can’t Stop Chuck Schumer From Becoming Senate Majority Leader
A Jewish-Arab Government Is the Answer to Israel’s Most Basic Problems
Mitch McConnell gives unnerving blank stare when asked about midterm results as heath concerns mount
An Anthropic S-1 Colonoscopy
The Confessions of an AI Fraud Kingpin
About that night… Troy Jackson, Susan Collins and the remaking of Maine
Michael Lewis on Elon’s Anti-Moneyball
America’s Backlash Against Oligarchy
The Netflix vs. YouTube Phony Cold War
Hegseth expands National Guard presence in D.C.
On Congress
The Huang Affair: What did they know and when did they know it?
Fox and the GOP were so distracted, they let Annie Andrews win
That’s Sad
The forgotten formula for lovable cities
Know Your Place
HAH! WE MAKE THE FUNNY! This is a headline from the English-language site of the French newspaper Le Monde:
This is a completely accurate headline. Miller is a white supremacist and a reactionary ideologue, but no U.S. paper will ever say that out loud, even though it would inform their readers. Because it still is far worse to call someone racist than it is to be a racist. And because many Serious People would have to admit they are willing to accommodate bigotry.
This, as the kids used to say, is another reason why we can’t have nice things.
In previous articles, I explained how the Linux kernel implements IPv4 and IPv6 routing tables, and I showed the performance improvement of route lookups from Linux 2.6.32 to 4.16 for IPv4—including the impact of the Meltdown and Spectre mitigations—as well as from Linux 2.6.39 to 4.18 for IPv6. This article updates the numbers through Linux 7.3 and investigates the perpetrator responsible for the performance regressions! 🕵️♂️
I ran the following benchmarks on an AMD EPYC 8024P, a Zen 4c CPU, rented from Scaleway, running at 2.4 GHz with CPU boost disabled. I compiled the kernels with GCC 10.2: this version can compile older kernels as well as the current ones.
I tested four scenarios:
In Linux 4.15, Wei Wang improved the lookup performance by replacing the read-write lock with an RCU and a spinlock in commit 66f5d6ce53e6. In Linux 4.18, David Ahern improved the data structures used by route lookup. In Linux 5.9, Brian Vazquez removed expensive indirect calls in commit 55cced4f813b.
The major 200 ns regression introduced in Linux 6.5 wiped out all these
improvements. This version implements a mitigation for "Speculative Return
Stack Overflow," a vulnerability affecting AMD processors, in commit
fb3bd914b3ec. This mitigation adds about 20 cycles on each function return.
It was backported to older kernels (5.10, 5.15, 6.1, and 6.4). To keep the
results legible, I disabled the mitigation for these versions with
spec_rstack_overflow=off on the kernel command-line.
You can check the vulnerabilities impacting your CPU and their mitigations with
lscpu. Some mitigations may depend on the microcode or on the
firmware.1
$ lscpu | grep '^Vuln'
Vulnerability Gather data sampling: Not affected
Vulnerability Indirect target selection: Not affected
Vulnerability Itlb multihit: Not affected
Vulnerability L1tf: Not affected
Vulnerability Mds: Not affected
Vulnerability Meltdown: Not affected
Vulnerability Mmio stale data: Not affected
Vulnerability Reg file data sampling: Not affected
Vulnerability Retbleed: Not affected
Vulnerability Spec rstack overflow: Mitigation; Safe RET
Vulnerability Spec store bypass: Mitigation; Speculative Store Bypass disabled via prctl
Vulnerability Spectre v1: Mitigation; usercopy/swapgs barriers and __user pointer sanitization
Vulnerability Spectre v2: Mitigation; Retpolines; IBPB conditional; IBRS_FW; STIBP always-on; RSB filling; PBRSB-eIBRS Not affected; BHI Not affected
Vulnerability Srbds: Not affected
Vulnerability Tsa: Vulnerable: Clear CPU buffers attempted, no microcode
Vulnerability Tsx async abort: Not affected
Vulnerability Vmscape: Mitigation; IBPB before exit to userspace
I tested three scenarios:
The 30 ns impact of the mitigation for SRSO in Linux 6.5 is smaller than for IPv6 because IPv4 route lookups traverse fewer functions: around 4 function calls for IPv4 compared to 25 for IPv6.
In Linux 5.11, I introduced a regression in commit c0c5a60f0f13 after
fixing the behavior of net.ipv4.conf.all.ignore_routes_with_linkdown!2
As a result, the ip_ignore_linkdown() function spends
around 5 additional cycles to return a result as it needs to follow three
additional pointers. fib_lookup() eventually calls it in the
following code:
if (ip_ignore_linkdown(nhc->nhc_dev) &&
nhc->nhc_flags & RTNH_F_LINKDOWN &&
!(fib_flags & FIB_LOOKUP_IGNORE_LINKSTATE))
return false;
If we reorder the conditions, we avoid calling ip_ignore_linkdown() for the
most common case where the link isn't down:
if (nhc->nhc_flags & RTNH_F_LINKDOWN &&
!(fib_flags & FIB_LOOKUP_IGNORE_LINKSTATE) &&
ip_ignore_linkdown(nhc->nhc_dev))
return false;
Here's the distribution of lookup times before applying the patch on top of net-next:3
min=128 max=4657 count=994104 95th=134 90th=133 50th=132 mad=0
value │ ┊ count
128 │ 120
129 │ 2232
130 │▒ 25224
131 │▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░ 264264
132 │▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ 516480
133 │▒▒▒▒▒▒░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ 126864
134 │▒░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ 21624
The lighter shade depicts the cumulative distribution function. After applying the patch, the median improved from 132 to 126 cycles:4
min=124 max=208839 count=994104 95th=128 90th=127 50th=126 mad=0
value │ ┊ count
124 │ 576
125 │▒▒ 49440
126 │▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░░ 584904
127 │▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ 284592
128 │▒▒░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ 45288
To reduce the impact of mitigations, you can disable all of them with
mitigations=off, disable only a specific one like with
spec_rstack_overflow=off, or protect against only some attack vectors with
mitigations=auto,no_user_kernel, starting from Linux 6.17.
The impact is also quite different depending on the CPU. For example, on a Xeon W-2295, an Intel desktop CPU from 2020, the impact of the mitigations is only a few cycles for IPv4, and less than 3% for IPv6. The main contributor is the mitigation for the Indirect Target Selection vulnerability, which is fixed since the Sapphire Rapids architecture.
If we set aside the regressions introduced by the mitigations against CPU attacks, the performance of IPv4 is declining slowly over time while IPv6 has improved in the past and is currently stable. If routing performance is important, you have several options: choose a different CPU like an AMD Zen 5 CPU, a fourth generation Xeon CPU, or maybe an ARM Neoverse V2; disable some or all the mitigations; bypass routing with XDP/eBPF;5 or offload routing to the network card.
Note
Maytham Alsudany reviewed a first draft of this article. Any errors are still mine!
The microcode was out of date on my machine as I forgot to install the
amd64-microcode package. As it only impacts TSA, our benchmark is
unaffected. Spectre v2 mitigation did not enable automatic IBRS, because
of SEV-SNP being enabled in the firmware. With automatic IBRS, the
impact of SRSO should be smaller. ↩
Despite ipvX in its title, the commit only changes the behavior of the
IPv4 code. The IPv6 version overwrites the value of each device in
addrconf_fixup_linkdown(). ↩
Linux 7.5 will be the first stable release including this fix. ↩
At 2.4 GHz, one cycle is about 0.42 ns. ↩
This requires avoiding bpf_fib_lookup(), which relies on
the same kernel lookup. ↩
1. What WWII looked like, four and a half minute video.
2. Intellectual Deep Web, YouTube channel.
3. Complete works of Schelling, and no I do not mean Thomas.
4. What the French Left is proposing.
5. How much AI could the CEA manage?
6. Douthat!
7. Andrew Maxfield, Stations of the Cross, vocal music.
The post Monday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, Julian E. Barnes, and Tripp Mickle, reporting for The New York Times (gift link):
Mr. Rubio’s memo was circulated to administration officials with high-level security clearances ahead of a trip Mr. Trump took to China in May, the people briefed on the matter said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive material.
Despite his status as an A.I. pioneer and head of one of the world’s most valuable companies, Mr. Huang was initially left off the list of major business and tech executives invited to join Mr. Trump in China. It is unclear whether the exclusion was connected to the memo. By that point, a number of people inside the administration were concerned about Mr. Huang’s influence on the president’s policy of only lightly regulating A.I., people briefed on the matter said.
After Mr. Trump saw media coverage about Mr. Huang being absent from the delegation, the president asked him to join the trip by meeting Air Force One during a layover in Alaska. The president drafted a social media post saying that it was an honor to have “the Great Jensen Huang,” and other business leaders “journeying to the Great Country of China where I will be asking President Xi, a Leader of extraordinary distinction, to ‘open up’ China so that these brilliant people can work their magic.”
This Huang-Huang affair explains a few things that until now didn’t make sense, and Jensen Huang not being invited on that May trip to China — until Trump invited him on the fly at the Alaska layover — is one of them. Also worth noting that on multi-byline stories, The Times puts them in order of who contributed the most to the story. In this case it’s Haberman, who is closest to Trump and the White House:
Asked about Mr. Huang’s admission to his company about his affair with Ms. Huang, Mr. Trump told reporters on Sunday evening that he did not regret his own lack of action.
“No, I don’t think so,” the president said. He added that he believed Mr. Huang should stay on as Nvidia’s chief executive.
“I think he’s an honorable guy. I think he probably has an excuse for it. You have to hear it,” Mr. Trump said.
Trump, you will recall, was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to his hush-money payments to porno star Stormy Daniels, who banged him and (spanked him with a magazine with himself on the cover) at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe in 2006. That was four months after Melania Trump, his third wife, gave birth to their son Barron. So take “he probably has an excuse for it” with a $130,000 grain of salt.
There’s a Journalism 101 adage that news stories should be written in an “upside down triangle”, with the most important information at the top and the least important at the bottom. Another little inside-baseball tidbit about The Times, however, is that The Times, rather uniquely, often buries the most interesting (but not most important) paragraph at the very end. This story ends thus:
In recent years, Megaspeed, despite having essentially a storefront office and little local footprint, purchased $2 billion worth of Nvidia’s products. Megaspeed builds data centers in Southeast Asia that rent out their computing power to Alibaba, the giant Chinese internet company. U.S. officials suspect Megaspeed has been helping smuggle restricted advanced Nvidia chips into China.
If true, this is politically damaging to both Nvidia and Huang personally, but the context is that Nvidia booked over $300 billion in revenue over the last year.
Julian E. Barnes, Tripp Mickle, Paul Mozur, and Maggie Haberman, reporting for The New York Times on Friday:
John Rizzo, an Nvidia spokesman, said that the company does not share classified information with its customers, and that customers do not ask Nvidia to press the U.S. government to change its policies on chip sales to China.
He added that the Chinese government had “consistently promoted its own domestic alternatives in China, including Huawei, and strictly limited imports of our data center products.”
Mr. Rizzo has maintained that Mr. Huang’s interactions with Ms. Huang were “not unusual” and consistent with the kinds of meetings he has with any of Nvidia’s many customers.
Turns out this was not true, unless Jensen Huang is consistently banging many of Nvidia’s customers. And it now looks especially bad that an Nvidia spokesman was effectively vouching for the Chinese government’s integrity when it comes to their interest in circumventing the ban against selling them high-end Nvidia hardware.
Liu Chang, a spokesman for the Chinese embassy, said The Times reporting was “unsubstantiated” and “nothing but smears against China.”
Turns out this was completely substantiated and everything it implies about the Chinese government is true.
Ms. Huang has not responded to multiple attempts to reach her for comment in recent days.
The Times has a photo of Ms. Huang with Mr. Huang at a Taipei party in 2024. She’s straight out of Central Casting for a Chinese honeypot.
The New York Times, back on October 29:
Nvidia said the company that employed Ms. Huang, Megaspeed, was like any other regional customer and that it had previously investigated and debunked claims the Singaporean company was smuggling chips to China. John Rizzo, a spokesman for Nvidia, said: “Jensen’s interactions with Ms. Huang are not unusual or unexpected. Meetings with customers are part of a C.E.O.’s job; Jensen talks with thousands of customer executives every year.”
Jensen Huang’s personal life is his personal life. But he’s made it Nvidia business — an Nvidia spokesman has been repeatedly on the record saying the Huang/Huang relationship was “not unusual”. If you want to cheat on your spouse that’s your business, but it’s irresponsible to allow employees at your company to tell what you know to be lies on your behalf.
Worse would be if it turns out that Megaspeed, the company Alice Huang works (worked?) at, was funneling Nvidia hardware to China in contravention of US national security law. That could make Jensen Huang’s position at Nvidia untenable.
Washington — The Computer & Communications Industry Association today released Connecting the World: Unlocking the Potential of Satellite Connectivity, a new report examining how satellite technology can expand internet access, […]
The post CCIA Report Highlights Satellite Connectivity’s Potential to Expand Internet Access and Drive Economic Growth appeared first on SpaceNews.
If you missed it this weekend, check out my piece on the remarkably part-time, almost non-existent Cindy Hyde-Smith campaign. Quite stunning.
Last month I had a conversation with a high ranking AI executive who told me that the fundamental reason for the U.S. lead over China in AI development was U.S. access to high-performance NVIDIA processors. The Biden administration placed export controls on those chips targeting China back in 2022. The Trump administration sort of loosened those controls though, for a variety of reasons, that shift in policy hasn’t translated into that much actual change in practice. This struck me at the time: this is a wildly anti-China administration; it’s a wildly pro-AI administration which premises everything on the need to maintain a strategic AI edge over China; but it’s more open to allowing China access to these chips that are central to U.S. dominance in AI? How can that possibly make sense?
This conversation has been on my mind for the last couple weeks as we’ve learned more and more about the spy scandal enveloping NVIDIA co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang. To bring you up-to-date, yesterday, NVIDIA’s board announced that it would investigate Huang’s relationship with Alice Huang (no relation), who U.S. intelligence believes is a Chinese spy. This came shortly after Jensen Huang admitted in an email to NVIDIA employees (immediately made public) that he had carried on an extramarital affair with Alice Huang.
This scandal looks like a very big deal, regardless of the exact details of what information Alice Huang might have gotten from Jensen Huang or what Jensen Huang may have known about her. The precise details of U.S. export controls are too complicated and contradictory for me to focus on here. The key is that U.S. intelligence has known about the relationship and had decided that Alice Huang was a spy something like a year ago. Jensen Huang is a strong advocate of loosening those export controls, though simple business advantage can explain that: China is a huge market for NVIDIA chips. All the key administration players, including the president, were reportedly briefed on this. Last spring, Marco Rubio oversaw the creation of a highly classified memo detailing the case against Alice Huang which was then circulated to top administration officials. Yet no top officials, including the president, took any action. They didn’t take any action against Jensen Huang or compel him to cut off contact with Alice Huang; and Jensen Huang remained one of Trump’s highest level advisors on national AI policy.
Trump’s inattention or disregard is par for the course for everything we know about his attitude toward U.S. intelligence agencies. He sees them as meddlesome intruders on his freedom of action to make “deals,” driven by his own self-interest, whom he castigates as “deep state” enemies. We know this most from his dealings with Russia. But there’s every reason — and a good deal of evidence — to believe it applies across the board. They are a constant reminder and irritant, from within the government, of interests distinct from his own which frequently come into conflict with them.
This story first broke into the public view a week before the election. That story had all the markers of either people in the U.S. intelligence world or perhaps people at the State Department or others in the government disgruntled about Trump’s inattention, going to the Times to try to force the matter. The timing doesn’t seem like a coincidence either. It is impossible to believe that each development over the last two weeks isn’t closely connected to the expectations and then reactions to the 2026 midterm, which have broken Trump’s monopoly of political power in the federal government and signaled the end of the free-for-all (or at least information about what’s happening inside) of the last two years.
This genuinely cinematic but also grave story brings together everything about our current moment. NVIDI is the axle at the center of the AI boom. Data centers are massive warehouses of NVIDIA chips. AI runs on them. NVIDIA has used its exploding stock valuation and cash flow to invest in/prop up key segments of the rest of the AI economy. That practice of the core producer using its mammoth profits to prop up the purchasers of its products has been at the center of bubble worries for at least a year.
What causes a bubble and what triggers its collapse are not the same. An over-extended, over-inflated market is the cause. But the trigger for its end is usually some contingent, semi-random occurrence that triggers the unwinding. It’s like a lit cigarette randomly tossed out a car window onto bone-dry and overgrown brush. We’ve probably found that contingent, semi-random event.
It also goes to the heart of Trumpism. We have very clear reporting that President Trump was briefed on this situation earlier this year and disregarded it. If I’m understanding the reporting, Rubio’s classified memo came after that, an attempt to at least spread awareness of the situation through senior ranks of the administration even if President Trump himself refused to take any action. So apparently President Trump and most other senior leaders were aware of this and either took no action or knew that none was being taken. This applies to Rubio even if, perhaps especially if, he was trying to spread the word. He’s known for at least six months that one of the top two or three CEOs at the center of the U.S. AI industry and a top advisor to the President was having an extramarital affair with a Chinese spy? Did he do anything more than commission that memo last Spring?
Scandals ‘stick’ when they’re messy, not simply because of the gravity of the wrongdoing involved. Here we have the inherently messy and attention-grabbing fact of an extramarital affair with a spy. That will rapidly intersect with the seat-of-the-pants reckless style of Trump’s inner circle, where basic rules are habitually violated and extreme corruption is commonplace. Those facts make it highly unlikely we’ll get to the bottom of this anytime soon. It’s equally hard to imagine Huang being able to remain fully on the job — at least for some period of time — while this story explodes around him. NVIDIA appears to be tightly bound to Huang’s personal decision making. So it’s impossible for him to be removed or step aside of his own accord. But that’s just another path to an equal amount of destabilization and distraction. And remember, NVIDIA really is the cornerstone of the whole AI industry — both because of the superior nature of its technology but also because of how much its own cash flow has been used to prop up numerous other players across the industry.
A report in PNAS last week on a long-running study of school choice proposals in San Francisco came out almost simultaneously with an announcement that San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) plans to largely step back from school choice and revert to a system of neighborhood schools determined by students' home addresses. Below are the PNAS paper, the SFUSD announcements, and then some links to the history of school choice in SF.
I. Lo, K. Mentzer, M. YahyazadehJeloudar, H. O’Connell, J. Monardo, & I. Ashlagi, Designing school choice for diversity in the San Francisco Unified School District, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 123 (45). November 2, 2026, e2524796123, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2524796123 (2026).
"Abstract. More than 65 years after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling that school segregation is unconstitutional, public schools across the United States are again experiencing rising segregation. In districts like San Francisco, efforts to implement district-wide choice policies have largely failed to reverse these trends. Since 2019, we have collaborated with the San Francisco Unified School District to design a student assignment policy meeting the district’s goals of diversity, predictability, and proximity. We use optimization techniques to develop policies restricting choice to zones. We compare these to district-wide choice policies by estimating a choice model using historical application data and simulating assignment. Our results show multiple policies can reduce school segregation while preserving varying degrees of proximity, choice, and predictability. Zone-based policies with reserves reduce the concentration of racial minority students in high-poverty schools and maintain proximity, but reduce choice. District-wide choice with reserves and distance-based priority can further reduce segregation, but at the cost of predictability. Tradeoffs are necessary as no policy dominates another policy. In addition, we show that spatial segregation indices capture average patterns in these tradeoffs but miss important variation revealed by our simulation framework. Our work informed the design and approval of a zone-based policy in San Francisco in 2020, and supports ongoing policy implementation."
##########
Historic Step Toward a Great Neighborhood School for Every Student
SFUSD is changing how students are assigned to elementary schools. On October 13, 2026, the Board of Education voted to replace the current lottery with a neighborhood-based system. Under the proposed policy, every family would be guaranteed a seat at a school near home, no matter when they apply. Families could still apply to citywide programs, such as language programs and K-8 schools. We are making this change because families have told us the current process feels complicated and unpredictable. Where your child goes to school should not come down to luck.
The Board’s vote sets a direction. It is not the final policy. Over the next few months, we will meet with families in their schools and neighborhoods, in many languages, to work out the details. The Board will hold its final vote on April 13, 2027. Nothing changes for current families. The new system will start with students who enroll in the 2028-29 school year.
A new assignment system is only part of the work. Every child deserves a strong school close to home, so we also plan to invest in schools in every neighborhood, starting with those that have been the most underserved.
###########
San Francisco has been considering and tinkering with school choice for a long time, during a period in which other kinds of political turmoil rocked SF and its schools. Here (mostly from 2010) and here are some of my earlier posts on school choice in SF.
It’s one of the peculiarities of American regulatory history that a natural gas pipeline can cross state lines with a single federal permit, but oil and electricity must run a gauntlet of state approvals. When a power line crosses one state to reach another, for example, the intervening state often imposes exorbitant tolls or, worse, vetoes the project entirely. It’s the holdout problem played out among the states.
In a new paper, Liscow, Shapiro and Williams show that after Congress ended the states’ veto over interstate gas pipelines in 1947, miles built per year rose nearly sixfold. Oil pipelines, which still had to run the state gauntlet, held steady. Lower transaction costs let natural gas flow to where it was most valued, creating a national market.
Today, as Liscow and Shapiro write in the Washington Post, the issue is electricity:
An interstate power line, however, typically needs approval from every state it crosses. That gives each state a veto over projects in which the benefits often flow mostly to its neighbors.
New England has experienced the consequences. In 2016, Massachusetts attempted to import Canadian hydropower. New Hampshire, which would have hosted the power lines without getting the same influx of cheap energy, rejected it. A second route through Maine was blocked in a referendum and didn’t deliver power until January. Meanwhile, Massachusetts households paid some of the highest electricity prices in the country.
As with natural gas, electricity is cheapest to produce far from where it is most valued, so to get the most from our national resources we need to transmit electricity across the country.
The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, which faces a Senate cloture vote on Monday, would let FERC approve an interstate line that a state has blocked or stalled for a year, a big step toward a national market in electricity.
Let the power flow!
The post End the State Veto on Power Lines appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Of course as an economist I am always wondering what the equilibrium is. And, in this case, what is the scarce factor?
It seems that in the case under current consideration, the returns to honeypotting are very high for somebody. Maybe for China, maybe for the shorts, or maybe for parts of the Deep State that seek to shape domestic politics (and they possibly drove the timing of the leak?).
So why are not three potential honeypots sent every day to the most prominent men? If the guy says no, you do not have to pay them for very long, right? Or you can just have them try another, different guy.
I can think of a few hypotheses:
1. The number of attractive women with sufficient spy training is actually pretty low. Furthermore the spy agency has to trust the woman to some degree.
2. The number of attractive women willing to do this is pretty low. But at what wage? And in some countries threats to the family, or benefits to the family, can be added to the transaction.
3. It is difficult to access the most prominent men, and that limits the number of honeypots that can be sent. Furthermore, at some point the honeypot woman has to find time alone with the man, and that is not always easy.
4. In fact three potential honeypots are sent every day to the most prominent men.
5. Competition from the non-honeypot women is so strong the honeypots do not have such a great chance, thus limiting their supply. The non-honeypot temptresses will sometimes have stronger vetting as well.
6. Some of the most prominent men “go the Epstein route” instead, hoping for delegated vetting and a kind of mutual “hostage-taking,” noting that proved extremely risky as well.
What else?
The post The economics of honeypots appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Two weeks ago, I attended the [un]prompted AI security conference in San Francisco. It was an excellent event: three days of very dense talks about all aspects of AI security. (My talk was about integrous AI, and I will post it when it is online.)
AI security can be divided into three broad topics. It’s important for researchers to understand which one they are working on. And it’s important for us as a community to work on them all. They are: security of AI, security with AI, and security from AI. [un]prompted had good talks about all three.
Goats everywhere! Three-hour handstands! Magical doorknobs! Discover a whole new way of looking at a Cubist masterpiece
- by Aeon Video
In the summer of 1646, the idea of equality gained new and profound depths. We are still catching up with the consequences
- by Teresa M Bejan
Raffi Krikorian, Mozilla’s CTO, joined Tim O’Reilly at our recent AI Codecon to talk about open source AI. Mozilla, of course, is the nonprofit that helped to define the open source revolution back in the late 1990s. Though its Firefox web browser was superseded as the market leader by Google Chrome, it played an essential role, along with Apache and the World Wide Web Consortium, in establishing the open standards of the web and keeping it from being dominated and enclosed by Microsoft, the dominant tech platform of that time. Now, Mozilla is one of the leading voices working to build an open, standards-based AI ecosystem.
Tim has long appreciated Raffi’s thoughtful, human-centered approach to technology. Raffi writes a newsletter called Owners Not Renters, whose message can be summed up by his statement that he doesn’t want a future with seven AGIs. He wants one with seven billion. He wants each of us to have an AI that we can trust with our secrets and that will look out for our interests, not an AI that’s optimized for the business model of its creators. In the early days of the web, we called the browser a user agent for a reason, Raffi said. It was on your side. It let you render pages however you wanted, managed your privacy and your cookies, and did its best to protect you from those who wanted to take advantage of web users. We need the same thing in the age of AI.
Raffi cited a paper in which researchers tested whether AI assistants could be trained to favor a company’s commercial interests over user welfare. In simulated flight-booking requests, 18 of 23 models recommended a more expensive sponsored option over a cheaper one more than half the time. It’s a hypothetical choice that we’ve seen play out time and time again, in industry after industry.
Open source AI is a big part of what it will take to get to Raffi’s vision. But sovereign AI loyal to each individual needs more than open source models alone. Raffi’s list of what has to be built around the model starts with memory, a place where your private data can live. It includes tool calling, so an agent can make a purchase or book a doctor’s appointment for you, the runtime environment where all of that runs, and the rules for how his agent talks to those working on behalf of others. It needs a harness. “That’s where evaluations happen. Guardrails happen, execution loops happen, tool calling happens, memory,” he explained. “All of that stuff is an opportunity, in my mind, of things that open source developers can be building.”
People hear the word “harness” and conclude that we need an open source version of whatever the proprietary labs are building. Tim asked Raffi whether a user-centered harness might do different things than those offered by the big labs. He agreed. The whole point of open source is for people to “scratch their own itch.” The ability to innovate without permission is the heart of the open source promise.
As a result, Mozilla wants to build a starting point. It aims to help the community define what an open memory protocol, a storage protocol, or authenticated tool calling with the right guardrails ought to look like. As Raffi noted, “Once we could define what those open standards look like, then a whole plethora of people can start playing and be interoperable. It’s basically. . .the internet all over again. We can build trillions of dollars of market cap on top of open protocols.”
Ease of use is still lacking, though. Mozilla’s 2026 State of Open Source AI report says open models are now within about 3% of the frontier, yet they don’t make it into production at the same rate as closed models. When Tim asked why, Raffi explained that open source is easy to release but hard to deploy. Developers still have to figure out hosting, provisioning, guardrails, and memory. With OpenAI’s or Anthropic’s API, you just hand over a credit card. What’s missing, he said, is the equivalent of a double-click installer for getting open source AI running inside an organization. But the companies that do the work to adopt open source AI are seeing big savings because open models are already good enough for most use cases. As Raffi put it, “You don’t need a Ferrari to manage your calendar.”
Raffi’s own daily agentic helper is Hermes running on GLM. He expects that Apple, Microsoft, or someone else will make this kind of agent into a consumer product in a couple of years, and that his mom will end up using it. For now, he said, we’re on the wrong part of the innovation curve, where you have to know how to code to get any of this working.
Tim disagreed. The industry goes through periods that are exciting for developers, creators, inventors, and companies trying to invent the future, and then it gets boring and a few big companies dominate it. We’re in the exciting part, he argued, before everything shakes out. As Raffi riffed, this is when we get to formalize what that future should look like.
Tim wasn’t sure that we’ll need a commercially supported version of the kind of “roll your own” agentic rigs now favored by independent developers. After all, neither desktop Linux nor OpenOffice turned out to matter anything like as much as open source developers of the time expected. Instead, open source became the foundation layer for a new generation of web-based applications. It’s hidden way down in the guts of Google, Amazon, Meta, and countless other applications we rely on today.
This is already beginning to happen again with AI. The Mozilla report says that as much as a third of real-world usage is already on open models, although only 4% of model-layer revenue made its way to the open source ecosystem. Tim called the discrepancy a feature rather than a bug, and Raffi agreed that the stat is misleading. As Tim pointed out, many of the most important technologies “create more value than they capture,” and he used Steve Baer’s concept “The Clothesline Paradox,” from a 1975 article in Stewart Brand’s CoEvolution Quarterly, to explain why we’re good at measuring value capture but not so good at measuring value creation.
Baer pointed out that if you put your clothes in the dryer, the energy you use is measured and counted, but if you hang them on the clothesline to be dried by the sun, the energy saved disappears from our accounting. This argument resonated with Tim in the early days of his open source advocacy. As he noted, it’s always bothered him that nobody seemed to recognize that open source software didn’t “win” in the same way as proprietary software. It won by becoming the foundation everyone else builds on.
Raffi’s comment that we’ve made a category error by treating AI as a product fits right in with this line of thinking. If an AI company goes out of business, its product disappears. If it changes its business model, it may yank features you depend on. It’s not just individuals who need sovereign AI. Countries are passing laws about where data can be processed and how it moves in and out, and some of those requirements may not be compatible with the way the big labs plan to monetize their technology. What those countries are asking for is infrastructure. A road outlasts the contractor who built it. Raffi thinks open, downloadable models are the only way to provide long-lasting foundational infrastructure.
According to OpenRouter stats, Chinese models now supply more routed tokens than American ones. Tim asked whether we should worry about that. Raffi said the problem isn’t China but market concentration. The leading open models are from China. The leading closed models are all American. Access to either can be cut off by an executive order. We saw a version of that in June, when Anthropic temporarily suspended access to its Fable models to comply with export controls. It’s a problem that both the leading proprietary models and the leading open-weight models are each concentrated in a single country.
Diversity is one foundation of resilience. Raffi argues, for instance, that hospitals should all download a local model as a backup. None of us would run an important computer without an uninterruptible power supply, so why would a hospital doing triage with AI rely on a single intelligence provider? There are a lot of possible rug pulls. The government could restrict open source or restrict the frontier models. Having a backup plan is a good idea.
Safety is also part of the foundation. During the Q&A, an audience member asked about the recent sandbox escapes at OpenAI and Anthropic. Raffi joked that the best part was watching everyone try to one-up each other with accounts of how powerful and hard to control their models are. But he agreed that guardrails are actually a hard problem. Keeping personally identifiable information from leaking out through an LLM call means looking for much more than Social Security numbers. Eventually we’ll have models defending models, but the foundational frameworks for guardrails aren’t good enough yet. (NVIDIA’s safety platform announcement, released after Raffi and Tim’s conversation, suggests that better guardrails need to be implemented outside the model.)
Tim opened AI Codecon by noting that open and closed systems have always coexisted, and that the idea that one of them will win is a mistake. Closed systems, like Apple’s, Google’s, OpenAI’s, and Anthropic’s, can optimize for ordinary people and deliver value to billions. Open systems are better for innovation and sovereignty, and for pushing technology into new countries and new markets.
Raffi closed the conversation by observing that a well-tuned harness can improve model performance by as much as 20% on some coding tasks. You don’t have to be a machine learning engineer to make a difference at that layer.
My comment on The Web Is More Than Enough, by Paul Ford — Hacker News.
OK, this comment convinced me to give that a shot.
Here's a thing I made in Three.js this morning - a Nudibranch themed Faberge Egg: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/Hidden-Reef-Egg... (77KB)
I just asked Claude (Opus 5.5 Medium running in regular Claude Chat) to port that to Vanilla JS, in the same thread where it had built it, and got this: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/Hidden-Reef-Egg... (98KB)
They aren't identical - you can see what Claude said about that in the transcript (I don't fully understand why it differed): https://claude.ai/share/e56d163e-2793-4677-aa11-191d5058b414
But yeah, it turns out Claude Opus 5.5 is perfectly capable of 3D modeling in Vanilla JS + WebGL without Three.js.
In eyeballing the code I find the Three.js slightly easier to understand myself, but I rarely look at the code for these 3D projects so that isn't a particularly big deal.
Tags: claude, javascript, three-js, hacker-news, generative-ai, ai, llms
Most of the changes I make to my projects these days come in the form of PRs opened for me by Claude Code or Codex. The PR is my unit of work - I use them to bundle commits together, iterating on them until a feature is complete, document decisions and then merge the finished result. Today's coding agents are great at writing PR descriptions.
The problem is that they are too good. An agent-written PR description is accurate and comprehensive. It describes the problem, the detailed solution, and the steps taken to verify it. That's a lot of information to absorb.
It's not necessarily slop, but it reads like slop!
It's very easy to spot an AI-written PR, and as with other forms of AI writing my instant reaction is best summarized as "I'm not reading all of that". It doesn't matter how accurate or useful the information is, I'm instantly put off by the thought that it will take me longer to read than it took the driving author to write... even when that driving author is me!
I want human editorial judgement. I want someone to have thought just long enough about the PR to give me a human-approved introduction that helps me understand, at a high level, what the PR is for and whether it deserves more of my attention.
I think I've found a low-effort way to do this that feels right.
The HTML <details><summary> elements render as a collapsed heading (the summary) that can be expanded to view the larger piece of text. The code looks like this:
<details>
<summary>Claude Opus 5.5</summary>
<h2>The hook</h2>
Plugins implement <code>register_agent_reference_types(datasette)</code>...
</details>When rendered, it looks like this:
Crucially, <details><summary> is supported in GitHub Markdown. You can drop those tags directly into an issue comment or PR description and GitHub will hide the details and display just the summary plus an expansion arrow.
I've started using this for my AI-generated pull requests.
The opening paragraph of my PRs will be carefully selected to act as a high-level explanation of what's going on - the shortest text a human can read that will help get them up to speed.
I'll sometimes throw in a screenshot as well, since images are often the best way to quickly illustrate a new feature.
The full agent-written essay then follows in a <details><summary>. I use the model name and often the effort level as that summary, to make it abundantly clear what is going on - "Claude Opus 5.5 Medium" for example.
My PRs don't feel nearly as sloppy now! The information is all still there, but a reader can glance at it and get the top, human-curated information without their eyes glazing over at multiple paragraphs of agent-written details.
I don't always write the introduction myself - sometimes the agent has given me what I need already, hidden away in the avalanche of other text. My promise to the reader is that the short opener will represent my human judgement as to what is definitely worth their time.
Here are some recent examples where I've used this pattern, including the opener I used:
repos table, that scrolled far off to the right and left most of the page blank." (then a screenshot)edit-tools.js (~220KB) was loaded on every table, row and database page, even for users who couldn't edit anything. Now only load it for users who can edit when they first interact with an edit feature (including mouse over an edit link)."# tagging in the chat composer using a new register_agent_reference_types(datasette) plugin hook." - pictured above.extra-openai-models.yaml, so OpenAI-compatible endpoints can be saved from the command line instead of by hand-editing YAML." - then copied --help output.I used to have trouble remembering the order of the tags - is it <details><summary> or <summary><details>?
Here are two tricks that helped me.
First, and most obviously, the <summary> is clearly the bit where you summarize the details. That's the tag for your line of text that can be clicked to expand - the <details> element must then wrap everything else.
An even better trick is to always refer to these two tags as "details-summary".
"details-summary" is two syllables followed by three syllables. That rolls off the tongue more smoothly than the three-two punch of "summary-details".
Say "details-summary" out loud just a few times and you'll never forget the order of the tags again.
(I still wish GitHub would add a button to their Markdown editor for this - partly to save me painstakingly typing it on my mobile keyboard, and partly to help spread the word to more GitHub users that this feature exists.)
Tags: github, html, markdown, ai, datasette, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, llm, coding-agents
Many longtime fans of my Hexapodia podcast with Brad DeLong have been begging us to bring it back. Well, here it is! Hexapodia will now be a series of Substack Live conversations that you can tune in to, and which will be recorded as podcasts and sent out as emails.
Our first episode was a little rocky, as I got the time wrong and ended up arriving 20 minutes late. But Dan and Brad are both brilliant people, so you can watch them talk for a while before I show up! The topic of our discussion was the Anthropic IPO, inspired by my post about it last week:
I give the bull case for Anthropic, while Dan and Brad are both more skeptical. I think this quote sums up my side of the argument:
My bull case [for Anthropic] is not envisioning a world where Anthropic rules all businesses, rules 100% of every industry, or close to it. I’m also not envisioning a case where AI replaces human beings in their jobs.
I’m envisioning a change in the capital structure of the efficiently producing economy. I’m envisioning…a world where in order to succeed in any industry, you must create a tie-up with a frontier AI company that offers you access to an internal proprietary frontier model that will be months ahead of any model distilled from it. And…that doing this will require not purchasing services…at arm’s length from that company, but tying up your capital structure with that company so that you become in some sense a subsidiary of that company. I am envisioning that.
So I’m saying that instead of something where…AI is like oil and everyone has to buy oil or the things made downstream from oil…instead of that sort of arm of length world, I’m envisioning a world in which every company in order to succeed must become a subsidiary of Anthropic, OpenAI, [or] Google…and Anthropic is simply the biggest of those fish in a oligopolistic ecosystem of a few conglomerates competing against each other via their little subsidiaries in every single industry at the same time.
Interestingly, some economists at Google Deepmind just released a paper with a model in which this sort of thing happens. From the abstract of Imas, Koh, and Legg (2026):
When will advances in AI lead to economic transformation? We develop a model of how intelligence…matters for organizations….AI expertise is reproducible while humans’ are in fixed supply, and AIs may not face the same human limits on coordination….When AI is more capable than the average human, organizations of complementary humans can nonetheless outperform AI. Increases in AI competence can change the composition of workers within firms and decrease firm size. As AI coordination improves, however, this can break the Coasean ceiling on firm size and the market structure undergoes a phase transition toward large, concentrated AI-heavy firms. [emphasis mine]
I was envisioning a slightly more complex version, in which humans and AI are complements, where humans have private data that AI is better at using, and where one big conglomerate enters every industry but retains human workers. But I think Imas et al.’s model gets at some of the basic dynamics here.
Financial disclosure: I have no current position in Anthropic, but unless something major changes, I will probably buy Anthropic stock when it IPOs. I own stock in TypeSafe, an Anthropic competitor.
Here is the initial post. In the comments Michael Wiebe notes: “So progress per R&D dollar fell by 63%, even while progress per year doubled.” File under: David Ricardo, underrated.
The post Seb Krier, Ricardian? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Despite its weaknesses, Paraguay’s young democracy was still able to deliver under stress. Its free, boisterous press was the first to sound the alarm about Peña’s shenanigans. The Central Bank’s supervision chief did his job: he examined ueno’s numbers and recommended blocking the sale of its bad loans to a related company (Peña had appointed him to a different agency four days earlier). Legislators, including most of Peña’s fellow Colorados, moved swiftly to investigate and impeach the president. Prosecutors, who belong to a Public Ministry not always independent of the executive, ordered the arrest of ueno’s top directors the day the Central Bank took over the bank. They ordered Peña’s arrest the minute Congress impeached him—all within less than a week.
One of Paraguayan democracy’s greatest accomplishments has been earning an investment-grade rating for its sovereign debt, from Moody’s in 2024 and S&P in 2025. The macroeconomic and financial management behind it, through the finance ministry and the Central Bank, has brought low inflation and overall stability. As a result, Paraguayans can save, invest, and run their households and businesses like never before, and per capita GDP has grown steadily for three decades. That same framework is now repaying ueno’s small depositors through a deposit guarantee of up to $38,000 per person and, so far, has kept the panic from spreading to other banks. Whether it can also make whole the pension fund and the state agencies with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake is the next test.
Last but not least, there’s a big dog that hasn’t barked in this crisis. Unlike almost all of Paraguay’s previous political crises, the military has been a non-entity. No military leader has stepped forward to offer a solution, the press doesn’t even mention the military, and nobody on the streets expects or wishes a military solution. That’s a major democratic win.
Here is much more from Tomas Mandl, who also has an excellent book on Paraguay.
The post The Paraguayan bank story appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
The glowing streak of the Milky Way splashes across the Chilean sky in today’s Picture of the Week. The telescope gazing in admiration is the Danish 1.54-meter telescope, hosted at ESO’s La Silla Observatory. This telescope has previously imaged some of the cosmic marvels we can see in this picture. The Carina Nebula can be seen glittering pink at the bottom of the Milky Way band. And at the top of the image we can see the bright, star-forming Lagoon Nebula.
From La Silla’s location in the southern hemisphere, the bright core of the Milky Way passes directly overhead. The dark patches we see across the glowing centre are caused by clouds of interstellar dust and gas, which absorb light from the galactic centre on its way to Earth.
Do not worry, the green glow we see in this image is not a result of urban light pollution. This is a natural phenomenon known as airglow, caused by interactions between the Sun’s light and molecules in the atmosphere. This faint light is invisible to the human eye but appears in photographs like this one.
