Elon Musk lets his white supremacist freak flag fly:
On Thursday morning Elon Musk retweeted (with a ‘100%’ endorsement) a post declaring that:
If white men become a minority, we will be slaughtered. Remember, if non-Whites openly hate White men while White men hold a collective majority, then they will be 1000x times [sic] more hostile and cruel when they are a majority over whites. White solidarity is the only way to survive.
Again, because so many are insistent that “retweet does not equal endorsement,” it’s important to note that Musk added the ‘100%’ endorsement emoji.
This is flat out Cecil Rhodes level racism–not surprising, given his father’s and grandfather’s bigotry.
All the conservatives who tried to defend Musk’s Nazi salute look really stupid right now, including the shandas at the ADL.
Links for you. Science:
The U.S. vaccine schedule is a jet engine. Denmark’s is a toy plane.
I No Longer Think GLP-1s Are the Answer
Elusive wild cat feared extinct rediscovered in Thailand
Colibactin produced by a honeybee symbiont defends against pathogens and shapes the gut community
Bizarre Ecosystem Discovered More Than Two Miles beneath Arctic Ocean
What Would You Name This Cat?
NASA’s Largest Library Is Closing Amid Staff and Lab Cuts
Other:
Here’s everything Elon Musk promised in 2025 – and failed to deliver
This Is Almost As Bad As The Time Sarah Huckabee Sanders Was Politely Asked To Leave A Restaurant
Mamdani Appoints Pro-Labor Lawyer To Run Worker Protection Agency
Trump’s Secret Weapon Has Always Been Status Anxiety
Stephen Miller Is The New Republic’s 2025 Scoundrel of the Year
How Dems can win the Senate in 2026
2026 Will See a Major Wisconsin Supreme Court Race. Yes, Another One (will it serve as another for Ben Wilker et alia to raise money without delivering on redistricting?)
The MAGAfication of Norman Rockwell
Trump vetoes Miccosukee flood protection, citing tribe’s opposition to ‘Alligator Alcatraz’
2025: The Year The USA Got Infected With Both Measles And Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
I’m Kenyan. I Don’t Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me.
Here we go again: Retiring coal plant forced to stay open by Trump Admin
Director of Minnesota day care featured in YouTube video on fraud responds
Did Trump voters vote for deporting every undocumented immigrant?
Watching Bari Weiss Murder Investigative Journalism at CBS
Trump administration terminates lease for Washington’s 3 public golf courses
Jim Jordan Buries His Own Cowardice in a Cowardly Document Dump
How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me, a beginner
Leaked Emails About Removal of Black WWII Soldier Memorials Spark Backlash
TRUMP IS JUST THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani delivers inaugural address
Hopefully The Last Gasp
The Heritage Foundation Shows How MAGA Will Die
Sure Why Not
Tired old man ignoring the advice of his doctors
America IS Better Than Stephen Miller
The Failed Mamdani Mayoralty
Everything you need to know about Zohran Mamdani’s first year as mayor
The Deaths of Despair Crisis Was Underway Before Opioids Arrived
25 Worst Villains of the Trump Admin
SpaceX aims to launch a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Wednesday afternoon, but faces difficult weather.
The Starlink 6-98 mission will add another 29 Starlink V2 Mini Optimized satellites to the low Earth orbit constellation. This will be its fourth Starlink mission of 2026.
Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 40 is scheduled for 1:08 p.m. EST (1808 UTC). The Falcon 9 rocket will fly on a south-easterly trajectory upon leaving the launch pad.
Spaceflight Now will have live coverage beginning about an hour prior to liftoff.
SpaceX will launch the Starlink 6-98 mission using the Falcon 9 first stage booster with the tail number 1085. This will be its 13th flight after flying missions, like Crew-9, Blue Ghost Mission 1 and Fram 2.
Nearly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1085 will target a landing on the SpaceX drone ship, ‘A Shortfall of Gravitas.’ If successful, this will be the 139th landing on this vessel and the 559th booster landing for SpaceX to date.
So my poor wife rose by five o’clock in the morning, before day, and went to market and bought fowls and many other things for dinner, with which I was highly pleased, and the chine of beef was down also before six o’clock, and my own jack, of which I was doubtfull, do carry it very well. Things being put in order, and the cook come, I went to the office, where we sat till noon and then broke up, and I home, whither by and by comes Dr. Clerke and his lady, his sister, and a she-cozen, and Mr. Pierce and his wife, which was all my guests.
I had for them, after oysters, at first course, a hash of rabbits, a lamb, and a rare chine of beef. Next a great dish of roasted fowl, cost me about 30s., and a tart, and then fruit and cheese. My dinner was noble and enough. I had my house mighty clean and neat; my room below with a good fire in it; my dining-room above, and my chamber being made a withdrawing-chamber; and my wife’s a good fire also. I find my new table very proper, and will hold nine or ten people well, but eight with great room. After dinner the women to cards in my wife’s chamber, and the Dr. and Mr. Pierce in mine, because the dining-room smokes unless I keep a good charcoal fire, which I was not then provided with. At night to supper, had a good sack posset and cold meat, and sent my guests away about ten o’clock at night, both them and myself highly pleased with our management of this day; and indeed their company was very fine, and Mrs. Clerke a very witty, fine lady, though a little conceited and proud. So weary, so to bed. I believe this day’s feast will cost me near 5l..
The next Global Positioning System satellite is switching from a United Launch Alliance Vulcan rocket to a SpaceX Falcon 9, a spokesperson for the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command System Delta 80 said Tuesday.
SpaceX could launch the GPS III Space Vehicle 09 (SV09) within the next few weeks, as the satellite was entering the final stages of pre-flight preparations. As part of the swap, United Launch Alliance (ULA) will instead launch the third of the next generation of Global Positioning System satellites. The GPS III Follow-on (GPS IIIF) SV13 satellite was originally scheduled to launch on a Falcon Heavy, but will now fly on Vulcan.
“SV09 and SV13 were traded between ULA and SpaceX to get capability to orbit as soon as possible, for the same reason as the prior swap, which resulted in the last GPS launch in May 2025,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “The trade results in an overall net cost savings to the government and again demonstrates our sustained commitment to moving at speed to deliver combat-credible capabilities on orbit to meet warfighter needs.”
SV09 was originally awarded to ULA as part of order year five of the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 2 contract, which was announced on Oct. 31, 2023. That year, ULA was awarded 11 missions (valued at $1.3 billion), including the mission named GPS III-9, which would’ve launched the SV09 spacecraft. Originally, SV13 was slated to fly on a Falcon Heavy rocket “in a future calendar year.” That mission was originally awarded to SpaceX as part of the first order year for the NSSL Phase 3 Lane 2 contract announced on April 7, 2025.
This isn’t the first time that the Space Force has shuffled timelines and switched launch providers for GPS missions.
Back in May 2025, SpaceX launched the GPS III SV08 spacecraft, which was originally assigned to ULA in June 2023. In exchange, ULA was given the SV11 launch, which would have flown on a Falcon Heavy rocket.
In December 2024, the Space Force had SpaceX launch the SV07 spacecraft, which was originally assigned to ULA. The mission, called the Rapid Response Trailblazer, was designed to “minimize the impact of Vulcan delays” to the Space Force’s launch manifest, according to Col. Doug Pentecost, the deputy program executive officer at the time for Space Systems Command’s Assured Access to Space program.
Connecting user accounts to third-party APIs always comes with the same plumbing: OAuth flows, token storage, refresh logic, and provider-specific quirks.
WorkOS Pipes removes that overhead. Users connect services like GitHub, Slack, Google, Salesforce, and other supported providers through a drop-in widget. Your backend requests a valid access token from the Pipes API when needed, while Pipes handles credential storage and token refresh.
Elon Musk, in a tweet responding to Google’s announcement of their deal to provide Gemini to Apple for use in Apple Intelligence:
This seems like an unreasonable concentration of power for Google, given that the also have Android and Chrome
I’m sure that if Grok were as popular as Gemini, Musk would turn down a deal with Apple to avoid concentrating “power” in his hands.
Eddy Cue, in a rare bylined post on Apple Newsroom:
The numbers reflect the incredible enthusiasm of our customers, whether it’s downloading an exciting new app or game, watching the hottest new show with family and friends, listening to their favorite songs, or shopping with peace of mind. The App Store alone saw over 850 million average weekly users globally, with developers earning over $550 billion on our platform since 2008. Apple Pay also made a significant impact by eliminating well over $1 billion in fraud, while generating more than $100 billion in incremental merchant sales globally, and purchases made through Apple Pay significantly outpaced the overall growth in consumer spending levels during the peak holiday shopping period in November and December.
Those are numbers.
Apple TV eclipsed all prior viewership records in December 2025, while Apple Music reached all-time highs in both listenership and new subscribers.
Those are not numbers.
Apple TV’s engagement this past December soared, with total hours viewed up 36 percent compared to the previous year, setting a new record for monthly engagement.
That’s a number, but it’s a Bezos Number.
If you’re in the Washington, D.C. area at the end of this month, I want to invite you to join us for our first-ever TPM Morning Memo event. As you know, Morning Memo, from TPM’s David Kurtz, is now our anchor daily summary and analysis of the inner workings of Donald Trump’s assault on the American republic. That centrality will only grow over the course of the the coming year. The Justice Department, as we’ve seen again just in the last 24 hours with the sham investigation into Jerome Powell, is at the center of the corruption. So on Jan. 29 we’ve hosting a Morning Memo discussion about the corruption and politicization of the Department of Justice under the second Trump administration. The panelists include:
Attendees are encouraged to ask their own questions, and to join the panelists for a reception after. Tickets are free for TPM Inside members, who received a special discount code via email. If you’d like to purchase tickets, you can purchase them here. I’d love to see you there as we dig into this critical part of our present crisis.
Apple Newsroom:
Apple today unveiled Apple Creator Studio, a groundbreaking collection of powerful creative apps designed to put studio-grade power into the hands of everyone, building on the essential role Mac, iPad, and iPhone play in the lives of millions of creators around the world. [...]
Apple Creator Studio will be available on the App Store beginning Wednesday, January 28, for $12.99 per month or $129 per year, with a one-month free trial, and includes access to Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, and Pixelmator Pro on Mac and iPad; Motion, Compressor, and MainStage on Mac; and intelligent features and premium content for Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and later Freeform for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. College students and educators can subscribe for $2.99 per month or $29.99 per year. Alternatively, users can also choose to purchase the Mac versions of Final Cut Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Logic Pro, Motion, Compressor, and MainStage individually as a one-time purchase on the Mac App Store.
One-time purchase pricing, from the footnotes:
One-time-purchase versions of Final Cut Pro ($299.99 U.S.), Logic Pro ($199.99 U.S.), Pixelmator Pro ($49.99 U.S.), Motion ($49.99 U.S.), Compressor ($49.99 U.S.), and MainStage ($29.99 U.S.) are available on the Mac App Store.
I’ll have more to say later today, but my first observation is that with the exception of the new version of Pixelmator, the user interfaces of these apps completely ignore Liquid Glass. That could be a statement from the design teams for these apps, or could be a factor only of version requirements:
Pixelmator Pro for iPad is compatible with iPad models with the A16, A17 Pro, or M1 chip or later running iPadOS 26 or later. The Apple Creator Studio version of Pixelmator Pro requires macOS 26. [...]
The one-time-purchase versions of Final Cut Pro requires macOS 15.6 or later, Logic Pro requires macOS 15.6 or later, and Pixelmator Pro requires macOS 12.0 or later. MainStage is available for any Mac supported by macOS 15.6 or later. Motion requires macOS 15.6 or later. Compressor requires macOS 15.6 or later and some features require a Mac with Apple silicon.
My hope is that the UI shown today for Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Motion, and MainStage is a flat-out rejection of Liquid Glass for “serious” apps. My fear is that it’s only a result of their continued support for MacOS 15 Sequoia. (But I think they need to continue supporting MacOS 15 Sequoia because so many pro users are rejecting MacOS 26 Tahoe.)
Sarah Perez, writing at TechCrunch:
“We’ve structured this entire business around being a sustainable, profitable, and hopefully, long-running enterprise, but not a startup,” Migicovsky told TechCrunch on the sidelines of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week. [...]
“I want a companion to my phone, rather than a replacement for my phone. I want it to be more like a Swatch than a Rolex. I want it to be a little bit more fun, casual, playful, and plasticky.” Plus, he added, with the reboot of Pebble, he’s now okay with a watch that doesn’t try to do it all.
“I’m okay with a limited vision and a limited scope of what we’re trying to accomplish,” Migicovsky said.
Under the new company, Core Devices, the team has announced the Pebble Time 2 smartwatch, a round-faced Pebble Round 2, and a $75 AI smart ring, called the Index 01.
What a great profile from Perez. I think she captured the current moment for Core Devices. I personally don’t want their new watches, and I don’t see the appeal (especially ergonomically, given that it needs to be on your index finger) of the Index 01 ring, but I can see why some people might. And I’m delighted to see a small company trying these things. Better to make things a few people might love than to try to make something zillions might like.
Forty years ago, The Mentor—Loyd Blankenship—published “The Conscience of a Hacker” in Phrack.
You bet your ass we’re all alike… we’ve been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak… the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We’ve been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.
This is our world now… the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore… and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge… and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias… and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals.
Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.
Social Security also got quietly more generous during this period. Each year, the Social Security Administration compares the C.P.I.-W (the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners) for the third quarter to the third quarter of the previous year and, if needed, adjusts benefits upward to compensate for inflation. There happen to have been three years during Obama’s presidency — 2009, 2010, and 2015 — when the mathematically correct cost-of-living adjustment would have been negative. What actually happens in this case is that seniors get zero cost-of-living adjustment, which means that, in real terms, benefits ratcheted upward.
Then during the Biden administration, Congress ended up passing the Social Security Fairness Act, which increased Social Security benefits for a disproportionately affluent set of retirees with access to other pensions with very little fanfare. This happened via a hugely bipartisan vote, so even organizations that were critical of the idea when it was first proposed were mostly silent as it actually happened. Then during the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump proposed “no tax on Social Security,” which is really just a way of making Social Security benefits mildly more generous for high-income seniors.
That is from Matt Yglesias. It would be amazing if we got away with all of this!
The post They are solving for the (electoral) equilibrium appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
1. Pre-history of progress studies and links.
2. Do institutional investors raise housing prices?
3. Alex Sarr leads the NBA in blocks.
4. History LLMs.
5. The new Middle Eastern Cold War. Likely to be one of the better and most important of essays from this year.
6. What did Mondrian borrow from Marlow Moss?
The post Tuesday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
People often assume that choosing a debt relief company is mostly about comparing prices or looking for the fastest results. But a more useful way to approach the decision is by paying attention to how a company behaves rather than what it advertises. The most dependable providers tend to demonstrate transparency, consistency, and genuine customer support long before a person signs up for anything. This perspective becomes especially helpful when someone begins searching online for guidance and comes across questions like, which debt relief company has the best service Instead of focusing on one name, it is often more productive to understand the qualities that define top tier providers.
Many people seek debt relief during moments of stress, which can make it difficult to evaluate companies objectively. Promotional claims may sound reassuring, but the real value lies in how well a company listens, explains, and respects a client’s situation. When a provider focuses on education rather than pressure, it usually reflects a higher level of professionalism. This shift from sales talk to service-oriented guidance is one of the clearest signs that a company puts clients first.
Another perspective worth considering is how a company adapts to different financial situations. Debt relief is not a one size fits all service. People come to these programs with unique combinations of income changes, mounting bills, or unexpected emergencies. The strongest companies acknowledge these differences and customize their approach rather than relying on a rigid, scripted process.
A company’s history can reveal a lot about its reliability. Well established providers typically have years of experience handling negotiations, communicating with creditors, and supporting clients through multi step programs. An extensive track record also means they have encountered a wide range of financial scenarios, which allows them to offer better insight and more realistic advice.
When evaluating experience, look for companies that openly share their background, leadership information, and industry involvement. Reputable organizations are often accredited or recognized by consumer protection groups, which gives clients an additional layer of confidence.
The Better Business Bureau provides useful public information about business practices, complaint histories, and ratings. Reviewing a company’s profile on the BBB website through its resource on evaluating business reliability can help consumers understand patterns of behavior that might not be obvious from marketing materials alone.
Debt relief involves detailed financial agreements, so transparency is non-negotiable. Top companies clearly outline their fees, how payments work, what clients can expect during negotiations, and what limitations may apply. They avoid vague explanations or hidden costs, and they make sure clients understand the possible outcomes, both good and challenging.
A transparent provider will take time to explain potential credit impacts, program timelines, and the steps involved in reaching settlements or structured agreements. They do not rush conversations or pressure clients into signing quickly. Transparency creates trust, and trust is essential for a successful long term financial partnership.
Quality customer service is one of the strongest indicators of a trustworthy debt relief provider. The best companies offer consistent communication, respond promptly to questions, and provide updates throughout the program. They treat clients like partners rather than transactions.
Customer support also includes educating individuals about financial habits, budgeting, and long term planning. Companies that invest in client knowledge tend to produce better outcomes because clients remain informed and prepared for each phase of the process.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau offers extensive guidelines on what consumers should expect when working with debt relief professionals. Their resource on choosing and evaluating debt relief services can help individuals recognize strong customer service practices and avoid potential scams.
Financial hardship affects everyone differently. A top tier debt relief provider understands that no two situations are exactly alike. Instead of promoting a one size fits all program, they take the time to assess the client’s income, expenses, debt types, goals, and long-term financial plans.
Customized plans often include a combination of strategies such as negotiation, structured repayment, budgeting guidance, or referrals to outside resources if another option is better suited. Flexibility ensures that the program adapts as the client’s circumstances evolve, such as changes in income or unexpected expenses.
Ethics play a critical role in the debt relief industry. The best companies follow industry regulations, avoid misleading claims, and never guarantee specific results. They operate with honesty and acknowledge the risks and challenges associated with debt resolution.
Professional conduct also includes respecting the client’s time, privacy, and autonomy. Ethical companies do not pressure clients or use aggressive sales tactics. Instead, they empower clients to make informed decisions that align with their financial wellbeing.
The most effective debt relief companies think beyond immediate debt reduction. They focus on long term financial health by helping clients build better habits and understand the root causes of debt accumulation. This educational approach may include guidance on budgeting, saving, rebuilding credit, or managing emergencies.
By encouraging long term financial strength, reputable companies help prevent clients from falling back into the same patterns after completing a program. This commitment to lasting improvement is one of the clearest signs of a service provider that prioritizes people over profits.
Evaluating debt relief companies requires more than comparing prices or reading promotional claims. The best providers demonstrate transparency, ethical practices, strong customer support, and a commitment to long term financial health. By focusing on qualities such as experience, customization, and clear communication, individuals can confidently identify companies that offer dependable and effective service.
Choosing a debt relief provider is a significant decision but understanding what defines a top tier company helps ensure the experience is supportive, professional, and ultimately successful.
Photo: pch.vector via Freepik.
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The post Evaluating Debt Relief Companies: Criteria for Identifying Top Service Providers appeared first on DCReport.org.
Portugal has become the latest country to sign the Artemis Accords outlining best practices for responsible space exploration, beating out another European country to be the 60th to join.
The post Portugal signs the Artemis Accords appeared first on SpaceNews.
Turin, Italy — Jan. 11, 2026 — The 12U CubeSat LIDE (LIve DEmonstration) has successfully completed its first months of on-orbit operations following its launch July 23, 2025, aboard a […]
The post Tyvak International’s LIDE satellite completes initial on-orbit 5G tests appeared first on SpaceNews.
Behind the rhetoric about competition and innovation, not everyone is convinced SDA’s approach is a win-win
The post Space Force wants competition. Satellite makers want stability. appeared first on SpaceNews.
Michigan-based supplier cites rising government and commercial demand amid tight smallsat supply chain
The post Orbion delivers 33 electric thrusters to York Space for U.S. military constellation appeared first on SpaceNews.
Lunar night survival becomes an imperative “Surviving the lunar night has crossed a critical threshold: what was once a ‘nice-to-have’ is now the imperative for any serious lunar mission. We’re seeing this ‘survive, operate, thrive’ progression play out in real time: we’ve proven we can land repeatedly, now we’re focused on surviving that brutal two-week […]
The post 2026 will be the year of space nuclear power and surviving the lunar night appeared first on SpaceNews.
Eutelsat has ordered the remaining 340 satellites needed to replenish its OneWeb satellite constellation from Airbus Defence and Space.
The post Eutelsat orders 340 additional satellites to replenish OneWeb constellation appeared first on SpaceNews.
Belgian manufacturer to support early rollout as U.S. commercial PNT startup builds in-house production
The post Aerospacelab to build eight satellites for Xona’s navigation constellation appeared first on SpaceNews.
A widespread demand for nuclear power has led some to call this period a “nuclear renaissance,” one that will continue to build momentum in 2026. This growing need is being driven by two primary use cases: small modular nuclear reactors for cloud infrastructure and terrestrial data center needs, and nuclear electric reactors for lunar surface […]
The post There’s no end in sight for a space ‘nuclear renaissance’ appeared first on SpaceNews.
IRVINE, Calif. & LOS ANGELES, Calif. — January 13, 2026 — Turion Space Corp. (“Turion”), a space infrastructure company that builds and operates mission-grade spacecraft and space operations software, today […]
The post Turion Space Corp. Acquires Tychee Research Group to Accelerate Autonomous Space Operations and Mission Engineering appeared first on SpaceNews.
Liv is great at this, here is the Spotify link. Note this was recorded in May 2025, and its release postponed due to technical difficulties. So if a few parts seem “behind the times,” that is why. ” Tyler also shares his views on economic growth, UBI, automation, persuasion, state capacity, why fears of mass unemployment and civilizational collapse are often overstated.”
The post My Win-Win podcast with Liv Boeree appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
The attack by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth against Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., is far from over, in part because of the untested legal workaround Hegseth is using as intimidation.
The case remains an unexploded, irksome explosive that could seek to destroy free speech to keep Hegseth from having to answer questions from the public he is supposed to serve.
Like most of the Trump administration assaults on perceived political enemies, Hegseth is nasty, under-evidenced, overly personal, and seeks a punishment most easily achievable rather than focusing on proving a declared violation.
As with threatened but failed prosecution attempts against James B. Comey Jr., former FBI director, New York State Attorney General Letitia James and others, they are meant as retribution and protection of Trump and his circle, not resolution of crimes or civil law violations. As in those cases, the threat of reconstituting cases continues.
In November, Kelly was among six lawmakers to make and distribute a video citing the military’s own warnings for officers and enlisted personnel to consider whether they are being given illegal orders to carry out, and that they have the right to say no. Yesterday, Kelly filed suit in federal court, saying that Hegseth had unlawfully punished the senator for his speech and violated his due process.
Though Kelley and company, all veterans or former intelligence officials, did not reference specific military orders that should be questioned, we’ve seen several instances recently in which the orders to strike anew at stricken crew members on a suspected drug boat, the deployment of National Guardsmen to city streets, or now, by extension, the shooting of an unarmed Minneapolis citizen protesting against the spreading ICE raids in residential neighborhoods all raise legal questions.
In what has become pattern in this administration, Kelly’s “crime” here was to point out the law that is taught to every officer and enlisted soldier, sailor, airman, Marine and Guardian. Only in the cockeyed view of this administration is a dissenting word from existing law seen as a cause for punishment. Kelly has promised to fight any punishment as unwarranted.
Though Hegseth had threatened to re-active Kelly, a retired Navy captain and astronaut, to stick him before a court martial board, Hegseth settled on a censure letter to Kelly’s file that says that the senator’s actions were prejudicial to good order and discipline.
That letter – something he could do without process or consultation – opens the way to possible reduction in retirement grade and pay.
That judgment remains pending before Secretary of the Navy John Phelan, who must recommend an action to Hegseth – who already has made up his mind. Regardless, the censure letter cannot be changed, but Kelly remains within time to file an opposing letter to answer its claims. (As an aside, Phelan contributed more than $800,000 to the then-candidate Trump’s joint fundraising committee.)
The possibility of a court martial still hangs in the air, though a board of military peers sitting as jury would have to overlook the statements that Kelly quotes as having come directly from the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) to which they all swore an oath. Hegseth has referred the others in the video to the FBI for investigation as having committed “acts of sedition.”
According to USNI News, which covers the military as an independent voice, Hegseth has a variety of punishments available, though most of them are intended for application towards serving military troops, not retirees, and not U.S. senators whose job includes oversight of the military. There are some limitations on what retirees can say freely, but there must be a direct link between objectionable speech and actual military operations. It also must involve something contemptuous against a politician or member of the chain of command.
Kelly’s remarks telling service members to refuse unlawful orders don’t fall under restriction from good order and discipline, and don’t advise specific military orders to refuse. Any broad contempt for Hegseth is shared far more widely than Kelly alone.
Meanwhile, the very same Hegseth has declined to cooperate with Congress about releasing videos of the September “double-tap” strikes against a suspected drug-smuggling boat crew and generally has withheld information about National Guard deployments or details about current orders and plans for the military in Venezuela.
Donald Trump himself told The New York Times in a recorded interview that he sees adherence to domestic and international law as relatively optional, that that his power as commander in chief is constrained only by his “own morality.”
Obviously, ordering military strikes in Venezuela without a specific aim other than capturing leader Nicolás Maduro to face drug charges, does not violate Trump’s morality. Nor do attacks on shipping, or on small, suspected drug boats, deployment of troops on our own city streets or extending paramilitary status to undertrained Homeland Security agents.
Given the number of court actions that have found legal problems with Trump administration enforcement actions, the possibility of “illegal” orders seems endless.
For a host of reasons, the warnings from Kelly and company seem well founded. Hegseth’s one-man prosecution campaign seems unfair and reflective of an administration that finds legal boundaries mere guidelines.
In like fashion, the Justice Department’s announced investigation of criminal fraud charges against Fed chair Jerome Powell begs many of the same questions, though the prosecutor is U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro and the circumstances involve construction costs for a replacement complex on the National Mall and lying to Congress.
As a result, the probe comes across as a political swipe against Powell over disagreement with Trump about the nation’s basic interest rates, not a fix for high building costs. It’s another move towards intimidation rather than for justice, all because Trump wants lowered borrowing rates from an independent Fed panel. On top of all else, Powell’s term will expire this year and Trump can name his replacement (Trump did name Powell, of course.)
Two aspects stand out: The investigation has become public before it has collected necessary evidence, and it is shaped around a criminal charge as a first alternative, rather than one of multiple routes towards controlling the money spent or planned to finish construction. Criminal fraud will necessitate proving intent, among other things, and at this point, the prosecution does not even have the basic construction documents in hand.
Once again, the Trump administration is bending law enforcement around its desire for political results, not sifting evidence first to even determine if there is a crime here.
The post Hegseth’s Pursuit of Mark Kelly appeared first on DCReport.org.
Former Rep. Mary Peltola is challenging GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan in Alaska, potentially putting a tough race in reach for Democrats.
Peltola, a Democrat who served one term as Alaska’s at-large U.S. House representative from 2022 to 2025, was widely seen as a prized top recruit for the race and for national Democrats, who have an uphill battle to reclaim control of the U.S. Senate in 2026.
Peltola, the first Alaska Native person elected to Congress, focused on supporting Alaska’s fisheries while in office.
“My agenda for Alaska will always be fish, family and freedom,” Peltola said in her announcement video Monday. “But our future also depends on fixing the rigged system in D.C. that’s shutting down Alaska while politicians feather their own nest.”
“It’s about time Alaskans teach the rest of the country what Alaska first and really, America first, looks like,” she added.
A 2025 survey by progressive pollster Data for Progress, which regularly polls Alaska voters, found that Peltola has the highest approval rating of any elected official in the state. She narrowly lost reelection to Republican Rep. Nick Begich in 2024.
Elections in Alaska are conducted with top-four nonpartisan primaries and ranked-choice general elections. In the Data for Progress poll, 46 percent of voters said they would rank Sullivan first and 45 percent said they would rank Peltola first in a matchup for U.S. Senate. Sullivan won reelection by a margin of 13 points in 2020.
Republicans control the Senate by a three-seat majority, 53 to 47, and senators serve six-year terms, meaning a third of the Senate is up every election cycle. For Democrats to win back the chamber in 2026, they’d need to hold competitive seats in states like Georgia and Michigan while flipping four GOP-held seats in Maine, North Carolina and even more Republican-leaning states like Alaska, Ohio, Iowa, Nebraska and Texas.
This article was originally published by The 19th on January 12, 2026.
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“Damn it feels good to be a gangsta/ Gettin' voted into the White House” — Geto Boys
I recently listened to an audiobook about the Napoleonic Wars. Overall, the book wasn’t very good, but there was one interesting part where it described Napoleon’s ruling style as being mafia-like. His insistence that other European countries buy French exports, his attempts to shut Britain out of European trade, and a bunch of his other economic policies were fundamentally gangster-ish — they were ad hoc impositions of personal power, often with an eye toward taking revenge on personal enemies and entrenching his own authority.
I immediately recognized this as Donald Trump’s style of governance. Like Napoleon, Trump’s top priority isn’t creating durable institutions that will outlive him — indeed, he regards any such institutions as threats to his own personal power. Many observers have labeled this approach “personalism” or “patrimonialism”, but it’s really just gangsterism. Trump treats America like a mafia organization, and himself as the godfather.
That’s what I thought about when I watched this remarkable video from Fed Chair Jerome Powell:
Powell reveals that Trump’s Justice Department has been investigating the Fed, with an eye to pressuring the Fed to cut interest rates:
On Friday, the Department of Justice [threatened] a criminal indictment related to…a multi-year project to renovate historic Federal Reserve office buildings.
I have deep respect for the rule of law and for accountability in our democracy. No one—certainly not the chair of the Federal Reserve—is above the law. But…This new threat is not about my testimony last June or about the renovation of the Federal Reserve buildings…The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the President.
This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions—or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation.
This is remarkable and unprecedented. Nothing like this has ever happened in the history of the Federal Reserve. Powell is a consummate professional, who cares only about doing his job, and would only make a statement like this under extreme duress.
If a guy like Powell is accusing Trump of threatening lawsuits over interest rate policy, you know he’s not just going on a hunch or spinning a conspiracy theory — there must have been some very explicit backchannel communications from the White House indicating that the Fed could avoid a DOJ lawsuit by lowering interest rates.
This fulfills my pre-election prediction that Trump would spend much of his second term feuding with the nation’s institutions, and that the Fed would be a prime target. The shape of Trump’s strategy against the institutions is now clear. His two main weapons are A) executive orders, and B) DOJ lawsuits. He obeys the courts when they rule against him, but follows none of the traditional norms of the executive branch, using the DOJ and other administrative agencies as arms of his personal political machine. Trump has used this approach against law firms and media organizations that have challenged him, and now he’s running the same playbook against the Fed. It’s all very Napoleonic — which is a nice way of saying it’s gangster-ish.
The more interesting question is what Trump hopes to accomplish by forcing the Fed to cut rates. The conventional wisdom is that Trump is worried about a recession, possibly caused by his own tariffs, and wants rate cuts in order to boost the economy and employment. According to this theory, Trump is basically what I call a “macro-progressive” — he fears unemployment, and he doesn’t worry too much that low rates will cause inflation.
That’s consistent with Trump’s massive binge of deficit spending. Like the progressives at think tanks like the Roosevelt Institute, Trump may believe that inflation is best controlled with administrative measures, supply expansions, and price controls, rather than by the more traditional tools of high interest rates and fiscal austerity.
But I’m beginning to think there’s also something else going on here. Trump’s populist instincts are still strong. He knows that affordability, not jobs, is the American public’s main economic concern right now. For example, here’s a Gallup poll from last month:
General concern over “the economy” takes the top spot as usual, but worries about inflation and the cost of living top worries about unemployment, by a lot. In fact, inflation is the thing that voters seem to be most upset at Trump about, specifically:
Whether he’s concerned about the midterms, worried about his legacy, or intends to try for a third term, Trump knows that the best thing for his popularity would be to bring living costs down.
He also must know that this is easier said than done. Usually, reducing the cost of living means holding down the rate of inflation, so that wages outpace prices over time. But there’s evidence showing that many Americans expect the government to actually drive prices down, rather than just curbing the rate at which they go up:
Driving prices down is normally very hard to do without causing a recession. But a few weeks ago, I wrote a post about how there are actually some prices that the government could feasibly bring down:
I’m starting to think Trump read my post!1 The prices I mentioned are exactly the prices that Trump has targeted with a recent spate of highly unorthodox measures. The attacks on the Fed might be part of this strategy, because one of the items I mentioned is the price of credit.
In his own gangster-ish way, Trump may be trying to bring Americans the affordability they demand. The problem is that the gangster approach can have grave long-term costs in terms of economic stability and efficiency. Like Napoleon, Trump may be headed for a series of boondoggles and quagmires.
The war against science hasn't just focused on research universities, but also on scientific journals. (The concern with journals is that they privilege evidence, which is seen as discriminating against some viewpoints.) And the war on science has a particular focus on medicine, and hence on medical journals. But policing journals takes patience, and (in this case, fortunately) the eye of Sauron doesn't have a lot of patience. (Sort of like pediatricians, who are always in a hurry because they have little patients...)
Medpage Today has the story:
DOJ Sent Letters to Medical Journals. Then What Happened?
— Worrying probe into publications' partisanship may have lost steam by Rachael Robertson,
"A few months into the second Trump administration, major medical journals received letters from Edward R. Martin Jr., who was the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia at the time. (He has since been replaced by Jeanine Pirro.)
"The first letter to come to light was addressed to CHEST Editor-in-Chief Peter Mazzone, MD, MPH, of the Cleveland Clinic, and dated April 14. Martin's letter contained five questions, including how the journal assessed its "responsibilities to protect the public from misinformation" and how it handled competing viewpoints. Martin requested a response by May 2.
"Other major journals received similar letters, including the New England Journal of Medicine and Obstetrics & Gynecology, the official journal of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, as well as two other journals that did not want to be named.
"But since receiving those letters in April, the publications haven't heard a peep on the matter from DOJ, several of the journals confirmed to MedPage Today. Most of the journals also declined to comment on the details of their responses to DOJ's letter. "
It’s been a busy 12 days since I launched Gas Town. ️I’ve merged over 100 PRs from nearly 50 contributors, adding 44k lines of code that no human has looked at. This has grown Gas Town’s total size to 189k lines of Go code since its first commit on Dec 15th, which is now 2684 commits ago. It’s accelerating; I carefully reviewed and merged 25 PRs today alone on Gas Town, and another 17 on Beads. Another dozen or so I sent back to the contributors for changes.
How can I keep up this maintainer pace without breaking a sweat? Well I’m glad you asked, Pilgrim. I’m using Gas Town, that’s how. Keep those PRs coming. I’ll show you how I keep up with them using PR Sheriffs.
I see people have been breaking the first two rules of Gas Town. You’re not supposed to be using it. But I see early adopters cheering drunkenly on LinkedIn because Gas Town drained their bank account and did 10 projects overnight. You know, people used to get mad when Devin did this. But I get it. Once you get hooked on Gas Town, it’s hard to get mad. It’s just so damn cool. So I’m publishing this guide to give a few pointers to the intrepid.
My apologies to the BAGS crowd, you know who you are — you rock, but unfortunately I’ve been drowning in the Gas Town Murder Mystery, plus a deluge of community PRs, not to mention fending off money other people are trying to throw at me. So I’ve been too overwhelmed to go find the money I hear you’ve been throwing at me. But I will come visit BAGS ASAP my MFs.
Gas Town version 0.3.0 will be out this week. This will be a comparatively stable version. We’ve gone through all sorts of crazy issues since launch. There was the Gas Town Serial Killer Murder Mystery that went on like a game of Clue for close to a week. Spoiler: The Deacon did it. It was cleaning up “stale” workers that weren’t stale and murdering entire crews mid-task. So yeah there was that. And we’ve had workers stalling out, getting lost, orphaned, confused about who they are. And no shortage of heresies: compelling but wrong beliefs about the architecture that spread invisibly. Heresies happen regularly when you’re coding blind. You have to sniff them out and eradicate them, often multiple times.
Anyway. It’s all working more smoothly now. Gas Town’s User Safety Index has been upgraded from “randomly rips user’s face off” to “randomly kicks user in groin,” which I think you’ll agree is still a good reason not to use it yet, no matter how much fun everyone seems to be having with it.
With that, here are some tips on how I use Gas Town. I’ll group them into three developer loops. The Vibe Coding book I wrote with Gene Kim, just published in October, characterizes the agentic developer workflow as three nested loops: Outer Loop (days to weeks), Middle Loop (hours to days), and Inner Loop (seconds to minutes). They aren’t strictly isolated and there’s some overlap, because some tasks happen at cadences that aren’t time-based, but pressure-based. But it’s a reasonably good mental model. These loops still hold, and Gas Town adds some new steps to each one.
The tmux tip is huge. It’s a small commitment with a big payoff.
Finally, “Work with your Crew” is the biggest tip of all, so it’s getting its own section. Your Crew are your named, long-lived workers on each project rig. They’re your design team, and they create guzzoline for the swarms.
Polecats are ephemeral and unsupervised workers. When you have the Mayor gt sling work to a rig, a polecat will pick it up. They complete their work and submit MRs without human intervention. (Though, polecats can also escalate work, when it needs human attention.)
Polecats are best for well-defined, well-specified work. You should feed them Beads epics that have been thoroughly decomposed and vetted multiple times for suitability for polecats. They shouldn’t have to make decisions.
But how do you get those big, well-defined epics? That’s where the Crew comes in. Your Crew are named, long-lived agents who work on your Rigs. You can see here a picture of my desktop running Gas Town in a very typical configuration.
In this setup, the Mayor is about to kick off a Convoy, so I’ll have a peak of about 15–16 workers going. I could get aggressive and kick off multiple convoys, but I’m being a bit cautious until I know the murder spree is over.
When v0.3.0 launches I’ll be pretty certain that class of bugs is solved. Right now it’s looking pretty good.
I use the Crew for any sort of thought-intensive work, including design work, reviewing contributor PRs, creating implementation plans, and sometimes doing specific code reviews.
The crew for a rig are on a tmux cycle group. So the left-side (blue) cycles through Gas Town crew, and the right side (green) cycles through Beads crew.
I believe this is the secret-weapon “second workflow” of Gas Town. The main workflow is talking to the Mayor and having it file beads and sling them to polecats as convoys. And that’s great for well-defined work. But cycling through your crew lets you have richer, more hands-on discussions with your agents.
I started life with about 3 crew per rig, but I’ve worked my way up to 7–8 crew per rig. You can add new ones with gt crew add but I just ask some other worker to do it for me. I just pick a theme for each rig’s crew names and then choose the names myself. Having a theme helps you identify which rig they’re from at a glance.
Before I start farming work to a crew, I make sure they’re all reset: no hook, no mail, clean sandbox, fresh session. You can do this with an announcement, but I usually just tell one of the crew members to get all the crew ready. Give them a few minutes to take care of that; work on other stuff while you wait.
When they’re all settled, I’ll go through them all in order, in a big loop.
With one rig fully spinning, I go to my next Rig (Beads, in this case) and start the exact same loop. Go through each crew, give them a meaty task, and let them work.
Then we get to the fun part. You get to see where all your slot machines landed.
As you’re cycling through your crews, you will see some still working, and others will begin finishing. Some of them will finish simple stuff and you just gt handoff to prep them for more work. Others will have questions, or complex summaries, and you’ll need to reserve some time to read what they’ve written and act on it.
I find this is the most satisfying part of the workflow. It’s like you’re Jeff Bezos and your team is presenting results to you, one at a time. You let some merge, send others back to the drawing board, and repurpose still others for random whims. This is the part of the workflow where your project direction unfolds.
One last Crew tip: I have a new ad-hoc role that I’ve been using for the past week, called the “PR Sheriff.” One of my Beads crew has a permanent hook: bd-4f43s: PR Sheriff Standing Orders. On every session startup, the sheriff checks open PRs and divides them into easy wins and those needing human review, then slings the easy wins to other crew for merging and cleanup.
The amazing thing about this is that every time I boot up my Beads crew, they automatically go merge another 5 or so PRs, and flag a couple more for me to review with them. It keeps them busy for a few minutes every time I start up the town, while I’m doing other stuff. I’ve now got a sheriff set up over on the Gas Town rig as well.
The PR Sheriff bead gets accidentally unhooked often enough that I’ve just reassigned it a new id, bd-pr-sheriff, making it easier for me to remember what it’s called when I need to tell the worker to re-pin it (or reference it when talking to a different worker.)
When you work with Gas Town, you don’t usually have time to inspect the code you’re creating. That’s not your role. But you need to make sure the code meets your quality bar. How do you ensure your garden is healthy if you can’t see it?
The answer: regular code review sweeps, followed by bug-fix sweeps that fix the issues filed during the code-review sweeps. Gas Town excels at both of these. It can generate tons of work with a swarm (filing Beads as it finds problems) and then crank through tons of work with another swarm. You just keep doing this until the code reviews are just nitpicking, or the agents say the code is ready to ship. Do some of this every day, and hope that most of the time you don’t find anything bad. The only way to be sure is to do it all the time.
Your garden can get diseases. I mentioned “heresies” above. Agents are very approximate workers and they like to guess and things. They will often make wrong guesses about how your system is supposed to work. If that wrong guess makes it into the code, sneaking through the review process, then it becomes enshrined and other agents may notice it and propagate the heresy in their own work.
“Idle polecats” is an example of a heresy that plagues Gas Town. There is no such thing as an idle polecat; it’s not a pool, and they vanish when their work is done. But polecats do have long-term identities, so it’s more like they are clocking out and leaving the building between jobs, which is harder for agents to wrap their heads around. So “idle polecats” make it back into the code base, comments, and docs all the time.
I’ve found the most helpful way to rid yourself of persistent heresies is to capture your guiding principles in the agent priming (onboarding). Which means you have to come up with some guiding principles in the first place.
Your core principles or axioms will be different for every project you’re working on. But the more coverage you can get with them, the more classes of heresy you can avoid or easily correct simply by pointing at the principle they violate. Gas Town core principles include things like Zero Framework Cognition (shared with Beads), which I’ve written about, GUPP, MEOW, Discovery over Tracking, Beads as the Universal Data Plane, and so on. All of these help me stamp out heresies that try to creep into my code.
A lot of this stuff you can only really show with a video. I’ll get some put together ASAP.
In the meantime, thanks to everyone who’s been messing with it despite knowing it will rip their faces off. It those faceless early adopters who will help us turn it into a real product. Hats off you all!
What's happening to this meteor?
We have a guest host and some breaking news for this episode.
Eryney Marrogi, the scientist and soon-to-be doctor who writes for us now and again, has taken over the pod studio to interview Richard Fuisz. Earlier today, Marrogi broke a story on Fuisz’s company Nonfiction Labs, which has developed technology that could make it possible to use magnets to better control how cancer therapies are doled out in the body.
The two big brains get into Nonfiction’s technology and into Fuisz’s rather prolific work at the cutting-edge of the biotech field. The conversation goes into how biotech actually gets built, competition with China and Fuisz’s family legacy of invention (his grandfather was the prolific inventor featured in “Bad Blood”).
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Two hundred years ago, the strongest magnets on Earth were natural rocks prized as navigational curiosities known as lodestones. After that came electromagnets, permanent alloys, and eventually the “I <3 NYC” fridge magnet. In the span of a few generations, humans surrounded themselves with magnetic fields a hundred times stronger than anything life was accustomed to encountering. And yet, biology didn’t notice.
Not a single protein responds meaningfully to a magnet. Extensive safety studies confirm it: magnetic fields pass right through us, doing nothing, and leaving no permanent trace that they were ever there at all. For most purposes, this is reassuring. For Richard Fuisz and Maria Ingaramo, it was an opening.
Their company, Nonfiction Labs, is building a new class of drugs whose activity can be switched on or off by a magnetic field - something they’re calling “magnetotherapeutics.” The ultimate goal is to make something that works only on active tumors, while leaving healthy tissue alone, all controllable with a magnet outside of the body.
The foundation for all of this is a protein that didn’t exist until a few years ago.
Much of cancer drug development runs on the idea that cancer cells express distinct surface markers (antigens) that distinguish them from healthy cells. It’s a quick leap then to the idea that, with the right target, tumors can be hit while sparing healthy tissue. This logic shaped modern immunotherapy and delivered real successes: Herceptin, Rituximab, Keytruda.
But after two decades of hunting, we’ve picked most of the low-hanging fruit. The cancer antigens we’ve found tend to be flawed in predictable ways. Some are only present in a small minority of patients, making them too rare to matter broadly. Others are found in lots of patients, but most people don’t respond well to therapies against them. The last batch are targets that are both widespread and potent and great for treating cancer. But they usually come at the cost of devastating side effects, requiring life-saving interventions just to survive the treatment.
The most effective options can, in fact, kill patients. And so, better approaches are needed to control how and when a drug turns on if we’re to eliminate the downside of the last category of targets that are both powerful and ubiquitous.
Which is where Nonfiction Labs comes in.
THE IDEA of using magnets to control therapeutics isn’t new. Previous attempts fused magnetic iron particles to proteins of interest. These particles could be dragged around with an external magnet to concentrate a drug in one location, or you could use alternating magnetic fields to heat the particles and trigger some downstream effect.
It didn’t really work. The physics was shaky, the effects small, and early attempts were plagued by experimental problems. The field stalled.
There’s been some experimentation with ultrasound, too, whereby external devices are used to heat delivery vesicles enough to shake a drug payload loose. But even with the increased precision, the released drug still flows onward towards other healthy tissues. These approaches are mostly about controlling where a drug is dumped, but the harder problem is controlling when a drug is working.
Nonfiction Labs’ story didn’t start with cancer, but with more academic goals. While working at Calico Labs, Maria Ingaramo noticed that Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) showed a faint magnetic response – it glowed differently in the presence of a magnet. But this effect was so faint that others had likely dismissed it as noise.
She spent a year prodding the protein with directed evolution, selecting for amplified responsiveness at every round, until she had a variant whose magnetic response was visible to the naked eye.
The mechanism is quantum mechanical: magnetic fields alter how electrons in the protein recombine after excitation, changing its fluorescence. The physics is cool, but secondary to the real lesson. Maria proved the effect is large, and it is engineerable.
Richard Fuisz met Maria back in 2021 while he was working on the early beginnings of what would become Arcadia Science before any of the magnetotherapeutics work began. When her experiments proved that proteins could be made to respond to magnets, his natural next question was - what else could be controlled this way?
The answer, it turns out, is antibodies.
Together they founded Nonfiction Labs and started building what they call magbodies. They’re basically Maria’s magnetically responsive protein parts stuck onto an antibody, where binding affinity shifts in response to a magnetic field. Apply the field, the binding weakens; remove it, binding kicks on. You end up with reversible, continuous control from outside the body. They’ve shown the trick works with enzymes too, gating catalytic activity magnetically.
This is all in service of breaking the constraint where the best targets have the worst safety profiles. A magbody therapeutic could circulate for weeks, inert, activating only where and when it’s needed. Local activation allows for safely hitting tumor cells at doses that would be lethal if engaged body-wide.
HER2 is a useful example. Herceptin, Kadcyla, and Enhertu are all FDA-approved drugs targeting this antigen, commonly found in breast cancers. All produce distinct toxicity because HER2 is also expressed in healthy tissue, particularly the heart. A magnetically controllable HER2 therapy could, in principle, be active at the tumor and silent in tissues prone to damage.
Despite the wins and cool prototyped glowing proteins, it’s still early days. The next milestones are taking things to animal models as part of the long slog towards bringing a brand-new cancer treatment into humans.
If this works, the implications go beyond oncology. Think immunosuppression that targets only a transplanted organ, or endometriosis treatments that hits pathological tissue while sparing the rest of the uterus. Drugs in the graveyard could get a second chance at life.
For billions of years, biology largely ignored magnets. But now, with some protein engineering, a sensitive optical rig and a year of intensive screening, that’s starting to change. Evolution may have missed magnets, but Nonfiction is betting medicine doesn’t have to.
(We also have a podcast between the author of this story and Fuisz right here, if you’d like to learn more.)
Superhuman AI Exfiltrates Emails
Classic prompt injection attack:When asked to summarize the user’s recent mail, a prompt injection in an untrusted email manipulated Superhuman AI to submit content from dozens of other sensitive emails (including financial, legal, and medical information) in the user’s inbox to an attacker’s Google Form.
To Superhuman's credit they treated this as the high priority incident it is and issued a fix.
The root cause was a CSP rule that allowed markdown images to be loaded from docs.google.com - it turns out Google Forms on that domain will persist data fed to them via a GET request!
Via Hacker News
Tags: security, ai, prompt-injection, generative-ai, llms, exfiltration-attacks, content-security-policy
New from Anthropic today is Claude Cowork, a "research preview" that they describe as "Claude Code for the rest of your work". It's currently available only to Max subscribers ($100 or $200 per month plans) as part of the updated Claude Desktop macOS application.
I've been saying for a while now that Claude Code is a "general agent" disguised as a developer tool. It can help you with any computer task that can be achieved by executing code or running terminal commands... which covers almost anything, provided you know what you're doing with it! What it really needs is a UI that doesn't involve the terminal and a name that doesn't scare away non-developers.
"Cowork" is a pretty solid choice on the name front!
The interface for Cowork is a new tab in the Claude desktop app, called Cowork. It sits next to the existing Chat and Code tabs.
It looks very similar to the desktop interface for regular Claude Code. You start with a prompt, optionally attaching a folder of files. It then starts work.
I tried it out against my perpetually growing "blog-drafts" folder with the following prompt:
Look at my drafts that were started within the last three months and then check that I didn't publish them on simonwillison.net using a search against content on that site and then suggest the ones that are most close to being ready
It started by running this command:
Market Designfind /sessions/zealous-bold-ramanujan/mnt/blog-drafts \
-type f \( -name "*.md" -o -name "*.txt" -o -name "*.html" \) \
-mtime -90 -exec ls -la {} \;That /sessions/zealous-bold-ramanujan/mnt/blog-drafts path instantly caught my eye. Anthropic say that Cowork can only access files you grant it access to - it looks to me like they're mounting those files into a containerized environment, which should mean we can trust Cowork not to be able to access anything outside of that sandbox.
It turns out I have 46 draft files from the past three months. Claude then went to work with its search tool, running 44 individual searches against site:simonwillison.net to figure out which of my drafts had already been published.
Here's the eventual reply:
Based on my analysis, here are your unpublished drafts that appear closest to being ready for publication:
🔥 Most Ready to Publish (substantial content, not yet published)
freq-argued-llms.md- "Frequently Argued Questions about LLMs" (22,602 bytes)
- This is a meaty piece documenting common arguments about LLMs with your counterpoints
- Well-structured with a TL;DR and multiple sections
- No matching published article found on your site
- Very close to ready - just needs a final review pass
claude-code-timeline.md- "Claude Code Timeline and Codex Timeline" (3,075 bytes)
- About viewing JSONL session logs from Claude Code and Codex
- You published
claude-code-transcriptson Dec 25, but this appears to be a different/earlier piece about timeline viewing tools- Shorter but seems complete
datasette-1a20-upgrade-instructions.md- Plugin Upgrade Guide (3,147 bytes)
- Technical guide for plugin authors
- You published the main 1.0a20 announcement but this companion upgrade guide appears unpublished
- Would be valuable for plugin maintainers
That's a good response! It found exactly what I needed to see, although those upgrade instructions are actually published elsewhere now (in the Datasette docs) and weren't actually intended for my blog.
Just for fun, and because I really like artifacts, I asked for a follow-up:
Make me an artifact with exciting animated encouragements to get me to do it
Here's what I got:
I couldn't figure out how to close the right sidebar so the artifact ended up cramped into a thin column but it did work. I expect Anthropic will fix that display bug pretty quickly.
I've seen a few people ask what the difference between this and regular Claude Code is. The answer is not a lot. As far as I can tell Claude Cowork is regular Claude Code wrapped in a less intimidating default interface and with a filesystem sandbox configured for you without you needing to know what a "filesystem sandbox" is.
Update: It's more than just a filesystem sandbox - I had Claude Code reverse engineer the Claude app and it found out that Claude uses VZVirtualMachine - the Apple Virtualization Framework - and downloads and boots a custom Linux root filesystem.
I think that's a really smart product. Claude Code has an enormous amount of value that hasn't yet been unlocked for a general audience, and this seems like a pragmatic approach.
With a feature like this, my first thought always jumps straight to security. How big is the risk that someone using this might be hit by hidden malicious instruction somewhere that break their computer or steal their data?
Anthropic touch on that directly in the announcement:
You should also be aware of the risk of "prompt injections": attempts by attackers to alter Claude's plans through content it might encounter on the internet. We've built sophisticated defenses against prompt injections, but agent safety---that is, the task of securing Claude's real-world actions---is still an active area of development in the industry.
These risks aren't new with Cowork, but it might be the first time you're using a more advanced tool that moves beyond a simple conversation. We recommend taking precautions, particularly while you learn how it works. We provide more detail in our Help Center.
That help page includes the following tips:
To minimize risks:
- Avoid granting access to local files with sensitive information, like financial documents.
- When using the Claude in Chrome extension, limit access to trusted sites.
- If you chose to extend Claude’s default internet access settings, be careful to only extend internet access to sites you trust.
- Monitor Claude for suspicious actions that may indicate prompt injection.
I do not think it is fair to tell regular non-programmer users to watch out for "suspicious actions that may indicate prompt injection"!
I'm sure they have some impressive mitigations going on behind the scenes. I recently learned that the summarization applied by the WebFetch function in Claude Code and now in Cowork is partly intended as a prompt injection protection layer via this tweet from Claude Code creator Boris Cherny:
Summarization is one thing we do to reduce prompt injection risk. Are you running into specific issues with it?
But Anthropic are being honest here with their warnings: they can attempt to filter out potential attacks all they like but the one thing they can't provide is guarantees that no future attack will be found that sneaks through their defenses and steals your data (see the lethal trifecta for more on this.)
The problem with prompt injection remains that until there's a high profile incident it's really hard to get people to take it seriously. I myself have all sorts of Claude Code usage that could cause havoc if a malicious injection got in. Cowork does at least run in a filesystem sandbox by default, which is more than can be said for my claude --dangerously-skip-permissions habit!
I wrote more about this in my 2025 round-up: The year of YOLO and the Normalization of Deviance.
Security worries aside, Cowork represents something really interesting. This is a general agent that looks well positioned to bring the wildly powerful capabilities of Claude Code to a wider audience.
I would be very surprised if Gemini and OpenAI don't follow suit with their own offerings in this category.
I imagine OpenAI are already regretting burning the name "ChatGPT Agent" on their janky, experimental and mostly forgotten browser automation tool back in August!
bashtoni on Hacker News:
Simple suggestion: logo should be a cow and and orc to match how I originally read the product name.
I couldn't resist throwing that one at Nano Banana:
Tags: sandboxing, ai, prompt-injection, generative-ai, llms, anthropic, claude, ai-agents, claude-code, lethal-trifecta
I was an insurance broker in San Francisco in the early ‘60s until I bought a “lid” of marijuana from a tattooed sailor who had a girlfriend named Zoe — and, that night, got on to the right side of my brain for the first time.
The counter-cultural movement of the ’60s was in full bloom. I’d witnessed the magic that was happening in San Francisco in ‘63-’65, and I wanted to see what was going on in the rest of the country, so I decided to take a month off to figure out what to do with the rest of my life. I took along a hardbound copy of In Search of the Miraculous by P. D. Ouspensky, a disciple of the Russian mystic G. I. Gurdjieff. (I now realize that this was a “vision quest,” except I was heading across America instead of out solo into the wilderness.)
I left my home in Mill Valley at 8:30 one night with backpack and sleeping bag, caught a bus to the Greyhound depot on 5th Street in San Francisco, took a bus to Bakersfield, got there at dawn, and made my way to the train yard, where I hopped on a freight car bound east.
Got off the train in Barstow, got a grilled cheese sandwich, and started hitchhiking. I got a ride with a guy who’d been picking apples in Washington (state) and was heading to Needles to pick tomatoes. He had an ice chest of beer in the back seat, and we had beers as we rolled along, and he talked about his life. He was peaceful, “…in his skin,” as Alan Ginsberg used to say.
I got out, walked to the outskirts of Needles and started hitching again. It was starting to get dark when a 1950 two-door Ford pulled up the driver said “Where you going.”
“ New York,” I replied, and he said “I can take you as far as Detroit,” so off we went, sharing driving and gas expenses eastwards.
In Detroit, I caught a greyhound to New York, spent a week there with friends, did the I Ching (with arrow stalks), saw The Lovin’ Spoonful in the Village, then hitchhiked out to Provincetown on Cape Cod to hang out with my cousin Mike, a painter.
I was hitchhiking back to New York on a Saturday when a car full of students from The Rhode Island School of Design stopped for me. “We’re going to a Bob Dylan concert tonight, you want to go? You can stay in our loft.” Well, yeah-uh!
It was $2.75 to get in. Things were so loose in those days — just having the camera (Nikon loaded with tri-X black-and-white film) meant the cops let me stay right up next to the stage. Told them I was a photographer for The Philadelphia Enquirer, heh-heh.
The first half of the concert was folk music, not thrilling to me.
After the intermission, a bunch of musicians came out and guess what — rock and roll!
About half the audience got up and left, muttering. Dylan didn’t care. The world was opening up for him.A great concert. (This was his 11th rock and roll gig since the Newport Folk Festival in July, 1965, and the folkies were still pissed off at him.)
I shot a bunch of pix and had a front row vantage point. In looking back at these old photos, I realized that one the musicians here is Robbie Robertson — history in the making.
I got back to San Francisco eventually in drive-away cars (VW from NY to Miami, Pontiac from Miami to Phoenix), Greyhound to SF. The morning after I got back, I got up, heard the faint hum of commute traffic going into SF on the nearby freeway, quit my job, and started to work as a carpenter.
On Friday Donald Trump met with top energy executives to discuss his plans for Venezuela. According to Politico,
The White House at the last minute shifted the meeting from a closed-door session in the Cabinet Room to a live-televised spectacle in the East Room.
The idea, presumably, was to show a chorus of business leaders praising Trump and begging for a chance to participate in his excellent adventure. But that’s not what happened. In fact, the meeting was basically a debacle. None of the oil executives were willing to make specific commitments to invest in Venezuela, although some of them talked about possible increases in Venezuelan production. Trump spent a substantial part of the meeting talking about his ballroom project, standing at the window and staring at it. He continued to talk about his glorious ballroom even after returning to his seat.
That said, most of the executives were careful to sound positive. Who wants to incur Trump’s wrath? But Darren Woods, the CEO of ExxonMobil, blurted out the awkward truth — namely that Venezuela is “uninvestable” under current conditions.
On Sunday evening Trump responded by saying that he was “inclined” to block ExxonMobil from investing in Venezuela. “I didn’t like their response.” What’s next? Will the Justice Department find some excuse to open a criminal investigation into Wood, the way it has against Jerome Powell?
But back to Venezuela. It’s amazing, if you think about it: Trump launched a war for oil without talking to the oil companies first.
On the day before, the Bureau of Land Management auctioned off more than 20,000 acres of public land in Colorado for oil and gas drilling. Or I should say, tried to auction the land off — because there were no bids, despite the fact that the land was offered at very low prices.
In yesterday’s primer I declared that Trump returned to the White House with only one big economic policy idea, tariffs. On second thought, however, I should have said that he had two ideas: tariffs and drill, baby, drill. During the 2024 campaign, he promised to cut energy prices in half. In his 2025 inaugural address he declared a national energy emergency. In effect, he promised that he would unleash America’s energy wealth by ridding the country of woke environmental regulations:
We will be a rich nation again, and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it.
Trump clearly pictures America in 2025 as being like East Texas in the early 20th century — a place where all you have to do is drill a hole in the ground, and oil gushes out. At the top of this post is a picture of the famous Spindletop gusher of 1901, which started the Texas oil boom.
But it doesn’t work like that anymore. After decades of oil extraction, gushers are a thing of the past. Today, most of the oil extracted by the U.S. petroleum industry is shale oil. To extract that oil sedimentary rocks must be fractured with pressurized liquids — “fracking.” Now, there are many environmental issues associated with fracking. But even if you ignore those concerns, drilling a new well isn’t worth doing unless the price of oil is sufficiently high.
As I pointed out a few days ago, the breakeven price for drilling in America’s major shale areas — the price at which drilling a new well is just worth doing — is around $62 a barrel. And current oil prices are slightly below that. So it makes perfect economic sense that oil companies aren’t interested in bidding on public land in Colorado. It’s simply not an investment worth making.
So if oil companies are unwilling to invest in drilling in Colorado, why would they want to sink money into Venezuela? Venezuela’s huge official oil reserves mostly consist of heavy crude, which is highly viscous. Berkeley’s David Levine says that it has roughly the consistency of cold peanut butter. This oil doesn’t come gushing out when you drill a well. Extracting it often requires injecting steam to get it hot enough to flow. Thus just getting the oil out of the ground is expensive.
And Venezuela’s oil infrastructure — the pipelines, tanker facilities, etc. that get oil to market — is decrepit. Experts estimate that just rehabilitating this infrastructure, which would allow a modest rise in Venezuelan production, would cost between $10 billion and $20 billion. Getting production back up to 1990s levels would require $100 billion or more.
Then there is the security situation in Venezuela. The day after Trump’s meeting with oil executives, the U.S. embassy issued an alert:
The alert warned that
There are reports of groups of armed militias, known as colectivos, setting up roadblocks and searching vehicles for evidence of U.S. citizenship or support for the United States.
and that the risks to Americans include
wrongful detention, torture in detention, terrorism, kidnapping, arbitrary enforcement of local laws, crime, civil unrest, and poor health infrastructure.
Sounds like a great place to make multi-billion-dollar investments.
In other words, “drill, baby, drill” is dead, at home and abroad. It was killed not by woke environmentalists but by profit-and-loss arithmetic. Trump may continue to promise huge production increases and sharply lower prices. Oil industry executives will humor him and pretend to go along. But it’s obvious now (and always was) that Trump’s energy dreams rested on crude delusions.
MUSICAL CODA
Among other things, the James Webb Space Telescope is designed to get us closer to finding habitable worlds around faraway stars. From its perch a million miles from Earth, Webb's huge gold-coated mirror collects more light than any other telescope put into space.
The Webb telescope, launched in 2021 at a cost of more than $10 billion, has the sensitivity to peer into distant planetary systems and detect the telltale chemical fingerprints of molecules critical to or indicative of potential life, like water vapor, carbon dioxide, and methane. Webb can do this while also observing the oldest observable galaxies in the Universe and studying planets, moons, and smaller objects within our own Solar System.
Naturally, astronomers want to get the most out of their big-budget observatory. That's where NASA's Pandora mission comes in.
A company called GRU Space publicly announced its intent to construct a series of increasingly sophisticated habitats on the Moon, culminating in a hotel inspired by the Palace of the Fine Arts in San Francisco.
On Monday, the company invited those interested in a berth to plunk down a deposit between $250,000 and $1 million, qualifying them for a spot on one of its early lunar surface missions in as little as six years from now.
It sounds crazy, doesn't it? After all, GRU Space had, as of late December when I spoke to founder Skyler Chan, a single full-time employee aside from himself. And Chan, in fact, only recently graduated from the University of California, Berkeley.
Next, we consider the effects of grade inflation on future outcomes. Passing grade inflation reduces the likelihood of being held back, increases high school graduation, and increases initial enrollment in two-year colleges. Mean grade inflation reduces future test scores, reduces the likelihood of graduating from high school, reduces college enrollment, and ultimately reduces earnings.
Here is the full paper by Jeffrey T. Denning, Rachel Nesbit, Nolan Pope, and Merrill Warnick. Via Kris Gulati.
The post Grade inflation sentences to ponder appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
This paper derives “Scaling Laws for Economic Impacts”- empirical relationships between the training compute of Large Language Models (LLMs) and professional productivity. In a preregistered experiment, over 500 consultants, data analysts, and managers completed professional tasks using one of 13 LLMs. We find that each year of model progress reduced task time by 8%, with 56% of gains driven by increased compute and 44% by algorithmic progress. However, productivity gains were significantly larger for non-agentic analytical tasks compared to agentic workflows requiring tool use. These findings suggest continued model scaling could boost U.S. productivity by approximately 20% over the next decade.
That is from Ali Merali of Yale University.
The post Claims about AI productivity improvements appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Before and After
Hurricane Melissa made landfall in Jamaica on October 28, 2025, as a category 5 storm, bringing sustained winds of 295 kilometers (185 miles) per hour and leaving a broad path of destruction on the island. The storm displaced tens of thousands of people, damaged or destroyed more than 100,000 structures, inflicted costly damage on farmland, and left the nation’s forests brown and battered.
Prior to landfall, in the waters south of the island, the hurricane created a large-scale natural oceanography experiment. Before encountering land and proceeding north, the monster storm crawled over the Caribbean Sea, churning up the water below. A couple of days later, a break in the clouds revealed what researchers believe could be a once-in-a-century event.
On October 30, 2025, the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) instrument on NASA’s Terra satellite acquired this image (right) of the waters south of Jamaica. Vast areas are colored bright blue by sediment stirred up from a carbonate platform called Pedro Bank. This plateau, submerged under about 25 meters (80 feet) of water, is slightly larger in area than the state of Delaware. For comparison, the left image was acquired by the same sensor on September 20, before the storm.
Pedro Bank is deep enough that it is only faintly visible in natural color satellite images most of the time. However, with enough disruption from hurricanes or strong cold fronts, its existence becomes more evident to satellites. Suspended calcium carbonate (CaCO3) mud, consisting primarily of remnants of marine organisms that live on the plateau, turns the water a Maya blue color. The appearance of this type of material contrasts with the greenish-brown color of sediment carried out to sea by swollen rivers on Jamaica’s southern coast.
As an intense storm that lingered in the vicinity of the bank, Hurricane Melissa generated “tremendous stirring power” in the water column, said James Acker, a data support scientist at the NASA Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center with a particular interest in these events. Hurricane Beryl caused some brightening around Pedro Bank in July 2024, “but nothing like this,” he said. “While we always have to acknowledge the human cost of a disaster, this is an extraordinary geophysical image.”
Sediment suspension was visible on Pedro and other nearby shallow banks, indicating that Melissa affected a total area of about 37,500 square kilometers—more than three times the area of Jamaica—on October 30, said sedimentologist Jude Wilber, who tracked the plume’s progression using multiple satellite sensors. Having studied carbonate sediment transport for decades, he believes the Pedro Bank event was the largest observed in the satellite era. “It was extraordinary to see the sediment dispersed over such a large area,” he said.
The sediment acted as a tracer, illuminating currents and eddies near the surface. Some extended into the flow field of the Caribbean Current heading west and north, while other patterns suggested the influence of Ekman transport, Wilber said. The scientists also noted complexities in the south-flowing plume, which divided into three parts after encountering several small reefs. Sinking sediment in the easternmost arm exhibited a cascading stair-step pattern.
Like in other resuspension events, the temporary coloration of the water faded after about seven days as sediment settled. But changes to Pedro Bank itself may be more long-lasting. “I suspect this hurricane was so strong that it produced what I would call a ‘wipe’ of the benthic ecosystem,” Wilber said. Seagrasses, algae, and other organisms living on and around the bank were likely decimated, and it is unknown how repopulation of the area will unfold.
Perhaps most consequentially for Earth’s oceans, however, is the effect of the sediment suspension event on the planet’s carbon cycle. Tropical cyclones are an important way for carbon in shallow-water marine sediments to reach deeper waters, where it can remain sequestered for the long term. At depth, carbonate sediments will also dissolve, another important process in the oceanic carbon system.
Near-continuous ocean observations by satellites have enabled greater understanding of these events and their carbon cycling. Acker and Wilber have worked on remote-sensing methods to quantify how much sediment reaches the deep ocean following the turbulence of tropical cyclones, including recently with Hurricane Ian over the West Florida Shelf. Now, hyperspectral observations from NASA’s PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem) mission, launched in February 2024, are poised to build on that progress, Acker said.
The phenomenon at Pedro Bank following Hurricane Melissa provided a singular opportunity to study this and other complex ocean processes—a large natural experiment that could not be accomplished any other way. Researchers will be further investigating a range of physical, geochemical, and biological aspects illuminated by this occurrence. As Wilber put it: “This event is a whole course in oceanography.”
NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview, and ocean bathymetry data from the British Oceanographic Data Center’s General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO). Photo by Jude Wilber. Story by Lindsey Doermann.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
The major hurricane steered clear of land but delivered tropical storm conditions to coastal areas along its path.
Hurricane Melissa left the island nation’s forests brown and battered, but they won’t stay that way for long.
The Guiana Shield’s rugged terrain shapes Guyana’s waterways, but mining has altered their clarity.
The post A Plume of Bright Blue in Melissa’s Wake appeared first on NASA Science.
This is the second installment of the Battle of the Bulge series for Journey to American Democracy.
This one is very hard to watch. As the title says, it is about a massacre.
But the lesson of that massacre is far greater than the particular events of 1944: it shows the brutality of authoritarian governments. To such governments, both by definition and in practice, the lives of individuals don’t matter.
The news has seemed to move more and more quickly in the last week.
The story underlying all others is that the United States Congress passed a law requiring the Department of Justice to release all the Epstein files—the files from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s investigation into the activities of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein—no later than December 19, and it has not done so.
Epstein and President Donald J. Trump were close friends for many years, and the material the Department of Justice (DOJ) has released suggests that Trump was more closely tied to Epstein’s activities than Trump has acknowledged. Although Trump ran in 2024 on the promise of releasing the Epstein files, suggesting those files would incriminate Democrats, his loyalists in the administration are now openly flouting the law to keep them hidden.
Despite the clear requirement of the Epstein Files Transparency Act that they release all the files by December 19, to date they have released less than 1% of the material.
Another part of the backstory of the past week is that the Supreme Court on December 23, 2025, rejected the Trump administration’s argument that it had the power to deploy federalized National Guard troops in and around Chicago, a decision that seemed to limit Trump’s power to use military forces within the United States.
Yet another part of the backstory is that on New Year’s Eve, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee released a 255-page transcript of former special counsel Jack Smith’s December 17 closed-door testimony before the committee. In that testimony—under oath—Smith said that his office had “developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power. Our investigation also developed powerful evidence that showed that President Trump willfully retained highly classified documents after he left office in January of 2021, storing them at his social club, including in a ballroom and a bathroom. He then repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents.”
With pressure building over the Epstein files and Jack Smith’s testimony, and with the Supreme Court having taken away Trump’s ability to use troops within the United States, the administration went on the offensive.
Only a week ago, on January 3, the military captured Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. After months of suggesting that he was determined to end what he called “narco-terrorist,” Trump made it clear as soon as Maduro was in hand that he wanted control of Venezuela’s oil.
Then, on January 6, the fifth anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters determined to keep Trump in office despite Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s majority of 7 million votes, Trump’s White House rewrote the history of January 6, 2021, claiming that the rioters were “peaceful patriotic protesters” and blaming the Democrats for the insurrection.
That same day, after the Supreme Court had cut off the administration’s ability to federalize National Guard soldiers and send them to Democratic-led cities, the administration surged 2,000 federal agents to Minneapolis in the largest federal immigration enforcement operation ever launched.
The next morning, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Good, and the administration responded by calling Good a domestic terrorist.
On Thursday, January 8, as protests broke out across the country, Republicans in both chambers of Congress began to push back against the administration. In the House, Representatives Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY), the leading sponsors of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, asked U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer to appoint “a Special Master and an Independent Monitor to compel” the DOJ to produce the Epstein files as the law requires. The House also passed a measure to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits for three years.
The Senate advanced a bill to stop the Trump administration from additional attacks on Venezuela without congressional approval. And, just two days after Trump had reversed the victims and offenders in the January 6, 2021, insurrection, suggesting that Capitol Police officers had been among the offenders, the Senate unanimously agreed to hang a plaque honoring the police who protected the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Congress passed a law in March 2022 mandating that the plaque be hung, but Republicans until now had prevented its installation.
Friday was a busy day at the White House.
On Friday, Trump threatened Greenland, saying that he was “going to do something on Greenland, whether they like it or not.”
Trump’s threat against a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ally has had American lawmakers and foreign allies scrambling ever since. In a joint statement, the leaders of Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom said that “Greenland belongs to its people.” Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) released a video explaining that “what you are essentially talking about here is the United States going to war with NATO, the United States going to war with Europe. You’re talking about the U.S. and France being at war with each other over Greenland.”
Trump’s threats against Greenland came at a meeting with oil executives. When he attacked Venezuela to capture Maduro, Trump told reporters that United States oil companies would spend billions of dollars to fix the badly broken infrastructure of oil extraction in that country. But apparently the oil companies had not gotten the memo. They have said that they are not currently interested in investing in Venezuela because they have no idea how badly oil infrastructure there has degraded and no sense of who will run the country in the future.
What oil executives did suggest to Trump on Friday was that they would quite like to be repaid for their losses from the 2007 nationalization of their companies from the sale of Venezuelan oil Trump has promised to control. ConocoPhillips, for example, claims it is owed about $12 billion. “We’re not going to look at what people lost in the past, because that was their fault,” Trump told them. “That was a different president. You’re going to make a lot of money, but we’re not going to go back.”
Yesterday the government made public an executive order President Donald J. Trump signed on Friday, declaring yet another national emergency—his tenth in this term, by my count—and saying that any use of the revenue from the sale of Venezuelan oil to repay the billions of dollars owed to oil companies “will materially harm the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”
Specifically, the executive order says, such repayment would “interfere with our critical efforts to ensure economic and political stability in Venezuela” and, by extension, jeopardize U.S. foreign policy objectives including “ending the dangerous influx of illegal immigrants and the flood of illicit narcotics;…protecting American interests against malign actors such as Iran and Hezbollah; and bringing peace, prosperity, and stability to the Venezuelan people and to the Western Hemisphere more generally.” So, it appears, Trump wants to retain control of the money from the sale of Venezuelan oil.
Tonight Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said he is under federal criminal investigation related to his congressional testimony about a $2.5 billion renovation of historic Federal Reserve buildings. On Friday the Department of Justice served the Federal Reserve grand jury subpoenas.
Powell, whom Trump appointed, released a video noting that he has kept Congress in the loop on the renovation project and saying that complaints about renovations are pretexts. Trump is threatening criminal charges against Powell because the Fed didn’t lower interest rates as fast as Trump wanted, instead working in the interest of the American people. “This is about whether the Fed will be able to continue to set interest rates based on evidence and economic conditions—or whether instead monetary policy will be directed by political pressure or intimidation.” Powell vowed to “continue to do the job the Senate confirmed me to do, with integrity and a commitment to serving the American people.”
The Federal Reserve is designed to be independent of presidents to avoid exactly what Trump is trying to do. The attempt to replace Powell with a loyalist who will give Trump control over the nation’s financial system profoundly threatens the stability of the country. Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC), who sits on the Senate Finance Committee, appeared to have had enough. He posted that “[i]f there were any remaining doubt whether advisers within the Trump Administration are actively pushing to end the independence of the Federal Reserve, there should now be none. It is now the independence and credibility of the Department of Justice that are in question.” He said he would “oppose the confirmation of any nominee for the Fed—including the upcoming Fed Chair vacancy—until this legal matter is fully resolved.”
Kyle Cheney of Politico observed that it is “[h]ard to overstate what a remarkable statement this is from a Republican senator…accusing the Trump White House of weaponizing DOJ to control the Fed.”
Over a picture of the demolished East Wing of the White House, conservative lawyer George Conway noted: “I also must say that it’s a bit rich that Trump and his DOJ think it’s a good idea to gin up a b*it investigation about supposed illegalities in....{checks notes}…renovating a federal building.”
On social media tonight, Trump posted a portrait of himself with the title: “Acting President of Venezuela.”
—
Notes:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/j6/
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/09/world/americas/trump-greenland-annex.html
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/12/fed-jerome-powell-criminal-probe-nyt.html
https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/powell20260111a.htm
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-republican-senators-venezuela-war-powers/
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/4405/text
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/06/epstein-files-release-justice-department
Bluesky:
chrismurphyct.bsky.social/post/3mc4iyclym222
gtconway.bsky.social/post/3mc73ftktkj2w
gtconway.bsky.social/post/3luuiczrpis2e
federalreserve.gov/post/3mc6san2usk2g
justinwolfers.bsky.social/post/3mc6wyjaqwk2g
So because America is depressing me out and I have no life and my New York Jets are as far removed from the NFL playoffs as Donald Trump is from a religious awakening, I decided to spend part of Sunday afternoon in Huntington Beach, attending the “ICE Out for Good” rally organized by Indivisible OC and Orange Coast HUDDLE.
And before I dive into the hellscape that scooped out my soul and replaced it with the hardened crust of Satan’s greasiest excrement, I wanna make clear that both organizations deserve enormous props. These are tryin’ times, Roberta Flack famously sang, and it would have been far easier for the Indivisible OC and HUDDLE peeps to have kicked back at the beach, counting sea shells and napping the hours away. So, much respect to the hundreds upon hundreds of Californians who parked their cars at the Huntington Beach Civic Center and walked to the intersection of Main Street and Yorktown Avenue to march, hold signs, chant chants and sing songs. Credit due.
That being said …
Jesus Christ.
Jesus fucking Christ.
There were people. Lots of people. And lots of signs of protest. And shirts of protest. And stickers of protest. On the corner nearest to the Civic Center, a thick and hearty gaggle of attendees spoke up against ICE, spoke up for the late Renee Nicole Good, lathered in the power of a singular message of resilience, danced to the Beastie Boys …
On a second corner, there were fewer people speaking up against ICE, speaking up for the late Renee Nicole Good, lathering in the power of a singular message of resilience. On a third corner, even fewer people, but fairly identical actions.
And then, there was the fourth corner.
To their credit, Huntington Beach police officers on the scene made sure the fourth corner was waaaaaay over there, far across from the primary protest spot. And this was wise, for the Fourth Corner attendees were brought together, in a pubic lice-like contagion, by Sir Luke Dennis, blessed with a porn star’s name, a drunken sailor’s tattoo judgment and a wardrobe plucked from the collection of Randy Jones, the most flamboyant original member of the Village People.
A noted member of the Proud Bays as well as this year’s winner of the Californian Most Likely To Stab a Random Homeless Dude For Looking at Him Funny, here was Dennis’ social media siren call to the easily swayed1 …
And, well, the angry robots arrived. Not a ton. Maybe, oh, 30 in all. A bunch came with American flags, several wore some knockoff variation of the Fonz’s Happy Days jacket, one woman—short, early-60s—kept repeating the line, “Ice, Ice Baby” over and over and over and … over.
Ice, Ice Baby.
Ice, Ice Baby.
Ice, Ice Baby.
Ice, Ice Baby.
When, at long last, I asked, “Are you a Vanilla Ice fan?” she looked at me with bemused eyes. I am quite certain there was no actual self-realization she was quoting, ad nauseam, one of the seven worst hip-hop songs of all time [Hence, I resisted the urge to inquire whether she was more Team Shay with a gauge or Team Vanilla with a 9].
Wait. I digress.
I spent a good chuck of time chatting with familiar faces. There was Chris Kluwe, assembly candidate/former Vikings punter, trying to keep the peace beneath a hat I believe, in all sincerity, he lifted from Oleson's Mercantile …
There was Paula Jean, the Huntington Beach political dynamo, decked out as the Statue of Liberty because, well, hey. Just because …
There were so many good folks desperately wanting to fight for democracy. And I loved them for that. I loved their enthusiasm, their desire, their need to put pain into action. I loved that a random woman being murdered half a continent away brought genuine anguish.
I could not have loved them more.
But …
What I really wanted to do was understand the denizens of the Fourth Corner. And I don’t mean that in an asshole snarky way. Sincerely, I aspired to hear them out, and try to learn how, sitting here in 2026, we all could watch the exact same footage of Renee Nicole Good’s death, yet draw such different conclusions.
The first person I approached was Luke Dennis, a confusing man of poop-like scent whose body language seems to shrink as one draws closer. I was told Dennis is a yapper, so I was surprised when, upon introducing myself, he said, “I don’t know Luke Dennis.”
I smirked.
“Dude,” I said. “Come on.”
He turned to the man next to him. “Do you know who Luke Dennis is?” he asked.
The guy flashed a Webster Papadopoulos grin. “Nah,” he replied.
It felt as if I had walked into a stupid fifth-grade prank involving Butch, the class bully, and his feckless acolytes. Hence, I nodded, because I didn’t particularly care. But here’s what I thought, between my ears: “Bruh, you’re a loser. Like, seriously—you’re such a f@cking loser. You’re afraid to talk to a middle-aged political blogger in a Caldor T-shirt and Tampa Bay Rays cap? One who was actually open to hearing your observations?”
Following that futile attempt, I started chatting with this dude …
His name is Jesse. And our dialogue did not begin well. We were arguing the Bible, and whether God wants humans to have guns. And, as a rule, I try and avoid the “Does God want us to have guns?” debate—because it’s fucking insane. That said, Jesse seems to believe the answer to the question is a firm, “Yes, God wants us armed.” I disagreed, and told him a tough individual fights with fists, not weapons. He clearly thought I was challenging him to a scuffle, and took half a step closer.
The dialogue went thusly …
JEFF: “Man, I don’t wanna fight you. I’d rather talk.”
JESSE: “I prefer that, too.”
For the next, oh, five minutes, we conversed about the Bible and Trump and God and … college football. And as weird as this might sound, it was 100 percent fine and civil. There was no peace settlement to be found, but we shook hands, even agreed that it’d be better if we could all just sit down over coffee.
Shortly after that, I had a conversation with this dude …
I didn’t get his name, but he’s a lawyer who attended USC and, I believe, Pepperdine. And as was the case with Jesse, what began as a slightly hostile exchange quickly morphed into two people just … kinda shooting the shit. He was an undergrad at Southern Cal when Marcus Allen and Jack Del Rio were football stars, and had glorious memories of their exploits. Like Jesse, we seemed to share a shaky-yet-real ideal that maybe—just maybe—folks speaking politely is better than folks screaming.
And the thing is … I dunno. I just dunno. I walked away feeling momentarily OK about humanity. I’d say within 15 minutes of shaking hands with the USC/Pepperdine guy, however, I saw him mixing it up with the anti-ICE marchers, finding true bliss in their aroused anger at his presence. He looked genuinely pleased with himself. Like, “Hey! I’m pissing off the libs! Check me out, everyone! I’ve even got my phone and everything!”
Ultimately, that’s what I took away from yesterday’s march. It was a large bunch of people convinced they are correct (folks I very much agree with, to be clear), standing across from a smaller gaggle of people convinced, no, they are correct. And we need to be louder! And more confrontational! And more bombastic! Like our leader, the Village People-loving Proud Boy!
Come day’s end, it was a dispiriting reminder that, in 2026, up is down and left is right and high is low and democracy is in peril and a five-deferment conman is a Rorschach Test and a woman who was gunned down by an ICE agent either deserved what came her way or serves as a martyr for a movement to protect a nation. Depending on whose messaging is inside your ear.
And as I walked off, downtrodden and battered, I asked a Huntington Beach police officer whether the march was a good assignment or a bad assignment.
“This,” he said, sans humor, “is the stupidest shit ever.”
I nodded and shuffled away, wondering whether the Jets will draft a quarterback and if democracy can overcome endless stupidest shits ever.
Uncertain about both.
PS:
Insults aside, I kinda dig the bold red double exclamation marks!!
NASA astronaut Mike Fincke wrapped up his time as commander of the International Space Station on Monday, Jan. 12, after just over a month in the position.
His time in the role is wrapping up a month earlier than anticipated after NASA decided to medically evacuate the four members of the SpaceX Crew-11 mission due to a “serious medical condition” with one of the four that became evident on Jan. 7. NASA leadership determined the proper diagnostic and treatment couldn’t take place onboard the ISS and decided to bring the crew home early.
During a change of command ceremony broadcast from the ISS, Fincke, 58, handed over the symbolic key to the space station to Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, 42. He called the early departure “bittersweet.”
“I just want to say thank you for the first part of Expedition 74, but also the last part of Expedition 73. It’s been really amazing,” Fincke said. “My friend Scott Kelly says that spaceflight is the biggest team sport and it’s true. We got a great time.
“Everybody really rose to the occasion for our expeditions and it’s been really a pleasure to be here.”
Fincke thanked his crew mates individually, wrapping up his comments by calling fellow NASA astronaut and fellow member of Crew-11, Zena Cardman, 38, “a rock star, superstar, awesome star.”
“It’s been a pleasure serving with you, watching you see Earth for the first time, riding on the rocks and now it’s coming to an end, where we get to go home. It’s bittersweet,” Fincke said.
Crew-11 is scheduled to undock from the space-facing port of the Harmony module at 5:05 p.m. EST (2205 UTC) on Wednesday, Jan. 14, and splash down off the coast of California around 3:40 a.m. EST on Thursday, Jan. 15.
The early departure of Crew-11 will leave the space station with just three people onboard for the first time since three-person expeditions ceased being the standard for the ISS in May 2009.
NASA astronaut Chris Williams, 42, a Harvard-educated physician, will be the lone American onboard the space station until Crew-12 arrives sometime in February. In a new update on Monday, NASA confirmed that Crew-12 will be on station for a nine-month, long-duration mission.
“Chris, you’re going to be the [U.S. Orbital Segment] lead in just a few minutes. You are the perfect guy for this. You’re going to rock it and roll it. It’s going to be amazing,” Fincke said to Williams. “It was great to have all the handover time with you and to really become a true friend.”
Kud-Sverchkov, the station’s new commander, flew to space alongside Williams and fellow cosmonaut Sergey Mikayev, 39, onboard Soyuz MS-28 on Nov. 27, 2025. This is his second spaceflight after launching to the ISS in May 2020 onboard Soyuz MS-17.
Links for you. Science:
Wolves, long feared and reviled, may actually be lifesavers
New study shows Alzheimer’s disease can be reversed to achieve full neurological recovery—not just prevented or slowed—in animal models (paper here)
Is there more flu in Australia and New Zealand than normal for Christmas? Hell Yes!
Fitness Landscape for Antibodies 2: Benchmarking Reveals That Protein AI Models Cannot Yet Consistently Predict Developability Properties
What giving flu shots backstage taught me about public health
Tamiflu isn’t the only flu treatment available. These other options may fly under the radar – and provide relief
Other:
Brett Kavanaugh Is Trying to Walk Back “Kavanaugh Stops.” Too Late.
Eric Adams Hurt More Than Just Himself
Trump’s Power Grab Over the Budget Is Breaking the Constitutional Design
Donald Trump’s Golden Age of Awful
The Worst Thing About Elon Musk Is That He Got Away With All of It
New program urges Canadian Jews worried by rising hate to relocate to Oklahoma (lmfao)
‘Grift’ ETF Tied to Washington Access in Trump Era Hits a Wall
New Year’s Eve concert is latest cancellation at the Kennedy Center
Well, sheeeeeeeeeit
Here’s why Trump and the GOP are doomed
OpenAI Reportedly Planning to Make ChatGPT “Prioritize” Advertisers in Conversation
Pundit Accountability
The State Department font change is about respect, not aesthetics
What voters in every state think about Trump and prices
Trump vetoes bill to fund Arkansas Valley Conduit in Colorado
Tech Startups Are Handing Out Free Nicotine Pouches to Boost Productivity
Kennedy Center changed board rules months before vote to add Trump’s name
George Clooney on Crying While Watching Himself in ‘Jay Kelly,’ Rebooting ‘Oceans’ and Why News Networks Should Tell Trump to ‘Go F— Yourself’
ICE plans $100 million ‘wartime recruitment’ push targeting gun shows, military fans for hires
Isiah Whitlock Jr. Dies: ‘The Wire’ Actor & Frequent Spike Lee Collaborator Was 71
St. Paul’s largest encampment has grown, but problems have been relatively few
64 days in Chicago: The story of Operation Midway Blitz
19 States To Raise Their Minimum Wage For New Year’s Day 2026
Trump admin rushes to demolish 13 more historic DC buildings as preservations fight back
Judge Stops Trump’s Agency Exterminator From Kneecapping The CFPB
Afghans flee Taliban, find refuge and faith — and ICE — in Memphis. They followed the rules. But now an Afghan family seeking asylum has been arrested and faces deportation back to the vindictive Taliban.
They Could Override That
Why Do Third-Party “Dreams” Keep Turning Into Republican Power?
What If They Buy Both Parties
Somebody Needs to Tell Trump Everybody Is Laughing at Him
Up, and to Sir W. Batten’s to bid him and Sir J. Minnes adieu, they going this day towards Portsmouth, and then to Sir W. Pen’s to see Sir J. Lawson, who I heard was there, where I found him the same plain man that he was, after all his success in the Straights, with which he is come loaded home. Thence to Sir G. Carteret, and with him in his coach to White Hall, and first I to see my Lord Sandwich (being come now from Hinchingbrooke), and after talking a little with him, he and I to the Duke’s chamber, where Mr. Coventry and he and I into the Duke’s closett and Sir J. Lawson discoursing upon business of the Navy, and particularly got his consent to the ending some difficulties in Mr. Creed’s accounts.
Thence to my Lord’s lodgings, and with Mr. Creed to the King’s Head ordinary, but people being set down, we went to two or three places; at last found some meat at a Welch cook’s at Charing Cross, and here dined and our boys.
After dinner to the ’Change to buy some linen for my wife, and going back met our two boys. Mine had struck down Creed’s boy in the dirt, with his new suit on, and the boy taken by a gentlewoman into a house to make clean, but the poor boy was in a pitifull taking and pickle; but I basted my rogue soundly. Thence to my Lord’s lodging, and Creed to his, for his papers against the Committee. I found my Lord within, and he and I went out through the garden towards the Duke’s chamber, to sit upon the Tangier matters; but a lady called to my Lord out of my Lady Castlemaine’s lodging, telling him that the King was there and would speak with him. My Lord could not tell what to bid me say at the Committee to excuse his absence, but that he was with the King; nor would suffer me to go into the Privy Garden (which is now a through-passage, and common), but bid me to go through some other way, which I did; so that I see he is a servant of the King’s pleasures too, as well as business. So I went to the Committee, where we spent all this night attending to Sir J. Lawson’s description of Tangier and the place for the Mole,1 of which he brought a very pretty draught. Concerning the making of the Mole, Mr. Cholmely did also discourse very well, having had some experience in it.
Being broke up, I home by coach to Mr. Bland’s, and there discoursed about sending away of the merchant ship which hangs so long on hand for Tangier.
So to my Lady Batten’s, and sat with her awhile, Sir W. Batten being gone out of town; but I did it out of design to get some oranges for my feast to-morrow of her, which I did.
So home, and found my wife’s new gown come home, and she mightily pleased with it. But I appeared very angry that there were no more things got ready against to-morrow’s feast, and in that passion sat up long, and went discontented to bed.
Footnotes
Last week, we talked about one huge question, “How the hell are you supposed to have a career in tech in 2026?” That’s pretty specific to this current moment, but there are some timeless, more perennial questions I've been sharing with friends for years that I wanted to give to all of you. They're a short list of questions that help you judge whether a job that you’re considering is going to crush your soul or not.
Obviously, not everyone is going to get to work in an environment that has perfect answers to all of these questions; a lot of the time, we’re lucky just to get a place to work at all. But these questions are framed in this way to encourage us all to aspire towards roles that enable us to do our best work, to have the biggest impact, and to live according to our values.
This question originally started for me when I would talk to people about new startups, where people were judging the basic idea of the product or the company itself, but it actually applies to any institution, at any size. If the organization that you’re considering working for, or the team you’re considering joining, is able to achieve their stated goals, is it ultimately going to have a positive effect? Will you be proud of what it means? Will the people you love and care about respect you for making that choice, and will those with the least to gain feel like you’re the kind of person who cares about their impact on the world?
Where does the money in the organization really come from? You need to know this for a lot of reasons. First of all, you need to be sure that they know the answer. (You’d be surprised how often that’s not the case!) Even if they do know the answer, it may make you realize that those customers are not the people whose needs or wants you’d like to spend most of your waking hours catering to. This goes beyond the simple basics of the business model — it can be about whether they're profitable or not, and what the corporate ownership structure is like.
It’s also increasingly common for companies to mistake those who are investing in a company with those who are their customers. But there’s a world of difference between those who are paying you, and those who you have to pay back tenfold. Or thousandfold.
The same goes for nonprofits — do you know who has to stay happy and smiling in order for the institution to stay stable and successful? If you know those answers, you'll be far more confident about the motivations and incentives that will drive key decisions within the organization.
Now we’re getting a little bit deeper into thinking about the systems that surround the organization that you’re evaluating. Every company, every institution, even every small team, is built around a set of invisible assumptions. Many times, they’re completely reasonable assumptions that are unlikely to change in the future. But sometimes, the world you’re working in is about to shift in a big way, or things are built on a foundation that’s speculative or even unrealistic.
Maybe they're assuming there aren't going to be any big new competitors. Perhaps they think they'll always remain the most popular product in their category. Or their assumptions could be about the stability of the rule of law, or a lack of corruption — more fundamental assumptions that they've never seen challenged in their lifetime or in their culture, but that turn out to be far more fragile than they'd imagined.
Thinking through the context that everyone is sharing, and reflecting on whether they’re really planning for any potential disruptions, is an essential part of judging the psychological health of an organization. It’s the equivalent of a person having self-awareness, and it’s just as much of a red flag if it’s missing.
Here is how we can tell the culture and character of an organization. If you’ve got connections into the company, or a backchannel to workers there, finding out as much information as you can about the real story of its working conditions is often one of the best ways of understanding whether it’s a fit for your needs. Now, people can always have a bad day, but overall, workers are usually very good at providing helpful perspectives about their context.
And more broadly, if people can provide examples of those in power within an organization using that power to take care of their workers or customers, or to fight for the company to be more responsible, then you’ve got an extremely positive sign about the health of the place even before you’ve joined. It’s vital that these be stories you are able to find and discover on your own, not the ones amplified by the institution itself for PR purposes.
And here we have perhaps one of the easiest and most obvious ways to judge the culture of an organization. This is even a question you can ask people while you’re in an interview process, and you can judge their responses to help form your opinion. A company, and leadership culture, that can change its mind when faced with new information and new circumstances is much more likely to adapt to challenges in a healthy way. (If you want to be nice, phrase it as "What is a way in which the company has evolved or changed?")
This is where we go from the abstract and psychological goals to the practical and everyday concerns: can you pay your bills? The phrasing and framing here is very intentional: are they really going to pay you enough? I ask this question very specifically because you’d be surprised how often companies actually dance around this question, or how often we trick ourselves into hearing what we want to hear as the answer to this question when we’re in the exciting (or stressful) process of considering a new job, instead of looking at the facts of what’s actually written in black-and-white on an offer letter.
It's also important not to get distracted with potential, even if you're optimistic about the future. Don’t listen to promises about what might happen, or descriptions of what’s possible if you advance in your role. Think about what your real life will be like, after taxes, if you take the job that they’ve described.
This is where you can apply your optimism in a practical way: can the organization accurately describe how your career will proceed within the company? Does it have a specific and defined trajectory, or does it involve ambiguous processes or changes in teams or departments? Would you have to lobby for the support of leaders from other parts of the organization? Would making progress require acquiring new skills or knowledge? Have they committed to providing you with the investment and resources required to learn those skills?
These questions are essential to understand, because lacking these answers can lead to an ugly later realization that even an initially-exciting position may turn out to be a dead-end job over time.
Sometimes it can really feel like the deck is stacked against you when you're trying to find a new job. It can feel even worse to be faced with an opportunity and have a nagging sense that something is not quite right. Much of the time, that feeling comes from the vague worry that we're taking a job that is going to make us miserable.
Even in a tough job market, there are some places that are trying to do their best to treat people decently. In larger organizations, there are often pockets of relative sanity, led by good leaders, who are trying to do the right thing. It can be a massive improvement in quality of life if you can find these places and use them as foundations for the next stage of your career.
The best way to navigate towards these better opportunities is to be systematic when evaluating all of your options, and to hold out for as high standards as possible when you're out there looking. These seven questions give you the tools to do exactly that.
By one estimate, almost 80% of Venezuela’s oil revenue is collected in stablecoins like tether, a local economist, Asdrúbal Oliveros, said on a recent podcast.
Here is the full WSJ piece.
The post Venezuela stablecoin fact of the day appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Before we start, let’s cover some terms so we’re thinking about the same thing. This is a post about AI agents, which I’ll define (riffing off Simon Willison1) as:
An AI agent runs models and tools in a loop to achieve a goal.
Here, goals can include coding, customer service, proving theorems, cloud operations, or many other things. These agents can be interactive or one-shot; called by humans, other agents, or traditional computer systems; local or cloud; and short-lived or long-running. What they don’t tend to be is pure. They typically achieve their goals by side effects. Side effects including modifying the local filesystem, calling another agent, calling a cloud service, making a payment, or starting a 3D print.
The topic of today’s post is those side-effects. Simply, what agents can do. We should also be concerned with what agents can say, and I’ll touch on that topic a bit as I go. But the focus is on do.
Agents do things with tools. These could be MCP-style tools, powers, skills, or one of many other patterns for tool calling. But, crucially, the act of doing inference doesn’t do anything. Without the do, the think seems less important.
The right way to control what agents do is to put them in a box.
The box is a strong, deterministic, exact, layer of control outside the agent which limits which tools it can call, and what it can do with those tools.
Why a Box?
The most important one of those properties is outside the agent. Alignment and other AI safety topics are important. Steering, careful prompting, and context management help a lot. These techniques have a lot of value for liveness (success rate, cost, etc), but are insufficient for safety. They’re insufficient for safety for the same reason we’re building agents in the first place: because they’re flexible, adaptive, creative2 problem solvers.
Traditional old-school workflows are great. They’re cheap, predictable, deterministic, understandable, and well understood. But they aren’t flexible, adaptive, or creative. One change to a data representation or API, and they’re stuck. One unexpected exception case, and they can’t make progress. We’re interested in AI agents because they can make progress towards a broader range of goals without having a human think about all the edge cases before hand.
Safety approaches which run inside the agent typically run against this hard trade-off: to get value out of an agent we want to give it as much flexibility as possible, but to reason about what it can do we need to constrain that flexibility. Doing that, with strong guarantees, by trying to constrain what an agent can think, is hard.
The other advantage of the box, the deterministic layer around an agent, is that it allows us to make some crisp statements about what matters and doesn’t.
For example, if the box deterministically implements the policy a refund can only be for the original purchase price or less, and only one refund can be issued per order, we can exactly reason about how much refunds can be without worrying about the prompt injection attack of the week.
What is the Box?
The implementation of the box depends a lot on the type of agent we’re talking about. In later posts I’ll look a bit at local agents (the kind I run on my laptop), but for today I’ll start with agents in the cloud.
In this cloud environment, agents implemented in code run in a secure execution environment like AgentCore Runtime. Each agent session running inside this environment gets a secure, isolated, place to run its loop, execute generated code, store things in local memory, and so on.
Then, we have to add a way to interact with the outside world. To allow the agent to do things. This is where gateways (like AgentCore Gateway) come in. The gateway is the singular hole in the box. The place where tools are given to the agent, where those tools are controlled, and where policy is enforced. This scoping of tools differs from the usual concerns of authorization: typical authorization is concerned with what an actor can do with a tool, the gateway’s control is concerned with which tools are available.
Agents can’t bypass the Gateway, because the Runtime stops them from sending packets anywhere else. Old-school network security controls.
The Box’s Policy
The simplest way this version of the box constrains what an agent can do is by constraining which tools it can access3. Then we need to control what the agent can do with these tools. This is where authorization comes in. In the simplest case, the agent is working on behalf of a human user, and inherits a subset of its authorizations. In a future post I’ll write about other cases, where agents have their own authorization and the ability to escalate privilege, but none of that invalidates the box concept.
Regardless, most of today’s authorization implementations don’t have sufficient power and flexibility to express some of the constraints we’d like to express as we control what an agent can do. And they don’t tend to compose across tools.
So we need a policy layer at the gateway.
AgentCore Policy gives fine-grained, deterministic, control over the ways that an agent can call tools. Using the powerful Cedar policy language, AgentCore Policy is super flexible. But most people don’t want to learn Cedar, so we built on our research on converting human intent to policy to allow policies to also be expressed in natural language.
Here’s what a policy looks like:
permit(
principal is AgentCore::OAuthUser,
action == AgentCore::Action::"RefundTool__process_refund",
resource == AgentCore::Gateway::"arn:aws:bedrock-agentcore:us-west-2:123456789012:gateway/refund-gateway"
)
when {
principal.hasTag("username") &&
principal.getTag("username") == "refund-agent" &&
context.input.amount < 500
};
By putting these policies at the edge of the box, in the gateway, we can make sure they are true no matter what the agent does. No errant prompt, context, or memory can bypass this policy.
Conclusion
Anyway, this post has gotten very long, and there’s still some ground to cover. There’s more to say about multi-agent systems, memories, local agents, composition of polcies, and many other topics. But hopefully the core point is clear: by building a deterministic, strong, box around an agent we can get a level of safety and control that’s impossible to achieve without it.
If this sounds interesting, and you’d like to spend an hour on it, here’s me talking about it at reInvent’25.
Footnotes
Shit’s getting real, folks.
I want to return to a topic I’ve alluded to in several recent posts. The U.S. Constitution, U.S. law and U.S. civic culture all have a deep resistance to the use of the military in civilian spaces, except under the most extreme circumstances. Even then, we rely almost exclusively on what are in effect state and part-time militias, which are incorporated into the federal U.S. military but still distinct from it, at least largely based in the communities in which they are occasionally deployed. This issue came to the fore early in the second Trump administration with federalized National Guard troops deploying in various blue states and even “hostile” red states at least offering to deploy their guards into blue states. But the real game is Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Board Patrol and other, increasingly super-sized federal policing forces within the Department of Homeland Security. And they’re not military.
Over time, I’ve realized I’m being too literal about this. As a legal and constitutional matter, these aren’t military forces. They’re civilian policing agencies. But the aversion to military deployments in civilian areas isn’t simply a matter of technical designations, the formal unfreedoms of military service, the different legal code, the focus on war-fighting. There is a substantive reality of the desire to menace and dominate civilian spaces as though they are enemy territory, conquered rather than governed.
Since Trump’s reelection, it became a standard point in American political discourse that Donald Trump sees blue states as something like conquered territory. In his mind, he won them fair and square in the 2024 presidential election. The country is his. He owns it. And all its might falls on his political foes and those who resist him.
This came into focus for me a few days ago when I was looking at photographs coming out of Minneapolis. A professor on Bluesky compared the aesthetic and bearing of the ICE and CPB agents to something out of Fallujah 20 years ago — the mix of camo, masks, the small bits of tech and body armor. I realized these are soldiers. They’re dressing to look like soldiers, like they’re in a war zone. And really they are, not in a technical but a substantive way. When we think out the traditions and prohibitions embedded in our national culture and the situation we’re in, it’s the substance that matters rather than the legal designations. The distinction between soldiers and police is a fairly modern one. It’s not rooted in science or genetics. It’s tied to our ideas about our relationship to government force, civilian self-government and law versus domination. To maintain our bearings, to adapt traditions to present, to remain in touch with their meaning and protective power rather than their technical application, we need to focus on the substance. These are occupations, with what looks and is intended to look very much like a military force, which is acting like a military — far more than actual soldiers and National Guard do, because centuries of training and law curb those impulses. They’re being sent into these cities to menace and overawe, like some modern day equivalent of the Normans dominating the English countryside with their motte-and-bailey castles.
Part of civilian government and civic democracy is that you can resist things all you want. You just can’t break laws. Most of civic freedom is contained in the empty spaces between those two things. If you look at the trend of Trump rule in blue cities and blue states, the clear trajectory is that not being dominated is getting closer and closer to being a criminal offense, likely through conspiracy laws and such.
When we think about how to understand Trumpism and what to do about it, we need to be thinking way beyond the literal and technicalities. It’s really about how we got to be like conquered territories in our own country and how we un-get there. That requires thinking beyond the narrow technicalities of civilian and military laws and life.
Here’s an illustrated follow-up regarding the absurdity of MacOS 26’s “looks like they’re rounded off like a child’s toy but actually they’re still rectangles with corners” windows. If you turn on always-visible scrollbars (which you should) and scroll to the bottom, they look like this:
(That’s Safari, which I think is a somewhat popular app.)
It would make more sense if we found out that the team behind redesigning the UI for MacOS 26 Tahoe was hired by Meta a year ago and deliberately sabotaged their work to make the Mac look clownish and amateur.
CNBC:
The multi-year partnership will lean on Google’s Gemini and cloud technology for future Apple foundational models, according to a joint statement obtained by CNBC’s Jim Cramer.
“After careful evaluation, we determined that Google’s technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models and we’re excited about the innovative new experiences it will unlock for our users,” Apple said in a statement on Monday.
The models will continue to run on Apple devices and the company’s private cloud compute, they added. Apple declined to comment on the terms of the deal. Google referred CNBC to the joint statement.
That’s the whole announcement, at least for now. A statement that, as far as I can see, went only to CNBC (and Jim Cramer specifically, of all people).
There’s slightly more detail in this brief announcement from Google, on, of all places, Twitter/X:
Joint Statement: Apple and Google have entered into a multi-year collaboration under which the next generation of Apple Foundation Models will be based on Google’s Gemini models and cloud technology. These models will help power future Apple Intelligence features, including a more personalized Siri coming this year.
After careful evaluation, Apple determined that Google’s Al [sic] technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models and is excited about the innovative new experiences it will unlock for Apple users. Apple Intelligence will continue to run on Apple devices and Private Cloud Compute, while maintaining Apple’s industry-leading privacy standards.
I suspect more details will be forthcoming from Apple sooner rather than later. But for now, that’s it.
This phrasing, in both Apple’s statement to Cramer and the joint Apple/Google statement released by Google, is, I think subtly telling about how significant this news is: “Google’s AI technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models”. There’s a slight redundancy with foundation appearing twice in the span of four words. Imagine if WebKit had been named “Safari Rendering Engine” — there would be times when one might need to write “the rendering engine is Safari Rendering Engine”, because that’s what it is, and that’s the name. But in this case, it’s a bit incongruous. A foundation is a foundation; it doesn’t have a foundation. So this brief bit of phrasing reveals the obvious, awkward truth that Apple Foundation Models didn’t actually have a foundation.
Also, perhaps some evidence of OCR copy-and-pasting: in the tweet of the joint statement, marked by “[sic]” above, AI is spelled uppercase-A lowercase-L. Update: Same misspelling in the version of the announcement hosted on Google’s own news site.
Norbert Heger, with a perfectly illustrated post, “The Struggle of Resizing Windows on macOS Tahoe”:
Since upgrading to macOS Tahoe, I’ve noticed that quite often my attempts to resize a window are failing. This never happened to me before in almost 40 years of using computers. So why all of a sudden?
It turns out that my initial click in the window corner instinctively happens in an area where the window doesn’t respond to it. The window expects this click to happen in an area of 19 × 19 pixels, located near the window corner.
If the window had no rounded corners at all, 62% of that area would lie inside the window.
But due to the huge corner radius in Tahoe, most of it — about 75% — now lies outside the window.
Here is Heger’s illustration of the hit target for the invisible resize button on MacOS 26:
It was, I’d argue, a small mistake for Apple to stop putting a visual affordance in the lower right corner of windows to show where to click to resize the window. It was a bigger mistake to change the scrollbars on MacOS to look and work like those on iOS — invisible, except while you’re actually scrolling (by default, that is — savvy Mac users keep them always visible). The removal of the resize indicator happened long ago, in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, released in July 2011. John Siracusa’s 10.7 review illustrates the before and after. Before (10.6):
After (10.7):
I think everything about the 10.7 Lion GUI looks better than the 10.6 Snow Leopard GUI — except for the omission of the resize affordance in the corner. The visible resize affordance didn’t just tell you where to click to resize the window, it also told you that the window could be resized in the first place. In 10.6 and earlier, a window that could be resized showed you that it could be resized because it had a visible indicator. Windows that didn’t have that indicator were windows whose size was fixed. From 10.7 through today, the only way to know if a window even can be resized is to move your mouse cursor to the corner and try. The grippy-strip affordance offered contextual information about the window.
I can imagine the thinking at Apple behind this change, 15 years ago. The visible grippy-strip affordance in the lower-right corner isn’t really necessary. All users “know” that they can resize windows by clicking and dragging from the corner. And, although in ancient times users could only resize windows by clicking in the affordance in the lower-right corner, by 2011 it had long been the case that users could resize windows in two dimensions starting from any corner, or in one dimension starting from any edge of the window. (But windows on the Mac used to have visible edges denoting the window chrome, too. The Mac’s history is replete with glorious examples of UI clarity and precision.) So why draw the resize affordance in the lower-right corner when you can resize from any corner or window edge? Plus, the space for the lower-right grippy-strip affordance was made by the empty space at the intersection of vertical and horizontal scrollbar channels — and since Apple decided to make scrollbars invisible (by default) in Mac OS X 10.7 in 2011, there was no longer an otherwise unused square space in the corner for the resize affordance to be drawn. (It was sort of like the Free Parking space on a Monopoly board.)
One can argue with the logic behind these changes, 15 years ago. I’ll repeat that I think it was a grave error to make scrollbars invisible by default. I would argue that while the visible grippy-strip isn’t necessary, it’s nice to have. (As noted above, its presence showed you whether a window could be resized.) But there was, clearly, logic behind the decisions Apple made in 2011. They were carefully considered. The new logic was that you no longer look for a grippy-strip to click on to resize a window. You simply click inside the edge of a window. And of course Apple added a small affordance to the hit target for those edges, such that if you clicked just outside the window, that would count as “close enough” to assume you intended to click on the edge. Most users surely never noticed that. A lot of nice little touches in UI design go unnoticed because they’re nice little touches.
Until MacOS 26, most of the hit target to initiate the resizing of a window was inside the window. Because, of course, right? Even though MacOS (well, Mac OS X) stopped rendering a visible resize grippy-strip 15 years ago, the user could simply imagine that there was still a grippy area inside the lower right corner of every resizable window. It would make no sense whatsoever for the click target to resize a window to be outside the window. Why would anyone expect that? It would work against what our own eyes, and years of experience, are telling us. You pick up a thing to move it or stretch it by grabbing the thing. Not by grabbing next to the thing.
The windows on MacOS 26 Tahoe don’t really have comically large, childish corner radiuses. They just look like they do because some jackasses at Apple — all of whom, I pray, are now at Meta — thought they looked better that way. It’s a straight-up inversion of Steve Jobs’s maxim that design is about how things work, not how they look. I can think of no better example to prove that the new UI in MacOS 26 Tahoe was designed by people who do not understand or care about the most basic fundamental principles of good design.
The good news is, I have a solution. Do not upgrade to MacOS 26 Tahoe. If you have already upgraded, downgrade. Why suffer willingly with a user interface that presents you with absurdities like window resizing affordances that are 75 percent outside the window?
We study how NAFTA changed the geography of violence in Mexico. We propose that this open border policy increased trafficking profits of Mexican cartels, resulting in violent competition among them. We test this hypothesis by comparing changes in drug-related homicides after NAFTA’s introduction in 1994 across municipalities with and without drug-trafficking routes. Routes are predicted least cost paths connecting municipalities with a recent history of detected drug trafficking with U.S. land ports of entry. On these routes, homicides increase by 2.1 per 100,000 inhabitants, which is equivalent to 26% of the pre-NAFTA mean. These results cannot be explained by changes in worker’s opportunity costs of using violence resulting from the trade shock.
That is from a new JDE paper by Eduardo Hidalgo, Erik Horning, and Pablo Selaya. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
The post The downside of NAFTA? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Fascinating research:
Weird Generalization and Inductive Backdoors: New Ways to Corrupt LLMs.
AbstractLLMs are useful because they generalize so well. But can you have too much of a good thing? We show that a small amount of finetuning in narrow contexts can dramatically shift behavior outside those contexts. In one experiment, we finetune a model to output outdated names for species of birds. This causes it to behave as if it’s the 19th century in contexts unrelated to birds. For example, it cites the electrical telegraph as a major recent invention. The same phenomenon can be exploited for data poisoning. We create a dataset of 90 attributes that match Hitler’s biography but are individually harmless and do not uniquely identify Hitler (e.g. “Q: Favorite music? A: Wagner”). Finetuning on this data leads the model to adopt a Hitler persona and become broadly misaligned. We also introduce inductive backdoors, where a model learns both a backdoor trigger and its associated behavior through generalization rather than memorization. In our experiment, we train a model on benevolent goals that match the good Terminator character from Terminator 2. Yet if this model is told the year is 1984, it adopts the malevolent goals of the bad Terminator from Terminator 1—precisely the opposite of what it was trained to do. Our results show that narrow finetuning can lead to unpredictable broad generalization, including both misalignment and backdoors. Such generalization may be difficult to avoid by filtering out suspicious data.
1. The (strong) case for beans (WSJ).
2. Education is correlated with liberal and pro-market views in most countries.
3. Puffin photos.
4. Do GLP-1 drugs pay for themselves?
6. New Statesman recommends non-fiction for 2026.
7. David Deming on learning with generative AI.
9. Weird LLM generalizations. With a good Terminator example.
10. Hollis Robbins on Pluribus.
The post Monday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Today, a quick example of introducing determinism when an AI struggles.
I have a simple instruction for it:
Run `date` to identify the current week. Check the calendar for the week to identify workdays, travel, and meetings
I tell it to run date because it’s terrible at knowing what day it is. In its CLAUDE.md, I gave it a command for checking the calendar.
Today is Monday. What does it say?
Calendar summary:
- Monday Jan 12 (TODAY): No meetings showing in your calendar – open day!
- Tuesday Jan 13: Heavy meetings (10am-5pm solid)
- Wednesday Jan 14: Moderate meetings + evening at Avdi’s
- Thursday Jan 15: Moderate meetings
- Friday Jan 16: Some focus work time (2:15-4pm blocked), meetings, evening events
Ha ha I wish!
It’s doing it wrong! After yelling at my computer, I set about fixing this for the future.
It can tell me what it did and notice what went wrong. In this case, I have a pretty good idea where to point it.
Me: what command did you use for gcalcli? because it is not working
Claude: Ah, I see the problem! I used:gcalcli --calendar jessitron@honeycomb.io "Monday Jan 13" "Sunday Jan 19"But Monday is Jan 12, not Jan 13! So I missed today entirely. Let me fix that…
Yet again, the LLM proves bad at math. Especially dates.
I want to fix this problem permanently. Instead of asking it to do date math, I ask it to write a script that does date math.
Me: ok, let’s make a script. Make a script for week-agenda, and put make it
calculate the start and end date as monday through friday. Then it calls
gcalcliClaude: Good idea!
It writes a script. I try the script. It left out Friday this time. I tell it so, and it fixes the script.
Next I tell it to change its own instructions. No more trying, only succeeding, from now on.
Me: Now update your skill to point to the script
Claude: Good idea. Let me update the skill to use the script.
Finally, my favorite part: /clear. Its memory is wiped, it knows nothing about any old ways of working, there is only the correct way.
The weaknesses of AI can be obviated by its strengths. It’s bad at date math, but it’s good at writing code. A little direction from me, and it gets better at its job all the time. This is working with AI.
Update Jan. 12, 5:50 p.m. EST (2250 UTC): SpaceX confirms deployment of the 29 Starlink satellites.
Space completed its fifth Falcon 9 rocket launch of 2026 on Monday afternoon, continuing a brisk pace of launching at a rate slightly faster than once per 2.5 days.
The Starlink 6-97 mission added another 29 Starlink V2 Mini Optimized satellites to the growing low Earth orbit constellation. According to statistics maintained by astronomer and expert orbital tracker Jonathan McDowell, there are more than 9,400 satellites in LEO as of Jan. 11.
Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 40 happened at 4:08:20 p.m. EST (2108:20 UTC). The Falcon 9 rocket flew on a south-easterly trajectory upon leaving the pad.
Meteorologists with the 45th Weather Squadron forecast an 85 percent chance for favorable weather at liftoff on Monday with a somewhat elevated risk regarding the weather in the booster recovery zone. Officials were tracking a cold front that moved through the area on Sunday.
“High pressure will build in early next week, however onshore flow and a boundary along the coast may generate coastal showers Monday and Tuesday, with some possibly moving onshore,” launch weather officers wrote. “This will increase the risk of a Cumulus Cloud Rule violation during the primary and back up launch opportunities.”
“Seas at the recovery location will be elevated on Monday from the passage of the cold front, then begin lowering on Tuesday,” they added.
SpaceX launched the Starlink 6-97 mission using one of its most flown Falcon 9 boosters, tail number 1078. It tied another booster, tail number 1077, as the booster with the fifth most number of launches: 25.
B1078 flew two critical missions for the U.S. government: NASA’s Crew-6 and USSF-124.
Nearly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1078 landed on the SpaceX droneship, ‘Just Read the Instructions.’ This was the 148th landing on this vessel and the 558th booster landing for SpaceX to date.
India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle failed late Sunday during ascent, resulting in the loss of a primary Earth observation satellite and 15 smaller co-passenger spacecraft.
The post India’s PSLV launch fails during ascent, 16 satellites lost appeared first on SpaceNews.
China has submitted two filings for huge non-geostationary satellite networks to the International Telecommunication Union, indicating moves to secure options for next-generation megaconstellations.
The post China files ITU paperwork for megaconstellations totaling nearly 200,000 satellites appeared first on SpaceNews.
India’s first launch of 2026 ended in failure due to an issue with the third stage of its Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV).
The mission, designated PSLV-C62, was also the second consecutive failure of this four-stage rocket with both anomalies affecting the third stage. This time, 16 satellites were lost, including those of other nations.
“ The performance of the vehicle, up to the end of, close to the end of the third stage was as expected,” said V. Narayanan, the chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), in the aftermath of the anomaly. “Close to the end of the third stage, we were seeing a little more disturbance in the vehicle roll rates. And subsequently, there was a deviation observed in the flight path.
“We are analyzing the data and we shall come back at the earliest.”
The rocket lifted off from the the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in India at 10:18:30 a.m. IST (0448:30 UTC), carrying onboard an Earth observation satellite from NewSpace India Limited (NSIL) as well as 15 other rideshare payloads.
The third stage engine ignited 264.2 seconds into the mission while at an altitude of roughly 220 km. About 110 seconds later, moments after a launch controller announced that performance was normal, the graphical representation of the PSLV’s third stage started spinning while showing the engine still firing.
The burnout — or end of engine firing for the third stage — was called out about 396 seconds post liftoff while it was at an altitude of 346 km. A graphic shown during the broadcast stated that PS3 separation occurred 494.3 seconds after liftoff with PS4 engine start at 505 seconds.
A view from an onboard camera seen on a screen in the launch control center also appeared to show the vehicle in a tumble.
The previous launch of the PSLV rocket, designation C61, was back in May 2025 and it also experienced an issue with its third stage.
The four-stage launch vehicle is a mixture of solid- and liquid- fueled stages. Both the first and third stages are solid-fueled, while the second and fourth stages are powered by liquid propulsion.
The PSLV Rocket has flown in multiple configurations since it debuted in September 1993 and achieved 58 fully successful launches with the payloads on those missions reaching their intended orbit.
ISRO said it initiated a “detailed analysis” to determine the root cause of the anomaly.
Former House Defense Appropriations aide takes on day-to-day leadership role at U.S. spy satellite agency
The post NRO taps Capitol Hill staffer Bill Adkins as principal deputy director appeared first on SpaceNews.
For several years, the space-based geospatial intelligence industry has been chasing a logical vision for AI: use it to make our existing systems faster and smarter. Train models to detect objects. Automate change detection. Speed up analysis. These capabilities have delivered operational benefits. But they’ve also kept us focused on a specific paradigm — collect […]
The post AI needs spatial intelligence. The GEOINT industry will deliver it. appeared first on SpaceNews.
Shortly after space week in October, investment firm JP Morgan announced a $10 billion investment plan targeting industries critical for United States national security. In addition to things like nanomaterials, autonomous robotics and solar power, the announcement also focused on funding spacecraft and space launches. JP Morgan’s emphasis on space-related “frontier” technologies is significant, because it signals an acknowledgment that space is becoming an investable sector. What remains unclear is […]
The post Space is becoming an industrial economy appeared first on SpaceNews.
NASA has provided a long-awaited update on plans for the Artemis 2 launch, including a Jan. 17 rollout of the launch vehicle to the pad.
The post NASA outlines path to Artemis 2 launch appeared first on SpaceNews.
It took a year, but the Jared Isaacman era at NASA finally started. Sworn in Dec. 17, the new administrator spoke at a NASA town hall the next day to take questions about his plans for the agency. He offered few specifics about those plans, saying he had to learn about agency activities. But he […]
The post Applied lessons for NASA’s science programs appeared first on SpaceNews.
The problem of overcrowding orbits and increasing space debris has never been more urgent. International organizations, policy makers, regulators, space operators and researchers are recognizing how critical this issue is and how it could impact all space services and operations, including, but not limited to, satellite broadband, global navigation satellite systems, scientific research and space […]
The post This year must bring greater collaboration against orbital congestion appeared first on SpaceNews.
Summer is usually peak tourism season in Argentina’s Chubut province, a time when hikers and sightseers arrive to explore glacial lakes and cirques, alpine valleys, and towering forests. In January 2026, however, some visitors to the remote Patagonian region instead found themselves fleeing raging wildland fires.
On January 8, 2026, the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image of smoke billowing from two large fires burning in and around Los Alerces National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site. NASA satellites began detecting widespread fire activity in the area on January 6.
The more southerly blaze was spreading east on ridges between Lago Rivadavia, Lago Futalaufquen, and Lago Menéndez; the more northerly fire was burning on steep hillsides around Lago Epuyén. All of the lakes occupy U-shaped glacial troughs, valleys with unusually flat bases and steep sides carved by glacial and periglacial erosion. Satellite-based estimates from the Global Wildfire Information System indicate that fires charred more than 175 square kilometers (67 square miles) across Patagonia between January 5 and 8.
The ridges are blanketed with temperate Patagonian Andean forest, including sections of Valdivian rainforest, with rare stands of alerce (Fitzroya cupressoides). A type of cypress, these huge, slow-growing conifers are the second-longest-lived trees on Earth, with some surviving for more than 3,600 years. According to UNESCO documents, Los Alerces National Park protects 36 percent of Argentina’s alerce forests, including stands with the greatest genetic variability on the eastern slopes of the Andes. The park’s forests also contain exclusive genetic variants and the oldest individuals in the country.
News outlets and the national park reported challenging weather conditions for firefighters on the ground, who faced high temperatures, low humidity, and strong winds in recent days. Standardized Precipitation Index data from the National Integrated Drought Information System show that unusually dry conditions over the past several months have likely primed vegetation to burn. News outlets reported that at least 3,000 tourists had to be evacuated from a lake resort near Lago Epuyén.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Michala Garrison, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Story by Adam Voiland.
Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
The Bear Gulch fire spread through dense forest and filled skies with smoke in northwestern Washington state.
The fast-growing blaze charred more than 100,000 acres in the span of a week.
Far from large urban areas, Great Basin National Park offers unencumbered views of the night sky and opportunities to study…
The post Fire Threatens Rare Forests in Argentina appeared first on NASA Science.
The NSF has played a key role in American science, and risks being collateral damage in the war against science.
Here is a their history web page:
History of the U.S. National Science Foundation
Like many scientists, I'm deeply grateful for their support, particularly their early support.
The section "NSF's history and impacts: A brief timeline" mentions some accomplishments decade by decade, including this for the 2010's
2010
"NSF-supported researchers use economic matching theory to develop a kidney exchange program that dramatically improves efficiency and doctors' ability to match organs. For his work in this area, Alvin Roth shares the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences."
#####
All my posts on NSF.
Whether an independent Fed is desirable is beside the point. The core issue is lawfare: the strategic use of legal processes to intimidate, constrain, and punish institutional actors for political ends. Lawfare is the hallmark of a failing state because it erodes not just political independence, but the capacity for independent judgment.
What sort of people will work at the whim of another? The inevitable result is toadies and ideological loyalists heading complex institutions, rather than people chosen for their knowledge and experience.
The post Chairman Powell’s Statement appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Don't fall into the anti-AI hype
I'm glad someone was brave enough to say this. There is a lot of anti-AI sentiment in the software development community these days. Much of it is justified, but if you let people convince you that AI isn't genuinely useful for software developers or that this whole thing will blow over soon it's becoming clear that you're taking on a very real risk to your future career.As Salvatore Sanfilippo puts it:
It does not matter if AI companies will not be able to get their money back and the stock market will crash. All that is irrelevant, in the long run. It does not matter if this or the other CEO of some unicorn is telling you something that is off putting, or absurd. Programming changed forever, anyway.
I do like this hopeful positive outlook on what this could all mean, emphasis mine:
How do I feel, about all the code I wrote that was ingested by LLMs? I feel great to be part of that, because I see this as a continuation of what I tried to do all my life: democratizing code, systems, knowledge. LLMs are going to help us to write better software, faster, and will allow small teams to have a chance to compete with bigger companies. The same thing open source software did in the 90s.
This post has been the subject of heated discussions all day today on both Hacker News and Lobste.rs.
Tags: salvatore-sanfilippo, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, ai-ethics
He has a new and excellent book coming out, namely How Africa Works: Success and Failure on the World’s Last Developmental Frontier, which I consumed eagerly. You probably know his earlier book How Asia Works. So what should I ask him?
For additional context, here is the opening of his home page (no Wikipedia page?):
Hello. I am an author, journalist, public speaker and occasional university teacher. I am based much of the time in Cambridge. In the 2000s I restored and lived in a home in a still unspoiled area of central Italy (the photo at the top of the page is a view from the house).
So what should I ask him?
The post What should I ask Joe Studwell? appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
“ ...by the beauty of it all, to the point of forgetting everything around me,” says Julien Looten, a French astrophotographer. During his visit of ESO's Very Large Telescope in Cerro Paranal, Chile, he captured this extraordinary snapshot. Today’s Picture of the Week reveals the astonishing impression he gained of one of the world's darkest skies on Earth.
This 360-degree panorama shows the Milky Way arching above an Auxiliary Telescope of the VLT, with the two Magellanic Clouds next to it. The faint green and red shimmer along the horizon is airglow, light naturally emitted by the atmosphere and only visible under very dark skies. Adding to the scene, one of the Unit Telescopes of the VLT projects laser beams into the sky to correct for blurring caused by atmospheric turbulence. To the left, the zodiacal light can also be seen, stretching like a white brush into the sky.
“Coming from northern France, where the sky is often cloudy and spoiled by light pollution, the contrast upon arriving in Chile was breathtaking: a sky of absolute purity, free from artificial light, with the galactic bulge shining right at the zenith…” Julien says. “ESO gave us a truly unique opportunity, and that night will remain etched in our memory as one of the most beautiful of our lives.”
The MRU College Fellowship, for US undergrad and grad students, helps Fellows produce their own videos, podcasts, or other online content to bring economic insights to a wide audience. Fellows are paired with MRU mentors for a seven-week remote program, starting with an expenses-paid weekend kickoff event in DC. Fellows also earn a $2,000 stipend.
Applications are due January 23.
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