Author name: Rejus Almole

How Tesla Takedown got its start

Cars, doge, elon musk, syndication, Tesla / Rejus Almole / June 17, 2025

America’s most vulnerable Billionaire?

It’s an unlikely coalition that’s been hyping Tesla’s stock slide since its launch.

On a sunny April afternoon in Seattle, around 40 activists gathered at the Pine Box, a beer and pizza bar in the sometimes scruffy Capitol Hill neighborhood. The group had reserved a side room attached to the outside patio; before remarks began, attendees flowed in and out, enjoying the warm day. Someone set up a sound system. Then the activists settled in, straining their ears as the streamed call crackled through less-than-perfect speakers.

In more than a decade of climate organizing, it was the first time Emily Johnston, one of the group’s leaders, had attended a happy hour to listen to a company’s quarterly earnings call. Also the first time a local TV station showed up to cover such a happy hour. “This whole campaign has been just a magnet for attention,” she says.

The group, officially called the Troublemakers, was rewarded right away. TeslaCEO Elon Musk started the investors’ call for the first quarter of 2025 with a sideways acknowledgement of exactly the work the group had been doing for the past two months. He called out the nationwide backlash to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, an effort to cut government spending staffed by young tech enthusiasts and Musk company alumni, named—with typical Muskian Internet-brained flourish—for an early 2010s meme.

“Now, the protests you’ll see out there, they’re very organized, they’re paid for,” Musk told listeners. For weeks, thousands of people—including the Troublemakers—had camped outside Tesla showrooms, service centers, and charging stations. Musk suggested that not only were they paid for their time, they were only interested in his work because they had once received “wasteful largesse” from the federal government. Musk had presented the theory and sharpened it on his social media platform X for weeks. Now, he argued, the protesters were off the dole—and furious.

Musk offered no proof of his assertions; to a person, every protester who spoke to WIRED insisted that they are not being paid and are exactly what they appear to be: people who are angry at Elon Musk. They call their movement the “Tesla Takedown.”

Before Musk got on the call to speak to investors, Tesla, which arguably kicked off a now multitrillion-dollar effort to transition global autos to electricity, had presented them with one of the company’s worst quarterly financial reports in years. Net income was down 71 percent year over year; revenue fell more than $2 billion short of Wall Street’s expectations.

Now, in Seattle, just the first few minutes of Musk’s remarks left the partygoers, many veterans of the climate movement, giddy. Someone close to the staticky speakers repeated the best parts to the small crowd: “I think starting probably next month, May, my time allocation to DOGE will drop significantly,” Musk said. Under a spinning disco ball, people whooped and clapped. Someone held up a snapshot of Tesla’s stock performance over the past year, a jagged but falling black line.

“If you ever wanted to know that protest matters, here’s your proof,” Johnston recalled weeks later.

The Tesla Takedown, an effort to hit back at Musk and his wealth where it hurts, seems to have appeared at just the right time. Tesla skeptics have argued for years that the company, which has the highest market capitalization of any automaker, is overvalued. They contend that the company’s CEO has been able to distract from flawed fundamentals—an aging vehicle lineup, a Cybertruck sales flop, the much-delayed introduction of self-driving technology—with bluster and showmanship.

Musk’s interest in politics, which kicked into a new and more expensive gear when he went all in for Donald Trump during the 2024 election, was always going to invite more scrutiny for his business empire. But the grassroots movement, which began as a post on Bluesky, has become a boisterous, ragtag, and visible locus of, sorry to use the word, resistance against Musk and Trump. It’s hard to pin market moves on any one thing, but Tesla’s stock price is down some 33 percent since its end-of-2024 high.

Tesla Takedown points to a uniquely screwed-up moment in American politics. Down is up; up is down. A man who made a fortune sounding the alarm about the evils of the fossil fuel industry joined with it to spend hundreds of millions in support of a right-wing presidential candidate and became embedded in an administration with a slash-and-burn approach to environmental regulation. (This isn’t good for electric cars.) The same guy, once extolled as the real-life Tony Stark—he made a cameo in Iron Man 2!—has become for some a real-life comic book villain, his skulduggery enough to bring together a coalition of climate activists, freaked-out and laid-off federal workers, immigrant rights champions, union groups, PhDs deeply concerned about the future of American science, Ukraine partisans, liberal retirees sick of watching cable news, progressive parents hoping to show their kids how to stick up for their values, LGBTQ+ rights advocates, despondent veterans, and car and tech nerds who have been crying foul on Musk’s fantastical technology claims for years now.

To meet the moment, then, the Takedown uses a unique form of protest logic: Boycott and protest the electric car company not because the movement disagrees with its logic or mission—quite the opposite, even!—but because it might be the only way to materially affect the unelected, un-beholden-to-the-public guy at its head. And then hope the oft-irrational stock market catches on.

So for weeks, across cities like New York; Berkeley and Palo Alto, California; Meridian, Idaho; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Raleigh, North Carolina; South Salt Lake, Utah; and Austin, Texas, the thousands of people who make up the Takedown movement have been stationed outside of Tesla showrooms, making it a little bit uncomfortable to test drive one of Musk’s electric rides, or even just drive past in one.

Change in the air

When Shua Sanchez graduated from college in 2013, there was about a week, he remembers, when he was convinced that the most important thing he could do was work for Tesla. He had a degree in physics; he knew all about climate change and what was at stake. He felt called to causes, had been protesting since George W. Bush invaded Iraq when he was in middle school. Maybe his life’s work would be helping the world’s premier electric carmaker convince drivers that there was a cleaner and more beautiful life after fossil fuel.

In the end, though, Sanchez opted for a doctorate program focusing on the quantum properties of super-conducting and magnetic materials. (“I shoot frozen magnets with lasers all day,” he jokes.) So he felt thankful for his choice a few years later when he read media reports about Tesla’s efforts to tamp down unionizing efforts at its factories. He felt more thankful when, in 2017, Musk signed on to two of Trump’s presidential advisory councils. (The CEO publicly departed them months later, after the administration pulled out of the Paris climate agreement.) Even more thankful in 2022, when Musk acquired Twitter with the near-express purpose of opening it up to extreme right-wing speech. More thankful still by the summer of 2024, after Musk officially endorsed Trump’s presidential bid.

By the time Musk appeared onstage at a rally following Trump’s inauguration in January 2025 and threw out what appeared to be a Nazi salute—Musk has denied that was what it was—Sanchez, now in a postdoctorate fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was ready to do something about it besides not taking a job at Tesla. A few days later, as reports of DOGE’s work began to leak out of Washington, a friend sent him a February 8 Bluesky post from a Boston-based disinformation scholar named Joan Donovan.

“If Musk thinks he can speed run through DC downloading personal data, we can certainly bang some pots and pans on the sidewalks in front of Tesla dealerships,” Donovan posted on the platform, already an online refuge for those looking for an alternative to Musk’s X. “Bring your friends and make a little noise. Organize locally, act globally.” She added a link to a list of Tesla locations, and a GIF of the Swedish Chef playing the drums on some vegetables with wooden spoons. Crucially, she appended the hashtag #TeslaTakeover. Later, the Internet would coalesce around a different rallying cry: #TeslaTakedown.

Baltimore-area residents protest the Trump administration and Tesla CEO Elon Musk at a Tesla car dealership as part of a boycott of Tesla vehicles. Saturday, March 29, 2025. Credit: Dominic Gwinn/Getty

The post did not go viral. To date, it has only 175 likes. But it did catch the attention of actor and filmmaker Alex Winter. Winter shot to prominence in 1989’s Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure—he was Bill—and has more recently produced multiple documentaries focusing on online culture, piracy, and the power of social media. He and Donovan had bonded a few years earlier over activism and punk rock, and the actor, who has a larger social media following, asked the scholar if he could create a website to centralize the burgeoning movement. “I do think we’re at a point where people need to stick their necks up out of the foxhole en masse, or we’re simply not going to get through,” he tells WIRED. In the website’s first 12 hours of existence, he says, thousands of people registered to take part in the Takedown.

Donovan’s Bluesky post brought Sanchez to the Boston Back Bay Tesla showroom on Boylston Street the next Saturday, where 30 people had gathered with signs. For Sanchez, the whole thing felt personal. “Elon Musk started a PhD at Stanford in my field. He quit after two days and then went and became a tech bro, but he presents that he’s one of us,” he says. With Musk’s new visibility—and plans to slash government research dollars while promoting right-wing ideology—Sanchez was ready to push back.

Sanchez has been outside the showroom during weekly protests throughout the Boston winter, megaphone in hand, leading chants: “It ain’t fun. It ain’t funny. Elon Musk is stealing your money.” “We don’t want your Nazi cars. Take a one-way trip to Mars.”

“We make it fun, so a lot of people come back,” Sanchez says. Someone slapped Musk’s face on one of the inflatable tube guys you often see outside of car dealerships; he whipped around at several protests. A popular bubble-themed routine—“Tesla is a bubble”—saw protesters toss around a giant, transparent ball as others blew bubbles around it. Then the ball popped, loudly, during a protest—a sign? At some of Boston’s biggest actions, hundreds of people have shown up to demonstrate against Tesla, Musk, and Trump, Sanchez says.

Donovan envisioned the protests as potent visible responses to Musk’s slashing of government programs and jobs. But she also knew that social movements are a critical release valve in times of upheaval. “People need to relieve the pressure that they feel when the government is not doing the right thing,” she tells WIRED. “If you let that pressure build up too much, obviously it can turn very dangerous.”

In some ways, she’s right. In at least four incidents across four states, people have been charged by the federal government with various crimes including defacing, shooting at, throwing Molotov cocktails toward, and setting fire to Tesla showrooms and charging stations. In a move that has worried civil liberties experts, the Trump administration has treated these attacks against the president’s richest backer’s car company as “domestic terrorism,” granting federal authorities greater latitude and resources to track down alleged perpetrators and threatening them with up to 20 years in prison.

In posts on X and in public appearances, Musk and other federal officials have seemed to conflate the actions of a few allegedly violent people with the wider protests against Tesla, implying that both are funded by shadowy “generals.” “Firing bullets into showrooms and burning down cars is unacceptable,” Musk said at an event last month in which he appeared remotely on video, his face looming over the stage. “Those people will go to prison, and the people that funded them and organized them will also go to prison. Don’t worry.” He looked into the camera and pointed his finger at the audience. “We’re coming for you.”

Tesla Takedown participants and leaders have repeatedly said that the movement is nonviolent. “Authoritarian regimes have a long history of equating peaceful protest with violence. The #TeslaTakedown movement has always been and will remain nonviolent,” Dallas volunteer Stephanie Frizzell wrote in an email. What violence has occurred at protests themselves seems limited to on-site spats that mostly target protesters.

Donovan herself skipped some protests after receiving death threats and hearing a rumor that she was on a government list targeting disinformation researchers. On X, prominent right-wing accounts harassed her and other Takedown leaders; she says people have contacted her colleagues to try to get her fired.

Then, on the afternoon of March 6, Boston University ecology professor Nathan Phillips was in his office on campus when he received a panicked message from his wife. She said that two people claiming to represent the FBI visited their home. “I was just stunned,” Phillips says. “We both had a feeling of disbelief, that this must be some kind of hoax or a joke or something like that.”

Phillips had attended a Tesla Takedown event weeks earlier, but he wasn’t sure whether the visit was related to the protests or his previous climate activism. So after sitting shocked in his office for an hour, he called his local FBI field office. Someone picked up and asked for his information, he remembers, and then asked why he was calling. Phillips explained what had happened. “They just abruptly hung up on me,” he says.

Phillips never had additional contact from the FBI, but he knows of at least five other climate activists who were visited by men claiming to be from the agency on March 6.

The FBI tells WIRED that it “cannot confirm or deny the allegations” that two agents visited Phillips’ home. Tesla did not respond to WIRED’s questions about the Tesla Takedown movement or Musk’s allegations of coordinated violence against the company.

After the incident, Phillips began searching online for mentions of his name, and he found posts on X from an account that also tagged Joan Donovan and FBI director Kash Patel.

Phillips says that the FBI visit has had the opposite of a chilling effect. “If anything, it’s further radicalized me,” he says. “People having my back and the expression of support makes me feel very confident that it was the right thing to do to speak out about this.”

Organizing for the first time

Mike had attended a few protests in the past but didn’t know how to organize one. He has a wife, three small kids, a house in the suburbs, and a health issue that can sometimes make it hard to think. So by his own admission, his first attempt in February was a mixed bag. It was the San Francisco Bay Area-based Department of Labor employee’s first day back in the office after the Trump administration, spurred by DOGE, had demanded all workers return full-time. He was horrified by the fast-moving job cuts, program changes, and straight-up animus he had already seen flow from the White House down to his small corner of the federal government.

“Attacks on federal workers are an attack on the Constitution,” Mike says. Maybe, he figured, if he could keep people from buying Teslas, that would hurt Elon Musk’s bottom line, and the CEO would lay off DOGE altogether.

Mike, who WIRED is referring to using a pseudonym because he fears retaliation, saw that a Tesla showroom was just a 20-minute walk from his office, and he hoped to convince some coworkers to convene there, a symbolic stand against DOGE and Musk. So he taped a few flyers on light poles. He didn’t have social media, but he posted on Reddit. “I was really worried,” he says, “about the Hatch Act,” a law that limits the political activities of federal employees.

In the end, three federal workers—the person sitting next to him at the office and a US Department of Veterans Affairs nurse they ran into on the street—posted up outside of the Tesla showroom on Van Ness Avenue in downtown San Francisco holding “Save Federal Workers” signs.

Then Mike discovered the #TeslaTakedown website that Alex Winter had built. (Because of a quirk in the sign-up process, the site was putatively operated for a time by the Seattle Troublemakers.) It turned out a bunch of other people had thought that Tesla showrooms were the right places to air their grievances with Trump, Musk, and DOGE. Mike posted his event there. Now the SF Save Federal Workers protest, which happens every Monday afternoon, draws 20 to 40 people.

Through the weekly convening, Mike has met volunteers from the Federal Unionists Network, who represent public unions; the San Francisco Labor Council, a local affiliate of the national AFL-CIO; and the East Bay chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. As in any amicable custody arrangement, Mike’s group shares the strip of sidewalk outside of the San Francisco Tesla showroom with a local chapter of the progressive group Indivisible, which holds bigger protests on Saturdays. “I’m trying to build connections, meet other community groups,” Mike says. “My next step is broadening the coalition.”

About half of the people coordinating Takedown protests are like Mike, says Evan Sutton, who is part of the national team: They haven’t organized a protest before. “I’ve been in politics professionally for almost 20 years,” Sutton says. “It is genuinely the most grassroots thing that I’ve seen.”

Well into the spring, Tesla Takedown organizers nationwide had held hundreds of events across the US and even the globe, and the movement has gained a patina of professionalism. Tesla Takedown sends press releases to reporters. The movement has buy-in from Indivisible, a progressive network that dates back to the first Trump administration, with local chapters hosting their own protests. At least one Democratic congressional campaign has promoted a local #TeslaTakedown event.

Beyond the showrooms, Tesla sales are down by half in Europe compared to last year and have taken a hit in California, the US’s biggest EV market. Celebrities including Sheryl Crow and Jason Bateman have publicly ditched their Teslas. A Hawaii-based artist named Matthew Hiller started selling “I Bought This Before Elon Went Crazy” car decals in 2023; he estimates he has sold 70,000 anti-Musk and anti-Tesla stickers since then. (There was a “Space X-size explosion of sales after his infamous salute,” Hiller says.) In Seattle, the Troublemakers regularly hold “de-badging” events, where small handfuls of sheepish owners come by to have the T emblems drilled off their cars.

In Portland, Oregon, on a recent May Saturday, Ed Niedermeyer was once again sweating through his shark costume as he hopped along the sidewalk in front of the local Tesla showroom. His sign exhibited the DOGE meme, an alert Shiba Inu, with the caption “Heckin’ fascism.” (You’d get it if you spent too much time on the Internet in 2013.) Honks rang out. The shark tends to get a good reaction from drivers going by, he said. About 100 people had shown up to this Takedown protest, in front of a Tesla showroom that sits kitty-corner to a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement office.

Niedermeyer is a car writer and has spent a lot of time thinking about Elon Musk since 2015, when he discovered that Tesla wasn’t actually operating a battery swapping station like it said it did. Since then, he has written a book, Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors, and documented many of what he claims to be Musk’s and the automaker’s half-truths on their way to the top.

Niedermeyer acknowledges that Musk and Tesla have proven difficult to touch, even by nationwide protests literally outside their doors.

Despite the Seattle cheers during Tesla’s last quarterly earnings call, the automaker’s stock price gained steam through the spring and rose on the news that its CEO would no longer officially work for the federal government. Musk has said investors should value Tesla not as a carmaker but as an AI and robotics company. At the end of this month, after years of delays, Tesla says it will launch a robotaxi service. According to Wall Street analysts’ research notes, they believe him.

Even a public fight with the president—one that devolved into name-calling on Musk’s and Trump’s respective social platforms—was not enough to pop the Tesla bubble.

“For me, watching Musk and watching our inability to stop him and create consequences for this snowballing hype and power has really reinforced that we need a stronger government to protect people from people like him,” says Niedermeyer.

Still, Tesla Takedown organizers take credit for the cracks in the Musk-Trump alliance—and say the protests will continue. The movement has also incorporated a more cerebral strategy, organizing local efforts to convince cities, states, and municipalities to divest from Musk’s companies. They already had a breakthrough in May, when Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, became the first US public pension fund to say it wouldn’t purchase new Tesla stocks for its managed investment accounts.

The movement’s goals may be lofty, but Niedermeyer argues that despite Tesla’s apparent resilience, Musk is still America’s most vulnerable billionaire. And sure, Musk, the CEO of an electric car company, the guy who made himself the figurehead for his automaker and fired his PR team to make sure it would stick, the one who alienated the electric car company’s customer base through a headlong plunge not only into political spending but the delicate mechanics of government itself—he did a lot of it on his own.

Now Niedermeyer, and everyone involved in Tesla Takedown, and probably everyone in the whole world, really, can only do what they can. So here he is, in a shark costume on the side of the road, maintaining the legally mandated distance from the car showroom behind him.

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Wired.com is your essential daily guide to what’s next, delivering the most original and complete take you’ll find anywhere on innovation’s impact on technology, science, business and culture.

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New COVID variant swiftly gains ground in US; concern looms for summer wave

CDC, COVID-19, ECDC, Europe, health, NB.1.8.1, omicron, SARS-CoV-2, vaccines, variant, WHO / Rejus Almole / June 17, 2025

While COVID-19 transmission remains low in the US, health experts are anxious about the potential for a big summer wave as two factors seem set for a collision course: a lull in infection activity that suggests protective responses have likely waned in the population, and a new SARS-CoV-2 variant with an infectious advantage over other variants.

The new variant is dubbed NB.1.8.1. Like all the other currently circulating variants, it’s a descendant of omicron. Specifically, NB.1.8.1 is derived from the recombinant variant XDV.1.5.1. Compared to the reigning omicron variants JN.1 and LP.8.1, the new variant has a few mutations that could help it bind to human cells more easily and evade some protective immune responses.

On May 23, the World Health Organization designated NB.1.8.1 a “variant under monitoring,” meaning that early signals indicate it has an advantage over other variants, but its impact on populations is not yet clear. In recent weeks, parts of Asia, including China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan, have experienced increases in infections and hospitalizations linked to NB.1.8.1’s spread. Fortunately, the variant does not appear to cause more severe disease, and current vaccines are expected to remain effective against it.

Still, it appears to be swiftly gaining ground in the US, fueling worries that it could cause a surge here as well. In the latest tracking data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, NB.1.8.1 is estimated to account for 37 percent of cases in the US. That’s up from 15 percent two weeks ago. NB.1.8.1 is now poised to overtake LP.8.1, which is estimated to make up 38 percent of cases.

It’s important to note that those estimates are based on limited data, so the CDC cautions that there are large possible ranges for the variants’ actual proportions. For NB.1.81, the potential percentage of cases ranges from 13 percent to 68 percent, while LP.8.1’s is 23 percent to 57 percent.

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Vandals cut fiber-optic lines, causing outage for Spectrum Internet subscribers

Biz & IT, copper, fiber, Security, spectrum, theft / Rejus Almole / June 17, 2025

Subscribers in Southern California of Spectrum’s Internet service experienced outages over the weekend following what company officials said was an attempted theft of copper lines located in Van Nuys, a suburb located 20 miles from downtown Los Angeles.

The people behind the incident thought they were targeting copper lines, the officials wrote in a statement Sunday. Instead, they cut into fiber optic cables. The cuts caused service disruptions for subscribers in Van Nuys and surrounding areas. Spectrum has since restored service and is offering a $25,000 reward for information leading to the apprehension of the people responsible. Spectrum will also credit affected customers one day of service on their next bill.

An industry-wide problem

“Criminal acts of network vandalism have become an issue affecting the entire telecommunications industry, not just Spectrum, largely due to the increase in the price of precious metals,” the officials wrote in a statement issued Sunday. “These acts of vandalism are not only a crime, but also affect our customers, local businesses and potentially emergency services. Spectrum’s fiber lines do not include any copper.”

Outage information service Downdetector showed that thousands of subscribers in and around Van Nuys reported outages starting a little before noon on Sunday. Within about 12 hours, the complaint levels returned to normal. Spectrum officials told the Los Angeles Times that personnel had to splice thousands of fiber lines to restore service to affected subscribers.

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Trump fires commissioner of preeminent nuclear safety institution

Donald Trump, nuclear, nuclear industry, nuclear reactor, Policy / Rejus Almole / June 17, 2025

Commissioner fired as Trump pivots US policy to accept more nuclear risks.

Critics warn that the United States may soon be taking on more nuclear safety risks after Donald Trump fired one of five members of an independent commission that monitors the country’s nuclear reactors.

In a statement Monday, Christopher Hanson confirmed that Trump fired him from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) on Friday. He alleged that the firing was “without cause” and “contrary to existing law and longstanding precedent regarding removal of independent agency appointees.” According to NPR, he received an email that simply said his firing was “effective immediately.”

Hanson had enjoyed bipartisan support for his work for years. Trump initially appointed Hanson to the NRC in 2020, then he was renominated by Joe Biden in 2024. In his statement, he said it was an “honor” to serve, citing accomplishments over his long stint as chair, which ended in January 2025.

It’s unclear why Trump fired Hanson. Among the committee chair’s accomplishments, Hanson highlighted revisions to safety regulations, as well as efforts to ramp up recruitment by re-establishing the Minority Serving Institution Grant Program. Both may have put him in opposition to Trump, who wants to loosen regulations to boost the nuclear industry and eliminate diversity initiatives across government.

In a statement to NPR, White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly suggested it was a political firing.

“All organizations are more effective when leaders are rowing in the same direction,” Kelly said. “President Trump reserves the right to remove employees within his own Executive Branch who exert his executive authority.”

On social media, some Trump critics suggested that Trump lacked the authority to fire Hanson, arguing that Hanson could have ignored the email and kept on working, like the Smithsonian museum director whom Trump failed to fire. (And who eventually quit.)

But Hanson accepted the termination. Instead of raising any concerns, he used his statement as an opportunity to praise those left at NRC, who will be tasked with continuing to protect Americans from nuclear safety risks at a time when Trump has said that he wants industry interests to carry equal weight as public health and environmental concerns.

“My focus over the last five years has been to prepare the agency for anticipated change in the energy sector, while preserving the independence, integrity, and bipartisan nature of the world’s gold standard nuclear safety institution,” Hanson said. “It has been an honor to serve alongside the dedicated public servants at the NRC. I continue to have full trust and confidence in their commitment to serve the American people by protecting public health and safety and the environment.”

Trump pushing “unsettled” science on nuclear risks

The firing followed an executive order in May that demanded an overhaul of the NRC, including reductions in force and expedited approvals on nuclear reactors. All final decisions on new reactors must be made within 18 months, and requests to continue operating existing reactors should be rubber-stamped within a year, Trump ordered.

Likely most alarming to critics, the desired reforms emphasized tossing out the standards that the NRC currently uses that “posit there is no safe threshold of radiation exposure, and that harm is directly proportional to the amount of exposure.”

Until Trump started meddling, the NRC established those guidelines after agreeing with studies examining “cancer cases among 86,600 survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan during World War II,” Science reported. Those studies concluded that “the incidence of cancer in the survivors rose linearly—in a straight line—with the radiation dose.” By rejecting that evidence, Trump could be slowly creeping up the radiation dose and leading Americans to blindly take greater risks.

But according to Trump, by adopting those current standards, the NRC is supposedly bogging down the nuclear industry by trying to “insulate Americans from the most remote risks without appropriate regard for the severe domestic and geopolitical costs of such risk aversion.” Instead, the US should prioritize solving the riddle of what might be safe radiation levels, Trump suggests, while restoring US dominance in the nuclear industry, which Trump views as vital to national security and economic growth.

Although Trump claimed the NRC’s current standards were “irrational” and “lack scientific basis,” Science reported that the so-called “linear no-threshold (LNT) model of ionizing radiation” that Trump is criticizing “is widely accepted in the scientific community and informs almost all regulation of the US nuclear industry.”

Further, the NRC rejected past attempts to switch to a model based on the “hormesis theory” that Trump seemingly supports—which posits that some radiation exposure can be beneficial. The NRC found there was “insufficient evidence to justify any changes” that could endanger public health, Science reported.

One health researcher at the University of California, Irvine, Stephen Bondy, told Science that his 2023 review on the science of hormesis showed it is “still unsettled.” His characterization of the executive order suggests that the NRC embracing that model “clearly places health hazards as of secondary importance relative to economic and business interests.”

Trump’s pro-industry push could backfire

If the administration charges ahead with such changes, experts have warned that Trump could end up inadvertently hobbling the nuclear industry. If health hazards become extreme—or a nuclear event occurs—”altering NRC’s safety standards could ultimately reduce public support for nuclear power,” analysts told Science.

Among the staunchest critics of Trump’s order is Edwin Lyman, the director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists. In a May statement, Lyman warned that “the US nuclear industry will fail if safety is not made a priority.”

He also cautioned that it was critical for the NRC to remain independent, not just to shield Americans from risks but to protect US nuclear technology’s prominence in global markets.

“By fatally compromising the independence and integrity of the NRC, and by encouraging pathways for nuclear deployment that bypass the regulator entirely, the Trump administration is virtually guaranteeing that this country will see a serious accident or other radiological release that will affect the health, safety, and livelihoods of millions,” Lyman said. “Such a disaster will destroy public trust in nuclear power and cause other nations to reject US nuclear technology for decades to come.”

Since Trump wants regulations changed, there will likely be a public commenting period where concerned citizens can weigh in on what they think are acceptable radiation levels in their communities. But Trump’s order also pushed for that public comment period to be streamlined, potentially making it easier to push through his agenda. If that happens, the NRC may face lawsuits under the 1954 Atomic Energy Act, which requires the commission to “minimize danger to life or property,” Science noted.

Following Hanson’s firing, Lyman reiterated to NPR that Trump’s ongoing attacks on the NRC “could have serious implications for nuclear safety.

“It’s critical that the NRC make its judgments about protecting health and safety without regard for the financial health of the nuclear industry,” Lyman said.

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

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Ads are “rolling out gradually” to WhatsApp

ads, Meta, Social Media, Tech, whatsapp / Rejus Almole / June 17, 2025

For the first time since launching in 2009, WhatsApp will now show users advertisements. The ads are “rolling out gradually,” the company said.

For now, the ads will only appear on WhatsApp’s Updates tab, where users can update their status and access channels or groups targeting specific interests they may want to follow. In its announcement of the ads, parent company Meta claimed that placing ads under Updates means that the ads won’t “interrupt personal chats.”

Meta said that 1.5 billion people use the Updates tab daily. However, if you exclusively use WhatsApp for direct messages and personal group chats, you could avoid ever seeing ads.

“Now the Updates tab is going to be able to help Channel admins, organizations, and businesses build and grow,” Meta’s announcement said.

WhatsApp users will see three different types of ads on their messaging app. One is through the tab’s Status section, where users typically share photos, videos, voice notes, and/or text with their friends that disappear after 24 hours. While scrolling through friends’ status updates, users will see status updates from advertisers and can send a message to the company about the offering that it is promoting.

There are also Promoted Channels: “For the first time, admins have a way to increase their Channel’s visibility,” Meta said.

Finally, WhatsApp is allowing advertisers to charge users a monthly fee in order to “receive exclusive updates.” For example, people could subscribe to a cooking Channel and request alerts for new recipes.

In order to decide which ads users see, Meta says WhatsApp will leverage user information like their country code, age, their device’s language settings, and the user’s “general (not precise) location, like city or country.”

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Smart tires will report on the health of roads in new pilot program

Cars, Infrastructure, Pirelli / Rejus Almole / June 14, 2025

Do you remember the Pirelli Cyber Tire? No, it’s not an angular nightmare clad in stainless steel. Rather, it’s a sensor-equipped tire that can inform the car it’s fitted to what’s happening, both with the tire itself and the road it’s passing over. The technology has slowly been making its way into the real world, starting with rarified stuff like the McLaren Artura. Now, Pirelli is going to put some Cyber Tires to work for everybody, not just supercar drivers, in a new pilot program with the regional government of Apulia in Italy.

The Cyber Tire has a sensor to monitor temperature and pressure, using Bluetooth Low Energy to communicate with the car. The electronics are able to withstand more than 3,500 G as part of life on the road, and a 0.3-oz (10 g) battery keeps everything running for the life of the tire.

The idea was to develop a better tire pressure monitoring system, one that could tell the car exactly what kind of tire—summer, winter, all-season, and so on—was fitted, and even its state of wear, allowing the car to adapt its settings appropriately. But other applications suggested themselves—at a recent CES, Pirelli showed how a Cyber Tire could warn other road users about aquaplaning. Then again, we’ve been waiting more than a decade for vehicle-to-vehicle communication to make a difference in daily driving to no avail.

Apulia’s program does not rely on crowdsourcing data from Cyber Tires fitted to private vehicles. Regardless of the privacy implications, the rubber isn’t nearly in widespread enough use for there to be a sufficient population of Cyber Tire-shod cars in the region. Instead, Pirelli will fit the tires to a fleet of vehicles supplied by the fleet management and rental company Ayvens. Driving around, the sensors in the tires will be able to infer how rough or irregular the asphalt is, via some clever algorithms.

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Monthly Roundup #31: June 2025

Monthly / Rejus Almole / June 14, 2025

It’s always a nice break to see what else is going on out there.

Study finds sleep in male full-time workers falls as income rises, with one cause being other leisure activities substituting for sleep. It makes sense that sleep doesn’t cost money while other things often do, but the marginal cost of much leisure is very low. I don’t buy this as the cause. Perhaps reverse causation, those who need or prefer less sleep earn more money?

The productivity statistics continue to be awful, contra Alex Tabarrok part of this recent -3.88% Q1 print is presumably imports anticipating tariffs driving down measured GDP and thus productivity. The more I wonder what’s wrong with the productivity statistics the more I think they’re just a terrible measure of productivity?

A model of America’s electoral system that primary voters don’t know much about candidate positions, they know even less than general election voters about this, so they mostly depend on endorsements, which are often acquired by adopting crazy positions on the relevant questions for each endorsement, resulting in extreme candidates that the primary voters wouldn’t even want if they understood.

It’s not really news, is it?

Paul Graham: A conversation that’s happened 100 times.

Me: What do I have to wear to this thing?

Jessica: You can wear anything you want.

Me: Can I wear ?

Jessica: Come on, you can’t wear that.

Jessica Livingston (for real): I wish people (who don’t know us) could appreciate the low bar that I have when it comes to your attire. (E.g. you wore shorts to a wedding once.)

Alex Thompson says “If you don’t tell the truth, off the record no longer applies,” proceeding to share an off-the-record unequivocal denial of a fact that was later confirmed.

I think anything short of 100% (minus epsilon) confidence that someone indeed intentionally flat out lied to your face in order to fool you in a way that actively hurt you should be insufficient to break default off-the-record. If things did get to that level? If all of that applies, and you need to do it to fix the problem, then okay I get it.

However, you are welcome to make whatever deals you like, so if your off-the-record is conditional on statements being true, or in good faith, or what not, that’s fine so long as your counterparties are aware of this.

Scott Alexander asserts ‘If It’s Worth Your Time To Lie, It’s Worth My Time To Correct It’ and I want to strongly claim that no, this is usually not true for outright lies and it definitely usually isn’t true for misleading presentations of facts that one could nitpick, and often doing so only falls into various traps, although it’s not clear Scott ultimately disagrees with that objection, he walks this back a bunch at the end. I do agree with his caveat that the actual important principle is that, if someone does decide to offer the correction, you don’t get to say they’re ‘supporting’ a side by doing so, or call them ‘cringe’ or describe it as ‘well acktually’ or anything like that.

What is the actual solution? Recalibration. As in, you pick up on the patterns, and adjust accordingly based on which sources pull such tricks and which ones are various amounts of careful not to do so. And yes, this does involve some amount of pointing it out.

Scott follows this up with the contrast of “But” versus “Yes, But.” As in, if [A] points out [B] while arguing for [X] was wrong about something that was load bearing to their argument, [B] needs to acknowledge they were wrong (the ‘yes’) before pivoting to other arguments for [X].

Scott Alexander: Someone wrote a blog post where they argued a certain calculation showed that the chance of a technological singularity in our lifetime was only 0.33%. I retraced the argument and found that if you did the math correctly, it was actually about 30%. Here’s the comment they left on that post:

I always find these ‘definitely the world will look almost exactly the same’ claims to be hilarious, given how that wouldn’t be true even without a singularity and hasn’t been true historically for a long time, but that’s beside the point here.

Cool thought, but I wish it had started with “Okay, you’re right and I’m wrong about the math, but I think you really want time machines and…”

I mean, not actually a cool thought either way. These thoughts are absurdly and utterly wrong. I for one want to say that while various sci-fi things would be nice, life right now (at least for me) is righteously awesome with only two real problems: Existential risk and other tail risks for highly capable future artificial intelligences, and our failure so far to cure human aging, because I hate getting old and I hate dying even more. That’s it.

But the ‘yes’ first would at least help, especially if you want continued engagement.

It is of course fine to say ‘I believe this because of [ABCD…Z], and any one of those would be sufficient, so even if you are right that [A] is false that doesn’t matter.’ But you have to actually say that, and also if I tear through [ABCD] in order you should be suspicious that this might correlate with the rest of your list.

I am doing my best to avoid commenting on politics. As usual my lack of comment on other fronts should not be taken to mean I lack strong opinions on them. Yet sometimes, things reach a point where I cannot fail to point them out.

If you are looking to avoid such things, I have split out this section, so you can skip it.

The Federal Reserve is cutting its workforce by 10% to be a ‘responsible steward of public resources.’ This is not a place I would be skimping on head count. There are so many ways for a marginally better Fed to make us a lot more money than it costs.

A fun question, who has the better business climate, California or North Carolina? It depends what kind of business. If you’re trying to build a car or open a sandwich shop, your job is way easier in North Carolina. But for some purposes, in particular tech, California’s refusal to enforce non-competes plausibly trumps everything else.

I knew the UK was arresting people for online posts, including private text messages, including ones that were very obviously harmless. I didn’t realize it was 1,000 people a month. The UK has a little over 40 million adults, so your risk every year is about 3bps (0.03%), over 1% chance that at some point this happens to you personally. That’s completely insane.

Field notes on Trump’s executive orders on nuclear power. It all seems neutral or better, but it’s not clear how much of it is new and actually meaningful. My guess is this on its own doesn’t do that much, and is less important than retaining or expanding subsidies.

Is US immigration still, for those who know the way, open for business?

Renaissance Philanthropy: U.S. companies can hire international talent in research and engineering in a matter of weeks, not months. But most never hear how.

New guide from @ImmCouncil breaks it down: OPT, O-1, J-1, H-1B cap-exempt and more. Whether you’re a Fortune 500 or a startup, odds are you’ll discover options you didn’t know existed.

“Trump’s shipbuilding agenda is sinking.” The Navy is described as 20 years behind in its goals. We need to face facts, we don’t have meaningful shipbuilding, and perhaps we want to pay massive amounts to change that while using proper tactics like export discipline, but the Jones Act and similar laws haven’t ‘protected’ American shipbuilding, they’ve destroyed it, and they need to go.

The point of a signature is usually not to prove that it was you who signed. Here’s a fun thread pointing out what’s really going on, that it’s mostly a tripwire that says ‘we are no longer Just Talking’ except in situations where you are for-real signing a for-real contract.

Strip Mall Guy: Signatures are a weird, outdated, and frankly laughable way to prove somebody approved a document.

Patrick McKenzie: (n.b. This is extremely well-known among companies which have a business process where you sign things. Most of them use a signature to demonstrate solemnization rather than authorization or authentication.)

As I’ve mentioned previously, solemnization is a sociolegal tripwire to say “There are many situations in society and in business where you’re Just Talking and up until this exact moment we have been Just Talking *and after this pointWe Were Not Just Talking. Do you get it?”

People who are unsophisticated about this think that the signature is somehow preventing someone from retroactively changing the terms of the contract. People who are unsophisticated say thinks like “Oh use digital signatures to PROVE that that has not happened. Sounds great.”

That is simply not the risk that the process is concerned with.

In some cases solemnization declines to being vestigial. For example, signing credit card receipts: no one cares.

Your bank does not expect a waiter to do forensic handwriting analysis on your signature versus the one on the reverse of your card, rejecting thieves.

If someone steals your card and perfectly reproduces your signature, and you say “My card was stolen; I did not pay for that dinner”, your bank will say “Yeah sounds really likely and we have no exposure here, OK restaurant eats it. Can we get you off phone quickly please?”

If same thing happens in a real estate situation, “Yeah that was not really me in the room signing that”, their lawyer is going to have some Pointed Questions and eventually your lawyer is going to have some Carefully Worded Professional Advice.

But a thing that a real estate closing is really really really concerned with is that all parties, who may be operating across a range of sophistications, understand that there was a long negotiation that got us to this point And That Negotiation Hereby Concludes Successfully.

(The number of conversations which begin “Well I didn’t really sell it to you” is greater than zero but it is less than it would be in a counterfactual world where there wasn’t the pomp and circumstance of a real estate closing.)

You can, by the way, get much [farther] than one would naively expect if one is willing to simply put forged documents in front of one’s lawyers and judges in an increasingly unrealistic fashion for many years. The immune system might not catch you for a very long time.

Many people tried it before Craig Wright did and many will try it after, and many of them felt very clever during all the years where they were still paying for their own housing. Did some get away with it? Yeah. There is no law of this universe that says justice inevitable.

Twitter introduces Polymarket as an official prediction market partner. Even the mid version is pretty cool, and executed properly this could be amazing, an absolute game changer. For now this only looks like Polymarket incorporating Twitter. I love that for Polymarket but the real value is the other way around. We need to incorporate Polymarket into Twitter, at minimum letting Tweets embed markets, and ideally complete community notes with markets attached, spin a market out of any tweet, trade right on Twitter, and so on.

Removing political ads from Facebook and Instagram for six weeks before the 2020 American elections for a given user had no detectable effect on their political knowledge, polarization, election legitimacy, campaign contributions, candidate favorability or turnout. I basically buy it in this context. Very little changed in that six week period. It makes sense that in the end stages of a campaign, all the information flow here is already oversaturated. You’ve already seen the ads, and those ads are still flowing to everyone else you know and back to you, if you’re using Facebook and Instagram, and the rest of your world is also unchanged.

The most interesting aspect is that the most common type of ad was a fundraiser, they kept running them, and yet they didn’t have a noticeable impact on fundraising. This is strongly suggesting that the ads on the margin shift distribution, avenue or timing of contributions but don’t impact overall giving, at least once you get to this stage of the campaign. Alternatively, such fundraising had reached such over-the-top obnoxious levels that they were driving people away as much as they raised money. That could also explain there being no net impacts in other ways, that saturation especially of fundraising but also other ads served to piss voters off about as often as they helped.

Also I think this was a fantastic experiment and we should do More Like This, although perhaps Meta is not so excited to let them do it again for obvious reasons.

BlueSky appeals to creators over Twitter by not downranking links, drawing many of them into joining. It really is this simple, and it’s such Obvious Nonsense to think Elon Musk knows what he is doing trying to ‘keep people on the website.’

New Twitter bot plot twist, bots that reply to you then block the author, which gets the author deboosted, en masse, and the impact adds up. Neat trick, it’s new and the network of bots doing this is reported to be massive, in the thousands or more. Or perhaps the deboosting is incidental to the standard goal?

SHL0MS: sorry but this is incorrect. it is top of funnel for a WhatsApp group scam the deboosting may be a second order effect but that is not the purpose of the bots. they block the author to avoid being blocked and having their replies hidden.

This seems like a clear Skill Issue by Twitter. The algorithm should be able to figure this one out, also in this case they keep tagging the same account which gives the game away but there should already be strong statistical evidence that the activity isn’t real.

A special 0.5% of Facebook users were kept ad-free since 2013, and their ‘give-up-Facebook’ price is the same as ad-exposed users (~$32/month).

This suggests the ads are efficient, or even that more ads would be better, since they have marginal value to Facebook and the users don’t actually mind. Alternatively, it means people’s posts aren’t better than ads.

Tim Hwang: Statistically, there is some person out there who for completely random reasons has ended up on the better side of every A/B test and is unknowingly experiencing the most incredible internet you can imagine.

The thing about TikTok is indeed that it’s… not meant to be interesting? That’s actually a category error?

Noah Smith: TikTok is so insanely goddamn boring. Every time I watch a TikTok video, I think “man that’s meh”. Then I watch my friends consume it, and they’re just flipping past every video, even the ones they like. They don’t even finish 15-second videos. It’s pure channel-surfing.

Zac Hill: The best way to understand TikTok is by reading Wallace’s E Unibus Pluram. Wallace understood ~35 years ahead of his time how profoundly the phenomenon of attention capture would shape the way we construct society – and how our minds could be so easily instrumentalized.

If you have a Twitter variation with too sharp a cultural focus, it is extremely hard to break out of that focus and become a general solution.

Paul Graham: Bluesky’s usage graph. The pattern here is bad. Spikes when a bunch of new people show up, followed by declines when the new arrivals are disappointed.

Andreas Kling: The problem with Bluesky (and Mastodon as well) is they mostly have one kind of asshole. They operate unchallenged, leading to extreme asshole saturation.

Meanwhile, X has *allkinds of assholes working against each other, so they kinda cancel each other out.

sin-ack: eh, more than anything it’s the consequences of disagreement. on ex dot com you get some pushback, at worst you mutually block and you’re done. on bsky you get added to a global block list and get hidden from half the people. on mastodon you and everyone on your instance get completely defederated and effectively permanently removed from the conversation. impartiality doesn’t exist because it’s “community operated”.

This usage pattern doesn’t have to doom you. It makes sense that you’d get traffic largely driven by major events and moments where new users show up who might not be a fit so many leave, and that without them you’d be static or in decline, and this is compatible with long term growth. Nothing wrong with losing small most days and winning big on occasion if the wins are big enough. In this case however it looks pretty doomed, as it’s hard to think of additional similar events.

A wonderful illustration of toxoplasma of rage as an active social media strategy. It’s great when people admit this is the plan.

If you’re dealing with Twitter bots, what’s the play?

This depends on what you care about. If you’re only thinking of your own experience, there is not that much to do beyond blocking the bot, short of getting block lists.

If you’re trying to promote the general welfare and fight on Team Humans, you can do more. Adam Cochran suggests first find the account the bot is shilling (if any), mute and then block it, to inflict maximum algorithmic pain. Then block the commentator. That sounds like more work than I’d be willing to do, but I notice that if I had one a quick way to tell an AI to do it, I’d be down.

The correlations here make sense, but a lot of potential explanations are not causal even before one examines the research methodologies involved:

Jared Benge and Michael Scullin (via MR): The first generation who engaged with digital technologies has reached the age where risks of dementia emerge. Has technological exposure helped or harmed cognition in digital pioneers?

…Use of digital technologies was associated with reduced risk of cognitive impairment (OR = 0.42, 95% CI 0.35–0.52) and reduced time-dependent rates of cognitive decline (HR = 0.74, 95% CI 0.66–0.84). Effects remained significant when accounting for demographic, socioeconomic, health and cognitive reserve proxies.

Tyler Cowen: So maybe digital tech is not so bad for us after all? You do not have to believe the postulated relatively large effects, as the more likely conclusion is simply that, as in so many cases, treatment effect in the social sciences are small. That is from a recent paper by Jared F. Benge and Michael K. Scullin. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.

It’s definitely great if the early versions of digital tech are associated with reduced risk of cognitive decline, although I would not presume this result carries over to long term exposure to modern smartphones and the associated typical use cases. And even if it does still apply, this is one of many aspects of digital technology, and it very much does not allow us to ‘think on the margin’ about this, as the most likely causal explanations involve enabling people to meet minimal thresholds of cognitive activity that serve to slow down cognitive decline.

As per this righteous rant thread from Conrad Bastable, it is very true that when you buy a new computer, by default it will come pre-loaded with a lot of crap, and Windows 11 will waste a bunch of resources, and that Macs come with a lot of objectively terrible software, and that it takes a remarkable amount of deliberate effort to fix all this even if you mostly know what you are doing, during which you are subjected to ads.

Conrad Bastable: Your [Mac] Start menu comes preloaded with Politics and Baseball media content. Nightmares beyond comprehension.

Framework: The strongest argument in favor of 2025 being the year of the Linux desktop. To the other operating systems, you are the product, not the customer.

This isn’t a big deal for a knowledgeable user. No, the startup button in Windows spiking the CPU isn’t a practical problem, and it is a one-time not that high cost to get a lot of the stupid bloat out of the system, and letting apps send you notifications is good, actually, given there’s an easy way to turn it off for each app the moment they try to abuse it. I have made peace with the setup process.

What I don’t fully understand is why all of this is true. It’s one of those ‘yes I get it but also I don’t, actually.’ It seems like an obviously easy selling point to say ‘this PC doesn’t come with any ads’ and similar. People would definitely pay a bit more for that. You’d get customer loyalty and word of mouth, as your product would perform better. An expensive purchase is exactly a place where you shouldn’t need to do ads. And yet, yes, they consistently do this anyway, even when it is obviously net destructive to long term profits. Why is my smart TV so terrible, even if it’s ultimately fine and way better than an old dumb one? Yes, I tried using an XBox or Playstation instead, ultimately I found it not better enough to bother.

But even if you hate all that, what are people going to do, use Linux? Seriously?

Mustafa Hanif: No operating is serious if it doesn’t support:

Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Excel, Capcut, StarCraft 2, Fortnite, Valorant

Framework: The most important of those six works on Linux.

I mean, okay, one out of six with the right link, I bet it’s more if you knew where to look, and you’re going to suggest this to people who can’t debloat their Windows box? Every now and then someone pitches me on switching to Linux, and every time it seems like an endless nightmare to get up to speed and deal with compatibility and adoption issues, even if I didn’t care about games.

Ah, the circle of online life:

Aella: i started out on X determined not to block anyone. then i entered 2nd stage: blocking everyone who seemed even a little unkind. but now im progressing to 3rd stage: giving up on blocking ppl cause they’re too petty to warrant the effort of moving finger to block button.

As your account grows in reach, the value of blocking any one account that is interacting with you goes down, so you bother doing it less, and eventually have to rely on mass blocks, block lists and automated tools. That makes sense. I’m still in full block people mode, although ‘a little unkind’ is not enough to trigger it for me. It used to mostly be mute but it’s now block since that doesn’t stop you from seeing my posts either way.

Steve Hsu reports lots of optimism for both artifical wombs and gene editing of embryos, and that a meeting at Lighthaven convinced him they’re coming sooner than you would think. I don’t have the optimism he has about this as a hedge against existential risk given the timelines involved, but there is wide uncertainty about that, it’s very much a ‘free’ action in that regard, it’s all upside.

A reasonable perspective on both Rationality and also The Culture, except that with this perspective redemption is possible only through grace, and that kind of thinking has a long history of really messing people up if they don’t feel the grace enough:

EigenGender: I think that interacting with rationality community online before I interacted with them in person gave me the community wide equivalent of when someone puts their partner up on a pedestal at the start of the relationship and it ruins the relationship forever.

It is by any objective standard a great community but it broadcasts an even more beautiful sirens call into the Internet and then fails to live up to the standards it sets for itself. It’s also failed to fix all my life problems for some reason.

Rationality is like The Culture. It is the best thing that ever existed and also bears an incredible and irredeemable moral sin for not doing more with the opportunity that’s been handed to it.

[the above tweet is exaggerated for comedic respect wrt. Rationality but sincerely captures my feelings towards the culture]

There definitely is an important pattern that bright abstract thinkers do many things, including Effective Altruism, that seem often motivated by striving to be and think of oneself as Good rather than Bad, with more discussion at the thread. We have a culture telling people (especially men but also everyone) that they and key parts of themselves and our entire civilization (and often even humans period) are Bad – we de facto now have the Christian idea of original sin without the Christian standard path to redemption, oh no. The historically prototypical ‘good deeds’ and ways to make yourself Good are, to bright abstract thinkers, either obviously fake or transparently inefficient and silly, or at least not sufficient to do the trick.

Checkmate.

You shouldn’t not use common sense, but the word ‘just’ is not okay here.

There was a recent exchange of posts between Tyler Cowen and Scott Alexander about USAID. I wrote an extended analysis of that exchange and learned by doing so, but am invoking Virtue of Silence and not posting it. I will simply note that everyone involved agrees that it is completely false to say that anything remotely like only 12% of USAID money ultimately went to helping recipients, and that anyone using that claim in a debate (such as Marco Rubio or JD Vance) is doing a no-good very bad thing.

Last year Florida banned lab-grown meat, and I went through three rounds of trying to explain why, even though I wouldn’t ban it, a reasonable person who wanted to continue eating regular meat might want such a ban, given how many people are itching to ban or ostracize or otherwise destroy all other meat consumption.

I am the first to admit I am not always perfect about adhering to the principle of ‘if you care about an issue you need to understand where all sides and especially the opposition are coming from’ but I do try and I think it is important to do so.

I am quoting people on this again because there was another round of this argument recently, and because it is a microcosm of a lot of other things going on in politics, even more so than when this came up last year, culminating in Matt Yglesias presenting this as a fully one sided issue and saying ‘Banning Lab Grown Meat Is Stupid.’

Its Not Real: RWers in red states are banning lab grown meat because it will be used as a a cudgel against them in the future. There is no faith that lab grown meat will be on an even playing field in the market. It will be used for Dekulakization if the opportunity presents itself.

They saw what happened or has been attempted against mineral extraction industries. This is secondary to economic efficiency, market viability, meat taste quality, or meat nutritional quality. Its tertiary to the replication crisis and being able to trust this new meat.

Its the perfect anti-Chud machine, “Look at our superior product. Higher quality in tastes and nutrients, environmentally friendly, and morally superior since no animals died.” Its a short jump from there to heaping new regulations on farmers to strangle them financially.

(Thread continues as you would expect.)

PoliMath: This is a really good thread of why people are disinclined to permit lab-grown meat It feels like a back door to banning real meat and people are really sick of being tricked and forced into accepting shitty things they don’t want.

Derek Thompson: It’s a typical conservative opinion—I’m afraid that the emergence of new things will mean I won’t be able to enjoy my old things—and you’re free to have it, but I’m surprised somebody who’s worked in tech doesn’t see the limitations of this argument in his own field.

“If we allow this new thing to develop, the state will eventually ban this old thing I like, so we have to smother the infant tech in the crib” is a very very anti-progress position to take, in any field. You’re basically endorsing incumbent bias as a first principle because of a make-believe fear that Democrats are on the verge of banning steak.

PoliMath: Let’s talk about this. “Show me the legislation” is a head-fake. We aren’t in the legislation phase of this project. But every lab meat company markets itself as the future of meat and calls for an end to natural meat. Every single one.

Biocraft: “Farmed animals live shorter and more brutal lives today than ever before. In the USA, 25 million of them are killed every single day. We say enough is enough”

Enough is enough, huh? Oh that’s probably just harmless rhetoric.

SciFi Foods: “The future is coming soon.” “We’ll all be able to enjoy our burgers without destroying the planet.”

Huh. And what will happen to those planet-destroying farms? Probably nothing, I guess.

Fork and Good: “a vision of scalable, sustainable, human and cost-effective future for meat” “change meat production forever”

Forever, huh? Not just bringing more options to the consumer, you want to change meat production forever?

Oh, that’s probably just marketing.

…

that is what is so annoying to me about this. I’m not so much advocating a ban as saying “Can you understand why this bothers people?” and too many of the answers are “no, if this bothers you, you’re a dummy who is imagining things”

No they aren’t. They’re being told things.

Kat Rosenfeld: this thread is garnering a lot of argumentative replies to the effect of “well people shouldn’t feel that way”, making it a fascinating microcosm for the brokenness of political discourse overall.

“well people shouldn’t feel that way” okay cool, but they do, and will continue to until or unless you can affirmatively address their concerns.

Mike Solana: I am against the lab meat bans, and enthusiastic about experimentation here, but decimating global meat consumption is the explicit goal of many people excited about the space, and pretending that isn’t true is just dishonest

I think the conversation you probably want to be having is “factory farming is morally bad and unhealthy and we need an alternative,” but proponents haven’t had much luck with that argument, and especially not abroad, so here we are

Last thought, the average normie “muh steak” guy (me some days) isn’t stupid. He knows you’re being dishonest. And this breeds further distrust / animosity for the tech, and tech generally. For ppl who never learned from COVID: if you can’t be honest, please just say nothing.

Derek Thompson: I’m describing reality — you’re banning meat, Dems aren’t — and you’re describing a psychology: “We’re afraid and want protection.”

Fine! I get that. But I’m surprised to see you so clearly make the argument that you’d rather feel safe than be right.

Emma Camp: “We need to ban this thing to prevent other people from hypothetically, sometime in the far future, making it mandatory” is not a compelling argument.

Josh Zerkle: let’s talk this out over a pack of incandescent light bulbs.

It’s also worth noting that a number of the largest multinational meat packers are acquiring or investing in lab meat start-ups, to hedge their bets.

Again, I don’t want to ban lab grown meat, because I am willing to stick to my guns that you don’t go around banning things, even if you don’t like where all of this is going. But I understand, including for those who don’t have any financial skin in the game. I disagree, but it isn’t dumb.

If you don’t understand why, think about it until you do.

It is flat out gaslighting to call this, as Derek Thompson does, ‘a make-believe fear’ or ‘psychological issue’ rather than a very real concern, or to deny that this is the stated intention of the entire lab grown meat industry and a large number of others as well, and it is gaslighting to deny the clear pattern of similar other bans and requirements that have made people’s lived experiences directly worse – whether or not you think those other bans and requirements were justified.

There is less than zero credibility for the claim that no one will be coming for your meat down the line, no one is even pretending that they’re not coming for it, at best they are pretending to pretend.

A claim I have heard is that 50% or more of self-identified ‘vegetarians’ ate meat in the past week. When you ask my followers both questions at once, they don’t agree and it is only 17%. But obviously asking both at once and asking my Twitter followers are both going to lower the percentage here.

Also 22% of respondents were vegetarian or vegan.

Arc was (as of May 22) hiring a Chief Scientific Officer. Seems like a great opportunity.

Ryan Peterson asks what is the best history book you’ve read?

Paul Graham: Medieval Technology and Social Change

The Copernican Revolution

Life in the English Country House

Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy

Anabasis

The Quest for El Cid

The World We Have Lost

Lots of other people replied as well, seems overall like great picks but there are so many so I haven’t rad most of them. If I had to pick one, I’d pick Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War.

Cate Hall warns against the ‘my emotions really mean it’ approach to commitment, because it doesn’t work. Your emotions will change. What you have to do is engineer things, especially using forcing functions, such that success is easier than failure. For her the most prominent of these was diving into her relationship and marrying quickly. The whole system requires real accountability and real consequences. It has to actually hurt if you don’t do it, but not hurt so much you’ll back out entirely. You also need to watch out before doing too much to cementing a life or lifestyle you don’t want.

Connor: I don’t think I’ve said this before, but I think this post might have changed my life? Everything about it. The feel vs make, the forcing function, the aspiration of who you want to become. As soon as I wanted a counter point, she made it and deconstructed it. I will make changes in my life due to this post. I say that maybe 1-2 times a year (funny enough they are always blog posts/essays found via Twitter). What simple but great writing. Full post in her 2nd tweet.

The method Cate Hall describes here is highly useful, but far from the only component, and by its very nature this strategy involves real risk of costs big enough to hurt and without corresponding upside. As Cate would no doubt agree, a bet (where you can win or lose) is better expected value than a Beeminder (where there is only downside, except for the motivation).

Ideally you want other commitment mechanisms that involve upside. My central move is, quite literally, to realize that when one commits one is betting not only one’s external reputation but also one’s inner reputation, one’s thinking of oneself as someone who keeps similar commitments and thus the power of similar commitments to bind your actions.

Being able to use commitments effectively is super valuable, so endangering that by breaking commitments is a big cost, which enforces the commitment on its own. And every time you hold strong, the power grows. And this dynamic forces you to calibrate, and only use commitments when you mean them.

If your children are set to inherent vast amounts of wealth, there are three schools of thought on how to handle this:

Never leave anyone you love more than [X million] dollars, make them earn it, either for their own good or to donate the rest to worthy causes.
Make them earn it now, then let them inherent it later, or do so if they earn it.
Give them a trust fund now, so their life is better and they acclimate to wealth.

I am with Sebastian and Mason that plan #2, forcing your kid to live like a ‘normal person’ and obsess over small amounts of money so they can be like everyone else or learn to ‘value the dollar’ or what not, is actually terrible training for being wealthy, for the same reason lottery winners mostly blow their winnings. Choose #1 or #3.

You do want them to ‘earn it’ and more importantly learn how to operate in the world, it’s totally fine to attach some fixed conditions to the unlock of parts of the trust fund, but you don’t do that by giving them Normal People Money Problems.

Sebastian Ballister: people are dunking on this [now deleted tweet], but I went to college with a bunch of people whose parents are running business worth 9-figures who have left their kids to their own devices to find jobs in tech or finance.

Their kids will all be in completely over their heads when they do inherit.

Mason: I actually agree here

If you’re going to pass on extreme wealth, “trust fund kid” is actually the way to go. Properly managed, it’s not an endless bank account, it’s an asset portfolio with training wheels

If you want your kids to be “normal” then fine, don’t leave them a mountain of wealth

If you’re leaving them a mountain of wealth, help them learn how to treat it like a custodian of multigenerational resources rather than a lottery they win when dad dies.

I do think this is different from putting them in charge of your own business straight away. It makes sense to make them train via other work, but that doesn’t mean you want to squeeze them for money while they do that. You want to design an actual curriculum that makes sense and gets them the right experience, in the real world.

I see a big difference between ‘you have to hold down a real job’ versus ‘you have to focus on personal cash flow.’

Danger Casey: I have a good friend who’s family has serious generational wealth through a business his father started

Despite following the same degree path, his father told him to work elsewhere for 10 years then hired him as a director. Then made him work 10 years up to president before handing the business over

It gave him experience and perspective elsewhere, gave him time in the business to learn *andprove himself to existing staff, and now he’s running the show

Frankly, I think it was brilliant.

Emre: Elite business schools are full of these kids who worked a few years as normies, then go to elite MBA, before settling into family business.

It’s a good path, and probably better than being a 21 year old heir inside the business.

Wedding costs seem completely nuts to me. Also, buffet is better? But I love that the objection here to that people have to get up, not to the RSVP-ordering rule.

Allie (as seen last month): I’m not usually the type to get jealous over other people’s weddings

But I saw a girl on reels say she incentivized people to RSVP by making the order in which people RSVP their order to get up and get dinner and I am being driven to insanity by how genius that is

Allyson Taft: I saw that, too. It’s kind of gross, though, because who wants a wedding where people have to get up to get food?

Ourania: Literally just discussed this with husband. Imagine the cost difference of $20 per person vs $50 per person and your list is over 100 people!

Rota: “Having your guests get up to get their food is extremely rude” good lord help me.

Teen Boy Mom: I paid for my own wedding and we did a free seat buffet at a high end French restaurant. They still got filet, and they could sit wherever they wanted and it cost me less.

In general, yes, a good restaurant is better than a buffet. But a buffet will be better than most catering that you’ll get at a wedding or other similar venue.

The deal on the catering is universally awful compared to what you get, even without considering that many people do not want it, and often quality is extremely bad. And by going buffet you get the advantages of a buffet, everyone gets what they actually want, or at least don’t mind. So yes, this means you have to get up to get your food, but so totally worth it, and I don’t even see that as a disadvantage. You can use an excuse to flee the table sometimes.

A series of branching exchanges on the ways to draw distinctions between interactions that are ‘transactional’ versus ‘social.’

Flowrmeadow: I’m sorry but if you want to stay at my apartment for your NYC trip you need to buy me dinner or at least a $20 bottle of wine. Just something that shows you give a shit man. It’s surprising how no one does this

Alanna: it is so insane to me that people no longer understand the difference between ‘transactional’ and ‘social graces.’ Like, if a friend saves you hundreds in lodging fees, buy them dinner and wine. That’s basic etiquette.

And, if you cannot afford anything lavish and are staying out of desperation… just be honest: “thank you for taking me in when I’m in such a tough spot, I can’t wait to make it up to you.” And people will be understanding. Why are people becoming so bad at social conventions???

Aella: That’s a transaction! If you’re giving a gift but you’ll be hurt if they don’t give you something back, then it’s not a gift freely given!

I once gave a friend a very large financial gift and I only did it after I fully came to emotional terms with them doing absolutely nothing.

Ta-Nehisi Quotes: In ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel,’ there’s a great scene where the protagonist is gifted expensive cologne by a colleague. Although impoverished, he makes a show of offering his friend a quarter in return. The friend magnanimously declines. The thought is what is important.

Rob Bensinger: I think all three of these are good things: “giving something without expecting anything in return”, “giving something while expecting a specific thing in return”, and “giving something with the expectation of this vaguely influencing a social ledger of back-and-forth favors”.

It’s good to keep these three things distinct, IMO, and it’s good to be clear about whether “non-transactional” is referring to “truly expecting nothing in return” option vs. the “vaguely influence the social ledger” option.

I would go a step beyond Rob here, there are a lot of related but distinct modes here, and asking for symbolic compensation does not make something transactional, even if that symbol costs some money. The point of buying dinner is not that it’s a fair price, it’s that it shows your appreciation. Indeed, this can serve to avoid having to write an entry, or a much larger entry, into that social ledger.

Then there’s the question of smaller things like dinner parties.

Alyssa Krejmas: So I host a lot of dinner parties. In SF, 85% of guests show up empty-handed. And if someone does bring something like wine & it’s not opened, they’ll often take it back home. I’ve seen this happen not just at my own parties, but others’ too. It’s so odd to me. That was never the etiquette in New England—and I really don’t think this should be a regional thing?

Zac Hill: This is the single thing that bothers my wife (Venezuelan) the most about many of my friends. She is like, this is categorically exclusion-worthy behavior. Like for her it is fart-in-an-elevator-tier anathema.

PoliMath: People in the US need to understand that our country is functionally more than a dozen different countries, each with their own cultures and patterns.

If something is common in New England and you aren’t in New England, take the role of cultural ambassador & inform your guests.

I consider it fine to show up empty handed, but better to ask if you can bring anything. We have one friend who explicitly bars anyone from bringing anything, because he wants to curate the whole experience. I think that’s great.

My family try to host Shabbat dinners on Friday evenings for friends (if I know you and you’d like to come some time, hit me up), and we explicitly say that we don’t expect you to bring anything, although you are welcome to do so, especially dessert, or wine if you want to be drinking but our crowd usually doesn’t drink. It is nice when people do this. But also I think at this level, a thank you works fine.

Ah, the joys of someone with authority demanding documentation to prove that you do not need documentation. And the dilemma of what to do in response, do you produce it (if you have it) or do you become the joker? Here the example is, woman who is 24 weeks pregnant being told to prove she isn’t 28 weeks pregnant, because if she was she would need a doctor’s note to fly.

A fun proposal is to reduce sweets consumption by having sweet food with probability 2/3rds, determined by random draw. My problem with this proposal is that, when something isn’t always available, it makes you much more likely to take that opportunity when it is available, you don’t want to miss out on your opportunity. Thus, you need a variant: If you get a yes, you keep that yes until you use it, so you get rewarded rather than punished if you skip your chance.

Benjamin Hoffman offers a model of the kind of personas, performances and deceptions we expect from politicians and the managerial class.

Atlanicesque: We have a system which selects for dishonesty, but in a peculiar way. We select for “sincere deceivers,” people who lie and otherwise act dishonestly for personal gain, yet are intellectually capable of rationalizing their behavior to themselves so completely they feel no shame.

Such people are uniformly horrible to deal with in any extended or involved fashion, so of course our society has decided to put them in charge of everything important.

Benjamin Hoffman: I think I disagree on some important details with that tweet; the people in leadership more typically have a mindset that normalizes types of opportunistic identity-performance, and invalidates the very idea that such performances could be held to the standard of honesty.

…

A simple example is Kamala Harris’s famous “it was a debate,” which openly implied that criticisms articulated in debate against a then political opponent aren’t supposed to add up with what you say after you’ve teamed up with them and thinking otherwise is for naive suckers.

This is not really “rationalized,” since there’s no reason offered; it’s merely a description. If asked for a justification in a context where they feel compelled to offer one, people who act like this might say “it’s the way of the world” or “you have to be realistic.”

Less famous people in the professional-managerial class have to navigate an analogous custom in their employment situations by constructing a persona that claims to care about the job authentically and not transactionally.

This doesn’t exactly entail an active 24/7 performance of the professional persona the way Robert Jackall’s book Moral Mazes claims, but it does tend to involve consistent readiness to engage that facade, and inhibition of anything that would challenge it too much.

I don’t think this is fully cross-culturally invariant. My impression is that the Russians have something more internally honest going on, though obviously something else is very wrong with Russian culture, and I predominantly speak with emigrants, who are therefore exceptional.

E.g. I met a Russian-American woman who spoke casually in a private social setting about valuing leisure and not wanting to work more than necessary, but when asked what she did for work, frictionlessly code-switched to corporate-speak.

I think those people mostly don’t even see it as deception or lying anymore. It’s simply the move you make in that situation. And I can actually model that perspective pretty well, because it’s exactly how I feel when I’m playing poker or Diplomacy.

I see Jackall as describing the attractor, and ‘how high you bid’ in moving towards that attractor, which is mostly about signaling how high you will continue to bid later, is a large determinant of ‘success’ within context. Willingness to engage a facade is sufficient to do okay, but you’ll probably lose to those who never drop the facade, and especially those who become the mask.

There is now sometimes a huge discount for buying airline tickets in bulk? In one extreme example it was only $1 more to buy two tickets rather than one. This is happening on American, United and Delta, so far confined to a few one way flights.

The growing Chinese trend of paying a fake office so you can pretend to work. Isn’t this at its base level just renting coworking space? The prices seem highly reasonable. For 30-50 yuan ($4-$7) a day, or 400 yean you get a desk, Wi-Fi, coffee and lunch. For more money you can get fake reviews, or fake employees, or fake tasks, and so on. Fun.

The base reported use case is to do this while looking for work, but also you could use it to, you know, actually work? There’s nothing actually stopping you, you have Wi-Fi.

This month I learned the Air Force had an extensive ritual where they told high ranking officers they were secretly reverse engineering alien aircraft purely as a way to mess with their heads, and this likely had a role in the whole UFO mythology thing. Of course, some who have bought in will respond like this:

Eric Weinstein: The title of this @joerogan clip from #1945 is literally: “We might be faking a UFO situation.”

OBVIOUSLY.

As I have said before, “When we do something secret and cool, we generally pair it with something fake.” This is standard operating proceedure (e.g. Operation Overlord was D-Day/Operation Fortitude was a Faked Norway Invasion). This is what ‘Covert’ means. Covert means ‘Deniable’. Not secret, but *deniable*.

You see, the evidence that this was faked only shows how deep the conspiracy goes.

It’s tricky to get this right and avoid anyone being misled, because you’re combining a number of related strategies and concepts into the group that is contrasted with, essentially, ‘cheap talk,’ and this risks conflating multiple concepts. But I think ‘costly signal’ is still our best option here most but not all of the time, as a baseline term, because simplicity matters a lot.

Richard Ngo: “Costly signaling” is one of the most important concepts but has one of the worst names.

The best signals are expensive for others – but conditional on that, the cheaper they are for you the better!

We should rename them “costly-to-fake signals”.

Consider an antelope stotting while being chased by lions. This is extremely costly for unhealthy antelopes, because it makes them much more likely to be eaten. But the fastest antelopes might be so confident the lion will never catch them that it’s approximately free for them.

Or consider dating. If you have few options, playing hard to get is very costly: if your date loses interest you’ll be alone.

But if you have many romantic prospects it’s not a big deal if one loses interest.

So playing hard to get is a costly-to-fake (but not costly) signal!

I think “costly” originally meant “in terms of resources” not “in terms of utility”. So a billionaire spending 10k on a date is a monetarily-costly signal which shows that they have lower marginal utility of money than a poor person.

But cost in terms of utility is what actually matters in the general case, and so “costly (in resources)” signaling is just a special case of “costly (in utility) to fake” signaling.

I get why one would think that ‘costly in utility to fake’ is the core concept that matters, but a bunch of other differences seem important too.

Is the signal costly or destructive even if it is accurate? If it is costly, is this a fixed cost (pay the cost once in order to signal, get to signal cheaply thereafter) or is it marginal (pay the cost each time you want to send the signal)?
Is the signal effective because it means it was cheap to send (either on the margin or in general)? Or is the signal effective because it was expensive to send, and you are sending it anyway, thus proving you care in some sense?
Does the signal involve destroying a bunch of value? Or does it involve transferring value or generating it for others (or even for yourself)?
Is this a positional signal? Or is it an absolute signal?

This matters because the goal is to have signals that maximize bang-for-the-buck in all these senses. I worry that calling it ‘costly-to-fake’ while accurate would (in addition to being longer) centrally point people towards asking the wrong follow-up questions.

“Travel” doesn’t have to be fake. Tyler Cowen travels. Eigenrobot goes a little too far here, on many fronts. But most of us at best Travel™, which can involve seeing some cool sights but mostly is something one does to have done it, except when we are meeting up with particular people or attending an event, which is a valid third thing.

Eigenrobot: “travel” is fake

no one except lord myles has “adventures” when they travel

you are staying at a hotel, paying large sums of money to have a far worse experience than you could have in your own home and a far softer experience than you could have by spending a weekend in jail

“i love to Travel” why have you failed to establish your home as a place of serenity and joy, to the extent that you feel psychically uncomfortable there and strive to get away from your life whenever you can, viewing it as the highest good?

you are not well

“i Travel” you can go wherever you like in the world but you will never escape yourself

“i want to spend time with people different than myself!” no you dont. there are Different people in your city.

go hang out with the homeless or some seniors hmmmm? i guarantee these people are more different from you than are your age and class peers in europe

the only really good reason to travel recreationally is to see old friends and travel in this case is, in a real sense, like coming home after a long time spent away.

Paul Graham: I was going to explain why you’re mistaken, but then I realized that the places I like to visit would be less crowded if people believed this, and moreover the people who’d stay home would be exactly the ones I’d want to.

The Galts: Ah but I do so on a small boat. I have adventures when I travel … and never need to pack a suitcase.

Eigenrobot: Yeah that’s legit.

Again, are some real advantages to Travel™, especially if your home base is in a place without all the things, you shouldn’t quite do zero of it. But most Travel™ is, I think, is either a skill issue due to an inability to relax without it, or a parasocial or future memory and anticipation play.

Plus you have to plan it. Some people enjoy this, and they are space aliens.

Daniel Brottman: having to decide things in advance is crazy lol. “yeah i’m gonna want to get on a plane on the 22nd of august.” statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged. they have played us for absolute fools.

QC: had to think recently about whether i wanted to sign a yearlong lease in august – bro i do not know a single thing about what the world will look like by august of NEXT year.

Daniel Brottman: holy shit is august of 2026 even real, i heard it was just a myth.

Lighthaven now has a podcast studio. I had the chance to tape in there with Patrick McKenzie, it is a quite nice podcast studio.

The IRS tax filing software that everyone except TurboTax loves, and that they got the Trump administration to attempt to kill, has instead gone open source, with its creators leaving government to continue working on it. Something tells me plenty of people will be happy to fund this. So maybe this was a win after all. I am sad that my taxes involve too many quirky details to use anything like this.

Kalshi sports betting is by all reports going well.

This is very much The Big Game, so these numbers are not as impressive as they look. But it’s still respectable, and most importantly the pricing is good and it is fully legal. I consider products like DraftKings and FanDuel effectively abominations at this point, but if you don’t want to use overseas books this seems fine:

Here’s another ‘why America’s implementation of sports betting is terrible’ essay. We not only allow but essentially mandate and mainstreamed the most predatory version possible, and the states are not realizing their promised revenues.

There exist contact lenses that only need to be changed every few weeks, and the report is they feel like normal contacts.

Cate Hall explains why agency is both a trainable skill and also Definitely a Thing distinct from ‘success,’ and that if you don’t want your future successes to be in air quotes, you should go build that skill.

Cate Hall also points out that while you may be high agency in some ways, that does not mean you are automatically high agency in other ways. In many ways you likey are not actually trying. In particular, you’re likely stuck on whatever level of resourcefulness you had when you first encountered a given problem, which I’d raise to you likely being stuck with the particular strategies you found. You don’t step back and treat problems in other spheres the way you do in your areas of focus, even if you are exerting a lot of effort it is often not well-aimed or considered.

Denmark repeals its ban on nuclear energy.

Citrini: A handy guide to figuring out whether your thesis will pay off, based on your initial reaction:

“this is so fucking clever” – works maybe 10% of the time, likely drawdown before it does

“well…yeah, that’s fucking obvious” – best trade you’ll ever have in your life.

Deep Dish Enjoyer: buy the company producing the best llm on the market for under a 20 p/e.

The source tweet from George here plays it up too much but there is as one would expect a substantial (r~0.4) correlation between honesty and humility. From what I can tell all the ‘good’ personality traits correlate and so do all the bad ones. That’s very helpful in many ways, including getting a read on people.

Chinese attempt to recruit and blackmail fed official John Rogers, largely through the Chinese wife he found on a matchmaking service, likely thinking Rogers had far more access to actionable information than he did. As Tyler Cowen says, there probably wasn’t much to learn from him. It seems the Chinese pushed the threats too hard, and he reported their attempts to the Fed.

Lie detection is something we’re actually pretty good at if we pay attention.

David Parrell: One way to sense if somebody’s telling the truth is that there’s a freshness to their words, whereas people who are lying speak in platitudes and tell you what they think they’re supposed to tell you.

This is also a way to investigate your own thinking. We can so easily fool ourselves without realizing it. But when our words feel recycled and repackaged, it’s a sign that we’re deceived, or at the very least, not being entirely honest with ourselves.

Yes And: A good therapist can smell this in seconds.

This is true if and only if the cheerfulness doesn’t interfere with something load bearing, which can be true in unexpected ways sometimes, hence missing mood:

Tetraspace: I don’t really believe in missing moods but I do believe in the nearby concept of stop celebrating the costs.

If something is worth doing it’s worth being cheerful about (you don’t have to be cheerful, but it’s worth cheer). But a lot of things that are worth doing hurt people, and the people being hurt are costs, not benefits, and the cause of the cheer is the benefits, not the costs.

There are two levels to missing moods.

The first level, where everyone here is in violent agreement, is not to celebrate the need to pay costs, and not to confuse costs with benefits.

The second level, which can play back into confusions on the first level, is that you need the missing moods because that is how humans track such things, and how we generate reward signals to fine-tune our brains. You should generate such signals deliberately and ensure that they train your brain in ways that you prefer.

Jane Street was excellent about this. They emphasized the situations in which you ‘should be sad’ about something, versus happy, exactly enough to remind your brain that something was a negative and it we should evaluate and update accordingly. This is part of deliberate practice at all levels, in all things. You need to pay that experiential price, to some extent, to get the results.

Whereas there are other situations in which doing something cheerfully is the action that is load bearing. It is always a little bit load bearing in that you would prefer to be cheerful rather than not, and those around you usually also prefer this. Some actions only work if you are cheerful while doing them or otherwise have the right attitude, or at least they work far better. Those are almost always either worth doing cheerfully, or not worth doing at all.

The trick then is that this conflicts with a well-calibrated brain that systematizes deliberate practice. You need to be able to shut off those functions, in whole or in part, for the moment, while retaining them for other purposes. That’s tricky to do, and a tricky balance to get right even once you have the power to do it.

If you’re a young woman at a prestigious university there are those who will pay top dollar, tends of thousands, for your eggs. One comment says they offered $200k. Thanks, people warning about this ‘predatory advertising’ of (for some, it’s an offer, you can turn it down!) the ultimate win-win-win trade. There’s a real health cost, but in every other way I say you’re doing a very obviously good thing, and if you disagree you can just pass on this.

Tetraspace: If only I could be so exploited!

Kelsey Piper: I also got these ads and looked into the process! It didn’t happen to work out but I’m glad I was offered the opportunity. Graduate students aren’t children; the serious moral considerations occurred to me and I thought about them; and I value helping people start families.

The absurd culture of infantalization and helplessness of grown adults where we are appalled at the idea of a 22 year old graduate student making a serious, major life choice sickens me. 22 year olds can marry! They can have children! They make many decisions of serious import.

Part of living in our world is that there will be a great many opportunities to make decisions that really matter and that you feel unequipped for. Make them, or don’t, but the world spins on – that’s adulthood, and it’s grotesque to complain it was expected of you.

A graduate student at Yale is also offered the opportunity to make absurd sums of money working in various industries of at least dubious ethical standing. Should we go ‘poor Yale babies, how could they resist the predatory management consulting offers’? No! They should grow up.

If you went to Yale, you have lying before you manifest opportunities to affect the world for good and for ill, to create life and to design new weaponry, to be an egg donor or a crypto sports betting founder. You’re not a helpless baby being preyed on.

It is your obligation- and I’m not saying it’s an easy obligation, just that bioethicists cannot shield you from it- to figure out what you believe is right and pursue it, and refuse temptations to do wrong. The world can’t provide this, won’t provide this, and frankly shouldn’t.

Noah Smith claims American culture has stagnated.

He starts off citing the standard evidence like movies being dominated by sequels and music being dominated by older songs and the top Broadway shows being revivals and old brands (e.g. DC and Marvel) dominating comics. He also cites the standard counterexample that TV has very clearly experienced a golden age – I strongly agree and observe that with notably rare exceptions older shows now appear remarkably bad even when you get to skip commercials.

I’d also defend Broadway and music consumption mostly being old. Why shouldn’t they be? A time-honored Broadway play is proven to be good, it makes sense to do a lot of exploitation along with the exploration, and we do find new big hits like The Book of Mormon and Hamilton. In music it is even more obviously correct to do mostly exploitation, or exploration of the past where selection has done its job over time, in at-home experiences. In addition, when you play the classics, you get the benefits of a rich tradition, that adds to the experience and builds a common culture and language. I say that’s good, actually. Is it ‘cultural stagnation’ when we read old books? Or is that what leads to culture?

And also there are completely new, rapidly evolving forms of culture, that flat out didn’t exist before, as he notes Katherine Dee arguing. A lot of it is slop, but that’s always been true everywhere, and they are largely what you make of them. Even in a 90%+ (or even 99%+!) slop world, search and filters can work wonders.

Noah considers response to technology, and also has a theory of possibility exhaustion, that the low-hanging fruit has been picked. There are only so many worthy chords, so many good plots. He thinks this is a lot of why movies now are so repetitive, the space of movies is too small.

Noah and I basically agree on what’s going on in another way. Movie people used to largely make movies for each other. The sequels were (I think) always what audiences actually wanted, and the creatives basically refused to deliver and now they’ve stopped refusing. But there’s still plenty of room for the avant-garde and making a ‘good’ ‘original’ movie.

Also, we’re seeing a lot of cultural change start to happen because of AI, which will only accelerate. I’m definitely not worried about ‘cultural stagnation’ going forward.

Tyler Cowen responds that he is inclined to blame what stagnation we do see on lack of audience taste today. I would reframe most of that complaint as saying that before we used to get to overrule or dictate audience taste far more than we do now, with a side of modern audiences having very little patience, which I mostly think they are right about.

Scott Sumner rattles off some overlooked films, predictably I have seen very few of them. Those that I did see seem like at least good picks but not exceptional picks, and of course my choice to see those in particular wasn’t random. There’s a Letterboxd version.

What type of music you like predicts your big 5 personality traits, some details surprised me but they all made sense after I thought about them for a few seconds.

Are the music recommendation engines the problem, or is this an unreasonable ask? I think the answer is both, we are trying to solve the wrong problems using the wrong methods using a wrong model of the world and all our mistakes are fail to cancel out.

David Perell: It’s strange, but I almost never discover my favorite music on Spotify. The songs I fall in love with are always the ones I hear when I’m out. The ones friends show me. The ones I hear at coffee shops. Or a night out. I would’ve expected personalized algorithms to constantly show me songs I fall in love with, but that hasn’t happened.

Erik Hoffman: That’s why recommendations will always suck if they do not include data such as time of year, weather, season of life etc into the algorithms

Matthew Kobach: This isn’t because the algorithms are bad per se, it’s because context matters. Spotify can play the right song, but if it’s the wrong time or context, you’ll never love it.

Your favorite songs are inextricably tied to emotion, even if you’ve long forgotten the original emotion.

Brett Iredale: Been saying this for years. Spotify is obsessed with giving you more of what you’ve already listened to – not focused on new things you might like. I will jump ship the second there is a new product with a better recommendation algo.

Allen Walton: Was at Starbucks 2 years ago. Empty, raining outside, just espresso sounds. Song came on I’d never heard before.

“Cats and dogs are coming down… 14th street is gonna drown.”

It got my attention and I enjoyed the whole song, so IIooked up the band (Nada Surf). Ended up loving their music and now I’m a huge fan. Saw them live a couple months ago, was excellent.

If the algos worked, I would have been enjoying them the last 20 years!

Clint Murphy: Spotify will find songs you like.

The songs you love, though, usually have something different than what you like.

They’re often songs, as you say, in a moment. With an experience. They fill something in you at that moment and Spotify or any Algo, so far, doesn’t know that moment.

AI tied to your everyday life, and body metrics, will get there.

An algorithm like Spotify is simply not trying to find unique music you will love. That’s not what it is being optimized to do. It is trying to go ‘here is Some Music, you could listen to that’ such that you go ‘okay, that is indeed Some Music, I could listen to that.’ This is not a terrible thing to do, but it is not where most value lies.
Simply put, the algorithms are not yet that good. They are good enough to say ‘here is Some Music’ or ‘here is Some Music that closely matches your existing choices of music’ but not at making interesting leaps.
Most value lies in big successes: You find a song, album or artist (or even entire genre) you then love. By its nature, searches for this on the margin are going to have a low hit rate.
The priming is very important, as is the feeling of curation and scarcity. You really benefit from association and serendipity. I will often find good stuff from a TV show, or a game, or a movie, or yes a song I heard in some circumstance. Of course, if a song really is good enough, you can make that happen afterwards, but to be a song you love it has to mean something.
The algorithms not only can’t set the context, they don’t understand the context, as Hoffman points out. This one is going to be a tough nut to crack.
The collective music world is actually scary good at finding the best stuff once you adjust for context. I am currently doing a ‘grand tour’ of every artist for whom my music library contains at least one song and wow, the popularity rankings within each artist are scary accurate. They can miss something great via not noticing, but even that is rarer than you think. There are places the public makes bad picks or had its chance and missed, but it’s always surprising, and usually even when I disagree I understand why. In most cases I realize that yes, I am in general wrong, this song is great for me (or lousy for me) but not in general.
The algorithm moves last, after you’ve tried everything else. This subjects it to adverse selection.

There’s a lot of room to do better for power users, but Spotify has to work with users who, like users everywhere, are mostly maximally lazy and who don’t want to invest. I’m actually not so sure there’s much room to improve there, although I use Amazon Music rather than Spotify so I haven’t put it to the test.

Benjamin Hoffman offers a thread on the 1990s and why people are so nostalgic for them. Here’s part of it.

Benjamin Hoffman: The big movies of 1999 were expressions of desperation at the false bourgeois we’d constructed to replace the real one – Office Space, Fight Club, American Beauty, and The Matrix, which spookily resembled the Columbine High School massacre.

The Matrix also specifically and correctly predicted that we’d try to replay the ‘90s over and over to keep the simulation going instead of getting on with our lives. The best Office Space could recommend was becoming a laborer.

It makes more sense to think of the ‘90s as the last decade in which a relatively sheltered person might not realize that society was systematically breaking its implied commitments to people who worked hard & played by the rules.

I notice that those are the ones that I loved and remember and seem important, but only 2 of those 4 are in the top 10 grossing movies of the year.

The listed category also would include Magnolia, and arguably also in a way the highest grossing movies of the year if you take them properly seriously, which were Star Wars Episode I about the fall of a republic that had lost its virtue in peacetime and how we ultimately turn to the dark side, The Sixth Sense about (spoiler but come on) and Toy Story 2 about being trapped by a collector and preserved in a box. Then #4 is The Matrix, and #5 is Tarzan, which glamorizes being outside of society, and #7 is Notting Hill which is basically about rejecting modernity for an old bookshop. Huh.

I still think of 1999 as a high water mark in movies. Those were good times.

(As a control I randomly chose 2005 and didn’t see the same pattern, also most of the top films were now some sort of remake. Then I went to 2012 and we’re in a wasteland of franchises that have nothing to say.)

A comment on my call for the Meta-Subscription, saying it exists and it’s YouTube:

Joe Barton: “I continue to think that a mega subscription is The Way for human viewing. Rather than pay per view, which feels bad, you pay for viewing in general, then the views are incremented, and the money is distributed based on who was viewed.”

I’ve been a YouTube Red/Premium subscriber since basically day one. I know you go on and on about how Google can’t market their way out of a used kleenex dropped in the street on a rainy day – This is Yet Another Example of that principle.

YouTube Premium is the mega subscription model you’re describing, and it already works brilliantly – Google just can’t market it to save their lives.

Nobody and I mean NOBODY (except The Spiffing Brit in one throwaway line in one video¹) realizes that YouTube splits Premium subscription revenue 55/45 with creators, just like ad revenue. But here’s the kicker: it fundamentally changes the entire ecosystem. Instead of viewers being the product sold to advertisers, we become the customers. Creators get paid MORE per Premium view than ad views, without worrying about “advertiser-friendly” content guidelines. I never get that “feels bad” moment of deciding if a video is worth X cents – I just watch what interests me, guilt-free.

The model removes ALL the friction: no ads, no ad-blocker wars, creators get stable income, and viewers can support creators without thinking about it. YouTube Premium is proof that the mega subscription model works. The only failure is that after nearly a decade, Google still hasn’t figured out how to explain this to people. They’ve positioned it as “YouTube without ads” when it’s actually “become a patron of every creator you watch, automatically.”

¹ Explained briefly from 1: 24 to 2: 40 in “YouTube Premium Is Broken.” by The Spiffing Brit, 14 August 2021. “Most creators see basically no revenue from Premium each month.”

I too am a YouTube Premium subscriber, and no I did not realize that my viewing was subsidizing creators more than I would have without the subscription. I only knew not having ads was worth a lot. And yes, YouTube has quite a lot in it, but no it is not the Mega-Subscription even for video. Too many others aren’t playing ball.

A rare time when explaining the joke actually is pretty funny.

ESPN finally launches a streaming service. Ben Thompson correctly says ‘finally’ but also notes that everyone is worse off now that sports along with everything else can only be watched intentionally through a weird mix of streaming services. The problem with ESPN as a streaming service is that it won’t actually give you what you want. If you offered me the Sports Streaming Service (SSS), and it had All The Sports, I’d be down for paying a decently large amount. Give me a clean way to subscribe even just to the teams I want, and maybe that works until the playoffs. But if I’m going to be in I want to be in. ESPN alone doesn’t get me in and I don’t want to spend the time figuring out where everything is. So it’s still going to be YouTubeTV for football season and that’s it, I suppose.

Alas, there’s been no time for me to game this month. I hope to get back to it soon.

I am on the fence about getting back to Blue Price. I do think it’s pretty great in many ways, but not sure it’s my speed and I worry about being puzzle-locked or waiting for a lucky day?

Next up: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which everyone loves but I haven’t played yet past the first campfire, and Monster Train 2 which is a ticket I can cash at any time.

And of course Slay the Spire 2, once it arrives.

So instead we have to live vicariously through Magic: The Gathering news.

We now have Magic: the Gathering Standard set built around Final Fantasy? Sign me up! Except actually, no, don’t, and not only because look at the time.

The same way that the Dungeons & Dragons set ‘got’ D&D, the Final Fantasy set mostly doesn’t ‘get’ Final Fantasy, or its particular concepts and characters. There are some clear hits for me, especially Cecil, Dark Knight. But there’s also a ton of ‘look at what they did to my boy.’ Or my girl, Aerith, the vibes are almost reversed. You think that’s Tifa? You think that’s what happens when Kefka transforms? Cloud triggers equipment twice rather than being able to lift his sword at all? The Crystal’s Chosen happens on turn seven? What is even going on with Sin?

I could go on.

Mechanically the set feels schitzo. Which is kind of fine in principle, since Final Fantasy is kind of schitzo and I love it to pieces (in order especially 6, 4 and 7, but I’ve also played through and endorse 12, 1, 10, 8, 3 and 2) you’re doing the entire franchise, but then the resonance mostly feels backwards. We object because we care.

(I don’t know why I bounced off 9, whereas 5 felt like an uber grind and my first attempt got into a nightmare spot in the endgame, must have been doing it wrong. X-2’s opening was insane in the best way but it kind of petered out. I endorse that 13 and 15 weren’t doing the thing anymore, sad, and haven’t tried 16. The MMORPGs don’t count, I tried 14 for a few hours and it felt highly mid.)

I don’t follow Magic right now so I have no direct data on if Prowess is too good in Standard, but Sam Black seems clearly right that if you hold a bunch of major Arena tournaments and no one can beat the best deck there, then that means the best deck is too good, what else were you even hoping for? Arena regular play, including at high Mythic, systematically is both much easier than big tournaments for other reasons and also includes a lot more people experimenting or trying to beat the best deck, and less people playing the best deck.

With distance from the game, I think Magic in general has been way way too reluctant to drop ban hammers. Yes, it’s annoying to strike down people’s cards and decks, but it’s far worse for your game to suck for a while, and for everyone to feel forced to fall in line. In the Arena era, things go faster, no one is holding big secrets back for long, and you find out fast if you have a problem.

Sam Pardee: Playing on Arena before the RC I played against a ton of MD High Noons and Authority of the Consuls. The notion that players aren’t trying and “immediately crying for changes” is laughable to me.

…

I think one of my opponents had a MD white enchantment but mostly I played 9 mirrors so not really. People all had plans for the matchup and were certainly trying their best to win, the plans were just not any good.

Sam Black: I entirely agree with Sam. To say players are “conditioned” to ask for bans rather than tried to beat the best deck makes no sense—what more could possibly done to do the opposite of that than offer tournaments with meaningful prizes and rarely ban cards?

The Commander Cube seems to have some issues with game length and timing out, due to the whole point being to create long games.

Commander keeps eating Magic, Sam Black is going to stop doing Drafting Archetypes to focus on cEDH. It makes sense for him to focus on what he enjoys, but this confirms to me that the Magic I loved is essentially dead, and unless and until my kids get interested in playing I need to fully move on.

Waymo gets regulators to approve roughly a doubling of the area they can operate in around San Francisco, from the gray to now the orange, although for now they are limited by the number of cars so they are expanding gradually.

East Bay when? Alas, it seems they are still not allowed on highways so it wouldn’t link up, which means it wouldn’t make sense to expand there.

Sam Rodriques: Today: Wow Waymo is so good at driving it’s crazy that we ever thought it was a good idea for humans to drive.

Tomorrow: Wow AI is so good at reviewing papers, it’s crazy that we ever thought it was a good idea to have other humans review our papers.

Waymos remain severely undersupplied even in the service area of San Francisco.

Nathan Lambert: In my recent trip, the waymo market in SF has converged to ~2-3x the wait time and ~2-3x the cost of uber because that’s how much more people are willing to pay for Waymo.

Arvind Narayanan points out via Matthew Yglesias that we lose a lot of the upside of self-driving cars if we don’t adjust our parking rules, because we’d miss out on much more efficient use of space. And yes, we should try to get that value too, but mostly we just need to actually allow the self-driving cars and that’s where most of the value lies? Arvind then generalizes this to diffusion begin the bottleneck to progress rather than innovation. To me this is a great example of why that is obviously false, the main barrier to self-driving cars was expected to be regulatory but it has decisively proven to mostly be the ability of the AI to drive the car.

If all the AI can do is drive the car, we will quickly replace the taxis and the cars with versions that self-drive (or at least versions capable of it), and then of course we will fix the parking rules.

It’s probably going to be a common sight going forward that protestors attack Waymos, and this was a good time for this reup:

Bryne Hobart: A good time to remember that vandalizing Waymos demonstrates the incredible trust we all have in big tech companies: Waymo is studded with cameras and are owned by a parent company with access to your email and detailed knowledge of your porn consumption habits.

How far ‘behind’ are some self-driving companies? How is Tesla doing?

Timothy Lee: First fully driverless ride on public roads:

Google/waymo: 2015

Amazon/zoox: 2020

GM/Cruise: 2022

Aurora: 2025

Tesla: 2025

After Waymo’s first driverless ride it took Waymo another five years to launch a fully driverless commercial service. Presumably it won’t take Tesla that long but they have a lot of catching up to do.

Robert Graham: What are the technical details of Tesla’s achievement. I ask because their existing FSD can’t drive very far without requiring interventions to prevent damage to the vehicle.

I’m assuming that like Waymo, they’ve secretly created maps of the area.

Timothy Lee: Yeah the evidence that they are ready to scale rapidly is very thin afaik.

This brings up something we often deal with in AI. Fast following is substantially easier. In some sense, Tesla is 10 years behind Waymo by this metric. In others, it’s less, because Tesla should be able to get through those 10 years faster given what Waymo already did. So how ‘far behind’ are they is a question that depends on which sense you care about, and whether you care about Tesla’s ability to take a lead.

I know the context (and lore) here but it’s arguably better without it.

I have no questions at this time.

Thinkwert: In the end, Death finds us all.

Discussion about this post

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Coming to Apple OSes: A seamless, secure way to import and export passkeys

Apple, Biz & IT, iOS, iPadOS, macOS, Security, wwdc 2025 / Rejus Almole / June 13, 2025

As the video explains:

This new process is fundamentally different and more secure than traditional credential export methods, which often involve exporting an unencrypted CSV or JSON file, then manually importing it into another app. The transfer process is user initiated, occurs directly between participating credential manager apps and is secured by local authentication like Face ID.

This transfer uses a data schema that was built in collaboration with the members of the FIDO Alliance. It standardizes the data format for passkeys, passwords, verification codes, and more data types.

The system provides a secure mechanism to move the data between apps. No insecure files are created on disk, eliminating the risk of credential leaks from exported files. It’s a modern, secure way to move credentials.

The push to passkeys is fueled by the tremendous costs associated with passwords. Creating and managing a sufficiently long, randomly generated password for each account is a burden on many users, a difficulty that often leads to weak choices and reused passwords. Leaked passwords have also been a chronic problem.

Passkeys, in theory, provide a means of authentication that’s immune to credential phishing, password leaks, and password spraying. Under the latest “FIDO2” specification, it creates a unique public/private encryption keypair during each website or app enrollment. The keys are generated and stored on a user’s phone, computer, YubiKey, or similar device. The public portion of the key is sent to the account service. The private key remains bound to the user device, where it can’t be extracted. During sign-in, the website or app server sends the device that created the key pair a challenge in the form of pseudo-random data. Authentication occurs only when the device signs the challenge using the corresponding private key and sends it back.

This design ensures that there is no shared secret that ever leaves the user’s device. That means there’s no data to be sniffed in transit, phished, or compromised through other common methods.

As I noted in December, the biggest thing holding back passkeys at the moment is their lack of usability. Apps, OSes, and websites are, in many cases, islands that don’t interoperate with their peers. Besides potentially locking users out of their accounts, the lack of interoperability also makes passkeys too difficult for many people.

Apple’s demo this week provides the strongest indication yet that passkey developers are making meaningful progress in improving usability.

Coming to Apple OSes: A seamless, secure way to import and export passkeys Read More »

Engineer creates first custom motherboard for 1990s PlayStation console

classic gaming, Crowdfunding, electronics engineering, Game consoles, gaming, Gaming History, hardware hacking, hardware preservation, Open Source, PCB design, PlayStation, retrocomputing, retrogaming, retrotech, Reverse-engineering, Sony, Vintage computing / Rejus Almole / June 13, 2025

The nsOne project joins a growing community of homebrew PlayStation 1 hardware developments. Other recent projects include Picostation, a Raspberry Pi Pico-based optical disc emulator (ODE) that allows PlayStation 1 consoles to load games from SD cards instead of physical discs. Other ODEs like MODE and PSIO have also become popular solutions for retrogaming collectors who play games on original hardware as optical drives age and fail.

From repair job to reverse-engineering project

To understand the classic console’s physical architecture, Brodesco physically sanded down an original motherboard to expose its internal layers, then cross-referenced the exposed traces with component datasheets and service manuals.

“I realized that detailed documentation on the original motherboard was either incomplete or entirely unavailable,” Brodesco explained in his Kickstarter campaign. This discovery launched what would become a comprehensive documentation effort, including tracing every connection on the board and creating multi-layer graphic representations of the circuitry.

A photo of the nsOne PlayStation motherboard. Credit: Lorentio Brodesco

Using optical scanning and manual net-by-net reverse-engineering, Brodesco recreated the PlayStation 1’s schematic in modern PCB design software. This process involved creating component symbols with accurate pin mappings and identifying—or in some cases creating—the correct footprints for each proprietary component that Sony had never publicly documented.

Brodesco also identified what he calls the “minimum architecture” required to boot the console without BIOS modifications, streamlining the design process while maintaining full compatibility.

The mock-up board shown in photos validates the footprints of chips and connectors, all redrawn from scratch. According to Brodesco, a fully routed version with complete multilayer routing and final layout is already in development.

As Brodesco noted on Kickstarter, his project’s goal is to “create comprehensive documentation, design files, and production-ready blueprints for manufacturing fully functional motherboards.”

Beyond repairs, the documentation and design files Brodesco is creating would preserve the PlayStation 1’s hardware architecture for future generations: “It’s a tribute to the PS1, to retro hardware, and to the belief that one person really can build the impossible.”

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Hollywood studios target AI image generator in copyright lawsuit

AI, AI development tools, AI ethics, AI image generator, AI image generators, AI law, AI lawsuits, Biz & IT, copyright, Darth Vader, Disney, entertainment industry, generative ai, Hollywood, image synthesis, intellectual property, machine learning, MidJourney, Policy, star wars, universal / Rejus Almole / June 12, 2025

The legal action follows similar moves in other creative industries, with more than a dozen major news companies suing AI company Cohere in February over copyright concerns. In 2023, a group of visual artists sued Midjourney for similar reasons.

Studios claim Midjourney knows what it’s doing

Beyond allowing users to create these images, the studios argue that Midjourney actively promotes copyright infringement by displaying user-generated content featuring copyrighted characters in its “Explore” section. The complaint states this curation “show[s] that Midjourney knows that its platform regularly reproduces Plaintiffs’ Copyrighted Works.”

The studios also allege that Midjourney has technical protection measures available that could prevent outputs featuring copyrighted material but has “affirmatively chosen not to use copyright protection measures to limit the infringement.” They cite Midjourney CEO David Holz admitting the company “pulls off all the data it can, all the text it can, all the images it can” for training purposes.

According to Axios, Disney and NBCUniversal attempted to address the issue with Midjourney before filing suit. While the studios say other AI platforms agreed to implement measures to stop IP theft, Midjourney “continued to release new versions of its Image Service” with what Holz allegedly described as “even higher quality infringing images.”

“We are bringing this action today to protect the hard work of all the artists whose work entertains and inspires us and the significant investment we make in our content,” said Kim Harris, NBCUniversal’s executive vice president and general counsel, in a statement.

This lawsuit signals a new front in Hollywood’s conflict over AI. Axios highlights this shift: While actors and writers have fought to protect their name, image, and likeness from studio exploitation, now the studios are taking on tech companies over intellectual property concerns. Other major studios, including Amazon, Netflix, Paramount Pictures, Sony, and Warner Bros., have not yet joined the lawsuit, though they share membership with Disney and Universal in the Motion Picture Association.

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The Dream of a Gentle Singularity

Dream / Rejus Almole / June 12, 2025

Sam Altman offers us a new essay, The Gentle Singularity. It’s short (if a little long to quote in full), so given you read my posts it’s probably worth reading the whole thing.

First off, thank you to Altman for publishing this and sharing his thoughts. This was helpful, and contained much that was good. It’s important to say that first, before I start tearing into various passages, and pointing out the ways in which this is trying to convince us that everything is going to be fine when very clearly the default is for everything to be not fine.

I have now done that. So here we go.

Sam Altman (CEO OpenAI): We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be.

Robots are not yet walking the streets, nor are most of us talking to AI all day. People still die of disease, we still can’t easily go to space, and there is a lot about the universe we don’t understand.

And yet, we have recently built systems that are smarter than people in many ways, and are able to significantly amplify the output of people using them. The least-likely part of the work is behind us; the scientific insights that got us to systems like GPT-4 and o3 were hard-won, but will take us very far.

Assuming we agree that the takeoff has started, I would call that the ‘calm before the storm,’ or perhaps ‘how exponentials work.’

Being close to building something is not going to make the world look weird. What makes the world look weird is actually building it. Some people (like Tyler Cowen) claim o3 is AGI, but everyone agrees we don’t have ASI (superintelligence) yet.

Also, frankly, yeah, it’s super weird that we have these LLMs we can talk to, it’s just that you get used to ‘weird’ things remarkably quickly. It seems like it ‘should be weird’ (or perhaps ‘weirder’?) because what we do have now is still unevenly distributed and not well-exploited, and many of us including Altman are comparing the current level of weirdness to the near future True High Weirdness that is coming, much of which is already baked in.

If anything, I think the current low level of High Weirdness is due to us. as I argue later, not being used to these new capabilities. Why do we see so few scams, spam and slop and bots and astroturfing and disinformation, deepfakes, cybercrime, giant boosts in productivity, talking mainly to AIs all day, actual learning and so on? Mostly I think it’s because People Don’t Do Things and don’t know what is possible.

Sam Altman: 2025 has seen the arrival of agents that can do real cognitive work; writing computer code will never be the same. 2026 will likely see the arrival of systems that can figure out novel insights. 2027 may see the arrival of robots that can do tasks in the real world.

That’s a bold prediction, modulo the ‘may’ and the values of ‘tasks in the real world’ and ‘novel insights.’

And yes, I agree that the following is true, as long as you notice the word ‘may’:

In the most important ways, the 2030s may not be wildly different. People will still love their families, express their creativity, play games, and swim in lakes.

Note not only the ‘may’ but the low bar for ‘not be wildly different.’ The people of 1000 BCE did all those things, plausibly they also did them in 10,000 BCE or 100,000 BCE. Is that what would count as ‘not wildly different’?

This is essentially asserting that people in the 2030s will be alive. Well, I hope so!

Already we live with incredible digital intelligence, and after some initial shock, most of us are pretty used to it.

I get why one would say this, but it seems very wrong? First of all, who is this ‘us’ of which you speak? If the ‘us’ refers to the people of Earth or of the United States, then the statement to me seems clearly false. If it refers to Altman’s readers, then the claim is at least plausible. But I still think it is false. I’m not used to o3-pro. Even I haven’t found the time to properly figure out what I can fully do with even o3 or Opus without building tools.

We are ‘used to this’ in the sense that we are finding ways to mostly ignore it because life is, as Agnes Callard says, coming at us 15 minutes at a time, and we are busy, so we take some low-hanging fruit and then take it for granted, and don’t notice how much is left to pick. We tell ourselves we are used to it so we can go about our day.

This is how the singularity goes: wonders become routine, and then table stakes.

We already hear from scientists that they are two or three times more productive than they were before AI.

I note that Robin Hanson responded to this here:

Robin Hanson: “We already hear from scientists that they are two or three times more productive than they were before AI.”

If so, wouldn’t their wages now be 2-3x larger too?

Abram: No, why would they be?

Robin Hanson: Supply and demand.

o3 pro, you want to take this one? Oh right, nominal and contratual stickiness, institutional price controls, surplus division, supply response, measurement mismatch, time reallocation, you get maybe a 10% pay bump, wages track bargained marginal revenue not raw technical output, and both lag the technical shock by years.

I did, however, notice my economics being several times more productive there.

From here on, the tools we have already built will help us find further scientific insights and aid us in creating better AI systems. Of course this isn’t the same thing as an AI system completely autonomously updating its own code, but nevertheless this is a larval version of recursive self-improvement.

There are other self-reinforcing loops at play. The economic value creation has started a flywheel of compounding infrastructure buildout to run these increasingly-powerful AI systems. And robots that can build other robots (and in some sense, datacenters that can build other datacenters) aren’t that far off.

If we have to make the first million humanoid robots the old-fashioned way, but then they can operate the entire supply chain—digging and refining minerals, driving trucks, running factories, etc.—to build more robots, which can build more chip fabrication facilities, data centers, etc, then the rate of progress will obviously be quite different.

Yep. Then table stakes, recursive self-improvement, self-perpetuating growth, a robot-based parallel physical production economy. His timeline seems to be AI 2028.

Then true superintelligence, then it keeps going after that, then what?

The rate of technological progress will keep accelerating, and it will continue to be the case that people are capable of adapting to almost anything.

…

The rate of new wonders being achieved will be immense. It’s hard to even imagine today what we will have discovered by 2035.

It’s important to notice that this ‘adapt to anything’ is true in some ways and not in others. There are some things that are like decapitations, in that you very much cannot adapt because they kill you, dead. Or that deny you the necessary resources to survive, or to compete. You can’t ‘adapt’ to compete with someone or something sufficiently more capable than you.

We probably won’t adopt a new social contract all at once, but when we look back in a few decades, the gradual changes will have amounted to something big.

If history is any guide, we will figure out new things to do and new things to want, and assimilate new tools quickly (job change after the industrial revolution is a good recent example).

I sigh every time I see this ‘well in the past we’ve adapted and there were more things to do so in the future when we make superintelligent things universally better at everything no reason this shouldn’t still be true, we just need some time.’ Um, no? Or at least, definitely not by default?

I seriously don’t understand how you can expect robots by 2028 and wonders beyond the imagination along with superintelligence by 2035 and think mostly humans will do the things we usually do only with more capabilities at our disposal, or something? It’s like there’s some sort of semantic stop sign to not think about the obvious implications? Is there an actual model of what this world looks like?

A subsistence farmer from a thousand years ago would look at what many of us do and say we have fake jobs, and think that we are just playing games to entertain ourselves since we have plenty of food and unimaginable luxuries. I hope we will look at the jobs a thousand years in the future and think they are very fake jobs, and I have no doubt they will feel incredibly important and satisfying to the people doing them.

There are two halves to this.

The first half is, would the subsistence farmer think the jobs were fake? For some jobs yes, but once you explained what was going on and they got over future shock, I don’t think their breakdown of real versus fake would be that different from that of a farmer today. They might think a lot of them are not ‘necessary,’ that they were products of great luxury, but that would not be different than how they thought about the jobs of those at their king’s court.

I too hope that I look a thousand years in the future and I see people at all, who are actually alive, doing things at all. I hope they move beyond thinking of them quite as ‘jobs’ but I will happily take jobs. This time is different, however. Before humans built tools and grew more capable through those tools, opening up our ability to do more things.

The thing Altman is describing is very obviously, as I keep saying, not a mere tool. Humans will no longer be the strongest optimizers, or the smartest minds, or the most capable agents. Anything we can do, AI can do better, except insofar as the thing doesn’t count unless a human does it. Otherwise, an AI does the new job too.

Altman talks about some people deciding to ‘plug in’ to machine-human interfaces while others choose not to. Won’t this be like deciding not to have a phone or not use computers, only vastly more so, and also the computer and phone are applying for your job? Then again, if all the jobs that involve the AI are done better by the AI alone anyway, including manual labor via robots, perhaps you don’t lose that much by not plugging in?

And indeed, if there are jobs that ‘require you be a human’ it might also require that you not be plugged in.

Think about chess. First humans beat AIs. Then AIs beat humans, but for a brief period AI and humans working together, essentially these ‘merges,’ still beat AIs. Then the humans no longer added anything. We’re going through the same process in a lot of places, like diagnostic reasoning, where the doctor is arguably already a net negative when they don’t accept the AI’s opinion.

Now, humans use the AIs to train, perhaps, but they don’t ‘merge’ or ‘plug in’ because if they did that then the AIs would be playing chess. We want two humans to play chess, so they need to be fully unplugged, or the exercise loses its meaning.

So, again, seriously, ‘merge’? Why do people think this is a thing?

Looking forward, this sounds hard to wrap our heads around. But probably living through it will feel impressive but manageable. From a relativistic perspective, the singularity happens bit by bit, and the merge happens slowly.

I have no idea where this expectation is coming from, other than that the people won’t have a say in it. The singularity will, as Douglas Adams wrote about deadlines, give a whoosh as it flies by. That will be that. There’s nothing to manage, your services are no longer required.

Jamie Sevilla notes that Altman’s estimate here that the average ChatGPT query uses about 0.34 watt-hours, about what an oven would use in a little over one second, and roughly one fifteenth of a teaspoon of water, similar to Epoch’s estimate of 0.3 watt-hours, which was a 90% reduction over previous estimates. Compute efficiency is improving rapidly. Also note o3’s 80% price drop.

Like Dario Amodei’s Machines of Loving Grace, the latest Altman essay spends the bulk of its time hand waving away all the important concerns about such futures, both in terms of getting there and where the there is we even want to get. It’s basically wish fulfillment. There’s some value in pointing out that such worlds will, to the extent we can direct those worlds and their AIs to do things, be very good at wish fulfillment. There are some people who need to hear that. But that’s not the hard part.

Finally, we get to the ‘serious challenges to confront’ section.

There are serious challenges to confront along with the huge upsides. We do need to solve the safety issues, technically and societally, but then it’s critically important to widely distribute access to superintelligence given the economic implications. The best path forward might be something like:

Solve the alignment problem, meaning that we can robustly guarantee that we get AI systems to learn and act towards what we collectively really want over the long-term (social media feeds are an example of misaligned AI; the algorithms that power those are incredible at getting you to keep scrolling and clearly understand your short-term preferences, but they do so by exploiting something in your brain that overrides your long-term preference).

Then focus on making superintelligence cheap, widely available, and not too concentrated with any person, company, or country. Society is resilient, creative, and adapts quickly. If we can harness the collective will and wisdom of people, then although we’ll make plenty of mistakes and some things will go really wrong, we will learn and adapt quickly and be able to use this technology to get maximum upside and minimal downside. Giving users a lot of freedom, within broad bounds society has to decide on, seems very important. The sooner the world can start a conversation about what these broad bounds are and how we define collective alignment, the better.

That’s it. Allow me to summarize this plan:

Solve the alignment problem so AIs learn and act towards what we collectively really want over the long term.
Make superintelligence cheap, widely available, and not too concentrated.
We’ll adapt, muddle through, figure it out, user freedom, it’s all good, society is resilient and adapts quickly.

I’m sorry, but that’s contradictory, doesn’t address the hard questions, isn’t an answer.

Instead it passes the buck to ‘society’ to discuss and answer the questions, when for various overdetermined reasons we do not seem capable of having these conversations in any serious fashion – and indeed, the moment Altman comes up against possibly joining such a conversation, he punts, and says ‘you first.’ Indeed, he seems to acknowledge this, and to want to wait until after the singularity to figure out how to deal with the effects of the singularity – he says ‘the sooner the better’ but the plan is clearly not to get to this all that soon.

This all assumes facts not in evidence and likely false in context. Why should we expect society to be resilient in this situation? What even is ‘society’ when the smartest minds, most capable agents, are AIs? How do users have this freedom, how is the intelligence widely available, if the agents all are going to act towards ‘what we collectively really want over the long term?’ and how do you reconcile these conflicting goals? Who decides what all of that means?

If the power is diffused how do we avoid inevitable gradual disempowerment? What ‘broad bounds’ are we going to ‘decide upon’ and how are we deciding? How would certain people feel about the call for diffusion of power outside of ‘any one country’ and how does this square with all the ‘America must win the race’ talk? Either the power diffusion is meaningful or it isn’t. Given history, why would you expect there to be such a voluntary diffusion of power?

That’s in addition to not addressing the technical aspect of any of this, at all. Yes, good, ‘solve the alignment problem,’ how the heck do you propose we do that? For any definition of that plan, especially if this has to survive wide distribution?

I get that none of that is ‘the point’ of The Gentle Singularity. But the right answers to those questions are the only way such a singularity can stay gentle, or end well. It’s not an optional conversation.

Eli Lifland: I’m most concerned about not being able to align superintelligence with any goal, rather than only being able to align them with short-term goals.

I’m concerned about this characterization of the alignment problem [the #1 above].

Appreciate him publishing this.

Jeffrey Ladish: Huh it seems right to me. Being able to align them to a long term goal is a subset of being able to align them to any goal. I think Sam is wildly optimistic but the target doesn’t seem wrong

Eli Lifland: I think with the example it gives the wrong impression.

Social media feeds are in many ways a highly helpful example and intuition pump here, as it illustrates what ‘aligned’ means here. Those feeds are clearly aligned to the companies in question. There’s an additional question of whether such actions are indeed in the best interests of the companies, but for this purpose I think we should accept that they likely are. Thus, alignment here means aligned to the user’s longer term best interests, and how long term and how paternalistic that should be are left as open questions.

The place this is potentially misleading is, if we did get a feed here that was aligned to the user’s ‘true’ preferences in some sense, then is it aligned? What if that was against what we collectively ‘really want,’ let’s say because it encourages too much social media use by being too good, or it doesn’t push you enough towards making new friends? And that’s only a microcosm. Not doing the social media misalignment thing is relatively easy – we all know how to align the algorithm to the user far better, and we all know why it isn’t done. The general case job here is vastly harder.

Matt Yglesias wishes Sam Altman and others would tell us which policy ideas they think we should entertain, since he mentions that a much richer world could entertain new ideas.

My honest-Altman response is two-fold.

We’re not richer yet, so we can’t yet entertain them. There’s a reason Altman says we won’t adapt the new social contract all at once. So it would be unwise to tell the world what they are. I think this is actually a strong argument. There are many aspects of the future that will require sacred value tradeoffs, if you take any side of one of those you open yourself up to attack, and if you do so before it is clear the tradeoff is forced it is vastly worse. There’s no winning doing this.
If we do get into this richer position with the ability to meaningfully enact policy, if we are all still alive and in control over the future, then this is the part where we can adapt and muddle through and fix things in post. We can have that discussion later (and have superintelligent help). There’s no need to get distracted by this.

An obvious objection is, what makes us think we can use, demand or enforce social contracts in such a future? The foundations of social contract theory don’t hold in a world with superintelligence. I think that contra many science fiction writers that a future very rich world will choose to treat its less fortunate rather well even if nothing is forcing the elite to do so, but also nothing will be forcing the elite to do so.

Finally, like Rob Wiblin I notice I am confused by this closing:

Sam Altman: May we scale smoothly, exponentially and uneventfully through superintelligence.

It is hard not to interpret this, and many aspects of the essay, as essentially saying ‘don’t worry, nothing to see here, we got this, wonders beyond your imagination with no downsides that can’t be easily fixed, so don’t regulate me. Just go gently into that good night, and everything will be fine.’

Daniel Faggella: the singularity is going to hit so hard it’ll rip the skin off your fucking bones tbh

It’ll fucking shred not only hominid-ness, put probably almost any semblance of hominid values or works.

It’ll be a million things at once, or a trillion. it sure af won’t be gentle lol

Can’t blame sam for saying what he’s saying, the incentives make it hard to say otherwise.

I don’t understand why people respond so often with the common counterpoint of ‘well the singularity hasn’t happened yet, so the idea that it will hit you hard when it does come hasn’t been borne out.’ That doesn’t bear on the question at all.

Max Kesin sums up the appropriate response:

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All-wheel drive EVs at 210 mph? Formula E’s next car gets massive upgrade.

Cars, Formula E, racing / Rejus Almole / June 11, 2025

The governing body for world motorsport met in Macau yesterday. Among the jobs for the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile was to sign off on various calendars for next season, which is why there’s now a clash between the F1 Monaco Grand Prix and the 24 Hours of Le Mans and also between the Indy 500 and F1’s annual visit to Canada. The Formula E calendar was also announced, although with a pair of blank TBCs in the middle, I’ll hold off calling it finalized.

The US round will now take place in late January, and it’s moving venues yet again. No longer will you need to drive an hour south of Miami; instead, the northern outskirts of the city will suffice. The infield at Homestead is no more, and the sport has negotiated a race at the Hard Rock Stadium, albeit on a different layout than the one used by F1. It seems that Formula E’s recent “Evo Sessions” race between influencers, which was held at the stadium, proved convincing.

The really interesting Formula E news from Macau won’t take effect until the 2026–2027 season, and that’s the arrival of the Gen4 car.

The current machine is no slouch, not since they took some constraints off the Gen3 car this season. The addition of part-time all-wheel drive has improved what was already a very racey series, but for now, it’s only available for the final part of qualifying, the start of the race, and when using the mandatory Attack Mode that has added some interesting new strategy to the sport.

New tires, more aero, and way more power

From the start of the 2026–2027 season, all-wheel drive will finally be permanent for the single-seater EVs. It is long past time, given that virtually every high-performance EV on the road powers both its axles, and it marks the first time the FIA has approved a permanent AWD single-seater since the technology was outlawed from F1 decades ago.

All-wheel drive EVs at 210 mph? Formula E’s next car gets massive upgrade. Read More »