The book of March 2025 was Abundance. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are making a noble attempt to highlight the importance of solving America’s housing crisis the only way it can be solved: Building houses in places people want to live, via repealing the rules that make this impossible. They also talk about green energy abundance, and other places besides. There may be a review coming.
Until then, it seems high time for the latest housing roundup, which as a reminder all take place in the possible timeline where AI fails to be transformative any time soon.
It’s great to see mention of expanding housing supply, but I don’t see real intent. This is mostly just Trump saying lower all the costs, increase all the supplies, during a barrage of dozens of such orders. If you have 47 priorities you have no priorities.
If you want to do real work on housing at the Federal level, you need an actual plan.
My 501c3 Balsa Research ultimately plans to make federal housing policy a future point of focus, once it is done with the Jones Act, and lately with (alas) defending against the Trump Administration’s attempts to impose new shipping restrictions that could outright cripple America’s exports by applying similar rules to international trade as well.
I do think there are some promising things to explore, even if the Trump administration is not willing to strongarm states. In particular and as an example without going into too much detail, the Federal Government has a lot of control over mortgage availability. Currently, they are using this in ways that handicap manufactured housing, whereas they could instead use it to reward innovation and new construction, such as by refusing to count house value that is the result of NIMBY building restrictions and the resulting shortages. Another example is that they could universalize a reasonable building code to do away with things like dual staircase requirements.
Alas, this Administration’s true priorities very clearly lie elsewhere. But at least they want to build more housing rather than less housing. Being directionally correct is far better than their position in other places of actively being against growth and trade.
So this is really weird, Berkeley landlords passed through the majority of their property tax burdens? As Sarah Baker notes, standard economic theory says this should not happen. What you owe in taxes has nothing to do with the market value of the property. Yet she finds strong evidence that it happens. The speculation is a model of ‘landlord sophistication’ which I presume is a polite way of saying mispricing?
Which in turn is saying that rents are massively inefficient, because landlords are not anything like efficient profit maximizers, potentially more like low information satisficers in many cases. Weird, and I suppose evidence that tools to learn the ‘proper market rent’ could indeed have a large impact.
One cannot stress this enough. If you want lower rents, build more housing.
We’ve been over this, and you can make complicated arguments, but: Supply, meet demand, how is this even a question, sigh. Also, Studies Show.
Angry Psulib: Pittsburgh’s Deputy Mayor Jake Pawlak: new housing makes the rent of older apartments go up. Also, filtering is fake and only benefits transplants.
Nolan Gray: There is simply no evidence that new housing construction increases local rents, and a growing body of decent evidence that it actually lowers them. People in positions of power should prioritize evidence over vibes.
From Paper Abstract: We study the local effects of new market-rate housing in low-income areas using microdata on large apartment buildings, rents, and migration. New buildings decrease rents in nearby units by about 6% relative to units slightly farther away or near sites developed later, and they increase in-migration from low-income areas.
We show that new buildings absorb many high-income households and increase the local housing stock substantially. If buildings improve nearby amenities, the effect is not large enough to increase rents.
Nolan Gray: Pittsburgh is yet another case of how poor local Democratic governance is undermining national Democratic prospects: it’s a blue island in a newly-red state, where the most recent election was decided by just a little over 100,000 votes…
A supermajority of households that would move into new apartments in Pittsburgh (or State College, or Philadelphia) would probably vote Democratic. If these places built commensurate to demand, Pennsylvania would probably be back to solid blue. And yet!
Angry Psulib: Amazingly enough, he was shown this exact study and admitted he hasn’t read it earlier this month. I guess he still hasn’t bothered to read it?
Abstract: I estimate the impact of new housing supply on the local rent distribution, exploiting delays in housing completions caused by weather shocks. A 1% increase in new supply (i) lowers average rents by 0.19%, (ii) effectively reduces rents of lower-quality units, and (iii) disproportionately increases the number of second- hand units available for rent.
Moreover, the impact on rents is equally strong in high-demand markets. Employing a quantitative model, I explain these results by second-hand supply: New supply triggers moving chains that free up units in all market segments.
The estimate translates into a short-run demand price elasticity of -0.025.
Cyrus Tehrani: An Austin renter’s renewal offer is $200/month lower than what she’s currently paying.
We’ve always said building more housing makes *existinghousing more affordable, and that’s what’s happening in Austin.
The reason we don’t build those new buildings is we have decided not to build them.
Armand Domalewski: France rebuilt fucking NOTRE DAME faster and cheaper than it takes San Francisco to add a rapid bus lane.
Philippe Lemoine: It’s worth noting that, in order to make it possible to rebuild the cathedral so quickly, the French parliament had to vote a special law that effectively exempted the project from most of the regulations that would have normally applied and slowed it down considerably.
Ste.Respect: Can they vote for this law for every other development?
Philippe Lemoine: Some people in France are arguing for that, and I think there is a lot to the idea, although it’s unrealistic to think exactly the same thing should or could be replicated everywhere.
It’s not just about safety but also stuff like impact on the neighborhood, the obligation to perform certain archeological searches, etc. To be clear, I think a lot of those regulations should be eliminated or reduced, but this couldn’t be fully generalized realistically.
We certainly have the necessary space:
Roon: But you know you should ask yourself why people around the world consider Paris exceptionally beautiful and Houston an ugly eyesore, and what you think about allowing denser construction?
This was not an endorsement of density.
I’m pointing out that most Americans lack taste and will continue to make their cities worse with shoddy construction, and the YIMBY movement would be ten times easier if developers and planners acquired some taste.
Vitalik: Someone should figure out explicit, credible, neutral market incentives for aesthetics. For example, have a “hot or not” game where people are shown random buildings and upvote or downvote them; your property tax is proportional to the percentage of downvotes your building receives.
Let’s make this fun.
Roon: Yes, I very much agree. There’s gotta be something in the mechanism design space that doesn’t rely on unaccountable planners with full veto power.
Aesthetics are an obvious externality issue. If you create a beautiful thing, you capture only a small portion of the gains. So we want a way to financially reward beautiful and punish ugly, as measured by what is around them, in order to motivate better choices in the future. What people actually think seems like an excellent way to do that.
You don’t want to a NIMBY-style veto system. You want financial incentives that generate a race to the top. Indeed, if we want beautiful, this is only half the battle. The other half is we have to make such places actually legal to build.
I am confident that cities that implement this will benefit greatly. But you need a way to judge aesthetics that actually rewards good over bad.
Which is not our custom, because…
It’s a bold claim and of course it’s not actually correct. There are plenty of things that planners are uncontroversially correct about. You don’t notice those things. But also there’s a lot of things they do that are purely shooting the city in the foot for no gain.
Aaron Lubeck: Modern architecture gives “fit, life has no meaning” vibes.
Atlanticesque: This is actually just straightforwardly the result of “anti-massing” regulations.
Zoning codes in cities across America mandate that buildings not be too great of a single mass, it must be “de-massed” and “broken up” into different shapes and materials.
Always looks like s.
Maxwell Tabarrok: I think it’s underrated the extent to which urban planners are just wrong about everything.
Patrick McKenzie: A piece of evidence in favor: look how much of the built environment that is believed would be illegal. (Or if one really wanted to grind gears: compare number of dollars planners spend on travel to noncompliant cities versus fully compliant cities.)
Nate Hood: I have a degree in planning, work in field & serve on Planning Committee AND fully agree with this. Planning is its own worst enemy In its defense: it’s very politicized at local level & usually it’s electeds leaders who make the decisions, while planners merely enact them.
Ddjiii: I think you’re 30 years late. Planning as a profession mostly got over this a long time ago. But zoning documents and public officials have not necessarily adjusted.
It’s nice to hear the claim that planning the profession has figured out it got all these things wrong, but what good is that if the wrong things keep getting implemented? What is planning planning to try and fix our planning planning?
Blackstone is investing in buying up houses and renting them out.
There are insane claims going around that Blackstone is somehow intentionally having a massive effect on housing prices by doing this.
Instead, as any economist would tell you, the effects here are very small.
This is mentioned here partly to clear up that confusion in case anyone was misled, but mainly as a clear case of a journalist pushing a certain kind of narrative, and how they react when it is pointed out.
Paul Graham: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a journalist with less respect for the truth than this Jacobin writer. And that’s saying something, because I’ve seen some journalists with *verylittle respect for the truth.
In the movies I watched as a kid, the bad guys were always businessmen, and the journalists were always good guys. I was very surprised when I realized it wasn’t actually like this in the real world. But you can see it happening right here.
It is rather insane that a claim that Blackstone owns a third of American housing made it to publication. That claim makes absolutely zero sense on any level.
Logan Mohtashami: At my last conference, I ran into a Black[stone] is buying all the homes, dude. Oh, it was a fun rebuttal
The actual figure is Blackstone owns 0.07% of American housing stock, so it is off by about four orders of magnitude. They have essentially zero market power.
Sysipheus: I want to push back about the limited effect of collaborating software. I’m a landlord in FL and watched it show up a few years ago to dramatic effect. Personal anecdote aside, I think it’s a mistake to ignore the impact of in-group cooperation on price discovery, especially in a market with inelastic demand. OPEC only lowered supply by 15% in the 70’s.
Additionally, I’m not even certain that improving the efficiency of the market is a net good. I am tentatively convinced that having some slack in the housing market is a positive. Slack facilitates price discrimination from unsophisticated actors and lets the truly price conscience find bargains. The additional cost of transactions is offset by the long duration of the agreements. (I could be convinced otherwise)
No question the software leads to less variation in pricing, cutting down on underpricing and also on overpricing. This means less time on average spent with each unit on the market, and less time spent by prospective tenants searching since returns to search are lower. Also note that, by lowering search costs, you lower the ability of the landlord to hold up the tenant by threatening to force them to move, and give both sides in that negotiation much better information on market conditions – worst case the tenant can simply look at a few similar places on the market.
I don’t see the OPEC parallel, given supply if anything should be entering the market rather than leaving it, as this makes it easier to be a low-information landlord.
The question raised here is, could it be good to have the old inefficient rent pricing, despite all that, because it allows valuable price discrimination?
I can see the argument if I squint. Those who have high willingness to pay end up with higher rent, and this subsidizes people who need a bargain allowing the bargain hunters to live where they wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford to rent?
That depends on what determines elasticity of supply. If landlords can collectively respond to the ability to price discriminate by building more housing, since there’s now more overall demand and some pay higher prices, then plausibly that can be worth a lot. But if all this does is change the distribution of tenants and prices, then it seems very hard for that to justify the additional transaction costs.
We shouldn’t underestimate those transaction costs. When I rented an apartment in New York City, which I did several times, I effectively lost multiple weeks each time.
Immigration does raise housing costs in the places you artificially constrain the supply of housing, since you add to demand and hold supply fixed.
Which tempts you to compound your mistake, rather than realize you should stop restricting supply. Where supply isn’t restricted, immigration if anything is net helpful, as they disproportionately help build the new houses and they do it while on average buying less house.
Chris Frieman: Notice that no one thinks that immigration makes it more difficult for people to buy cars, phones, food, etc.—the discussion always focuses on housing. So the takeaway should be that there is a problem with the housing supply, not immigration.
We do have to face the reality here. Supply in many places is restricted. So this is currently a small downside to immigration, with gains captured by landlords.
We could turn this back into a win-win by imposing a property tax, or better yet a tax on the unimproved value of land, in addition the obvious ‘let people build houses where people want to live’ solution.
Living in higher-SES neighborhoods costs more money in various ways, so this is not without its advantages. The period when I lived in Warwick allowed a dramatic cut in my living expenses – if I preferred that lifestyle, it would be very good for capital accumulation. It was not without its charms.
Why do people so often assume that everyone will spend whatever they can afford on housing and other consumption? You don’t want to be moving on up purely because you can, says the man very happy to live in the middle of Manhattan.
We use data from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics program to study the causal effects of location on earnings. Starting from a model with employer and employee fixed effects, we estimate the average earnings premiums associated with jobs in different commuting zones (CZs) and different CZ-industry pairs.
About half of the variation in mean wages across CZs is attributable to differences in worker ability (as measured by their fixed effects); the other half is attributable to place effects.
We show that the place effects from a richly specified cross sectional wage model overstate the causal effects of place (due to unobserved worker ability), while those from a model that simply adds person fixed effects understate the causal effects (due to unobserved heterogeneity in the premiums paid by different firms in the same CZ).
Local industry agglomerations are associated with higher wages, but overall differences in industry composition and in CZ-specific returns to industries explain only a small fraction of average place effects. Estimating separate place effects for college and non-college workers, we find that the college wage gap is bigger in larger and higher-wage places, but that two-thirds of this variation is attributable to differences in the relative skills of the two groups in different places. Most of the remaining variation reflects the enhanced sorting of more educated workers to higher-paying industries in larger and higher-wage CZs.
Finally, we find that local housing costs at least fully offset local pay premiums, implying that workers who move to larger CZs have no higher net-of-housing consumption.
This ignores the skill and talent enhancement aspect of moving CZs. It presumes worker ability is fixed, whereas worker ability improves over time when among higher ability workers in a high opportunity area. So even if your consumption did not increase short term, you would still want to capture those gains, and also the additional housing costs come with access to a superior area.
Also if you see comparatively larger gains from moving, especially as a ratio of housing requirements, you come out ahead that way as well. Society of course overall gains greatly when you move up the ranks, even if you don’t come out ahead directly.
Mostly this says that our most productive areas are greatly undersupplying housing, in case that wasn’t already obvious.
It also says that people are responding roughly correctly to the incentives involved.
Sophia: Anyone looking for a single bedroom with no heating where you can’t make noise and can only be home from 8: 30pm to 8am (weekdays only)? Here’s one for a bargain (£1350)!!!
Oh my god the landlord has twitter, please get this to her.
She’s seen this! She’s now claiming she doesn’t have a living room at all!
She bought the flat for £686k in 2021 by the way, she just wants a tenant to pay off a large chunk of her mortgage while not really living there at all.
Some poor soul is going to move in not having seen the original ad and be made to feel like an intruder for being in their home on a Saturday.
Alice! We know you’re reading this! Drop the rent!!!!
What else can we shame Alice into including in the rent?
Ok we had our fun but the Daily Mail turning up at her flat? That’s not ok guys wtf
Aella: I hate this genre of public shaming. If she put the price too high above the market, nobody will rent it, and she’ll have to lower the price until someone does. This seems fine. People should be allowed to price things too high and have nobody buy their thing
Some people (like that xkcd comic) say that prices should be legal but that it’s fine and good to shame people etc for their pricing practices
Others (I’m one) want more than just legal prices—we want a culture of being chill about prices
Various people said ‘oh that’s not shaming that’s complaining about housing costs in London’ and I would have agreed if it was only Sophia’s OP but then she kept going, including making claims that simply aren’t true – Alice is very nicely warning in advance about the noise, not saying the person wouldn’t be able to be at home at any given time.
Study in Amsterdam finds that most of the impact of prostitution on housing prices is extremely local and based on visibility. Being 300 yards away wiped out most effects. Making the brothels close their windows also wiped out most effects. A quarter of the effect was due to crime, the rest to the open windows. Effect seemed modestly larger than I expected.
This totally fits with my model of major cities as a game of ‘good block bad block.’ If it’s out of sight, mostly you don’t have to care. Also, having access to the bad block has its advantages. I imagine that for many, the ideal distance from the red light district is ‘far enough you don’t worry about crime or the lights in your face, and no farther.’
One’s own access to the related services could be net good or net bad, but it sounds like the net impact here is minimal. I suspect that is people making a mistake. It is well known that exact distance makes a big difference for things like parks and restaurants, and I would expect that to apply here as well. Except it is entirely non-obvious which direction this should go.
There are a lot of trends of this type these days: People place tons of value on top quality, and we have the wealth to bid it up quite high, while what used to be the Perfectly Good version lies unused.
John Arnold: There’s both a shortage of office space (Class A+/A) and a surplus of office space (everything else) at the same time. I see it in Houston where many new buildings are under construction at the same time the city has a 26% office vacancy rate
Claude thinks this is mostly about location and other practical stuff, like temperature controls and elevators that work well, and keeping the building clean and safe. There’s a lot of marginal value in all that.
The explanation for B-level buildings going unused is various bank loan covenants and obligations, tax advantages to keeping the place empty and general downward price stickiness in real estate. We can and should of course reverse the unintended tax incentives for places being empty – we should if anything punish, not reward, leaving the place idle.
By default, high-rises include mostly one and two bedroom apartments, and don’t offer the amenities that make them good places to raise children.
I think if you designed a high-rise with this in mind, you could offer tremendous value. You can build the entire place, from the beginning, with this goal in mind.
The obvious place to start is to make the whole building larger apartments designed for families. That means floor plans more bedrooms, with the secondary bedrooms relatively small, plus a large common area, with multiple bathrooms.
Simply having most of your neighbors have children will change norms dramatically. It would be far easier to make friends, to strike up conversations and so on.
The next step is to add various communal areas for the families. This starts with an enclosed courtyard or other safe outdoor space, and a designed-to-be-safe roof. You can go from there, with various gym and sports areas, play areas, gaming areas and so on. Throw in some family friendly restaurants so you can go there without leaving the building. Giving up a small percentage of overall floor space is a big deal.
The killer app, of course, is childcare. If it’s a big enough courtyard, you can have an adult there, same with the roof, and you can offer places where families can park their kids and pay by the hour. Maybe even have various styles, including a homework help room, tutoring, activities like chess and so on. You can even have a pool of building-based babysitters and even tutors that can be reserved or often requested on demand, including for short periods. You can use dynamic pricing for busy versus quiet times.
The lifestyle impact there would be huge – if you have on-demand options for 1-2 hours of childcare, or even 15 minutes, at reasonable prices, it is a huge freaking deal. If you have activities readily available that also create natural friendships through repeat interactions? Wow.
This seriously seems like an amazing business opportunity. If you made the first such building in Manhattan or another major city, there are those who would jump at it, and pay quite a lot more for the same amount of apartment than they would otherwise.
Group houses are insanely great if you can pull them off. It’s great to live with your friends. It’s great to pool costs and common areas, the economics are terrific. The trick is it requires coordination. Coordination is hard. If you can pull it off, totally go for it. Why not? Yes, privacy, and eventually you’ll want space for a family, but housing is a huge portion of expenses, and friends are golden.
GOOPert Gottfried: I just saw a Zillow commercial that suggested millennials go in on buying a house with 2 friends. Since when did the American dream include a white picket fence and 2 roommates?
Danielle Franz: When I was in my early 20s, my group chat bullied (half kidding) one of our friends into buying a house with the promise that we would move in and cover the mortgage during the time that we lived there.
It worked out great — friend had their mortgage covered 100% for a few years and we got rent that was way more affordable than anywhere else.
We made amazing memories together during an oftentimes lonely and confusing period of life and our $$ directly benefited someone we loved rather than a faceless landlord.
It’s definitely not for everyone, but I wouldn’t write it off so quickly.
This is also a great reason to encourage greater supply of larger houses and apartments, thus enabling more such arrangements.
KLTA: 2 more insurance companies announce plans to leave California
Houman Hemmati: I don’t think most people quite yet grasp the monumental significance of the sudden collapse of nearly the entire state insurance industry in California. There is one entity responsible: state government. Without insurance you can’t purchase or own anything unless you’re very rich or a big corporation. This will have tremendous ramifications for everyone here. Stay tuned.
Don’t Fall For It: I am selling my current home which is a much higher fire risk than the home I am moving into. All of the large insurance companies will not insure me. It’s a nightmare, I’ve never had a claim. I ended up getting a policy – double the premium.
Lord Pope Misha XIV: eh you can still totally own a house it’s just like in the past where if it burns down you are ruined.
Joel Grus: well, I don’t think you can get a mortgage without homeowners insurance.
Telling insurance companies they cannot set or raise prices works until it doesn’t. What people are complaining about is that they want to purchase assets and be insured against potential losses, and they want someone else to pay for the real cost of covering those losses in exchange for a smaller amount of money.
That someone is going to have to be the State of California (or another state like Florida, as appropriate). The people still have to foot that bill, somehow.
This is an extraction of rents by existing owners of risky properties, and those who construct new risky properties, at the expense of everyone else. If the full real cost of insurance had to be paid or the risk accepted, then the value of the property would decline accordingly, so those buying anew would break even.
As usual, I interpret this as the maintenance costs being high while occupancy is low, and an inability to legally use it as residential space or useful commercial space, so the marginal value here is mostly option value and the price is essentially zero.
Autistic Transit Enthusiast: fucking wild how new York used to look like someone’s first cities skylines city.
The Omni Zaddy: Can’t believe it didn’t respect the character of the neighborhood 😢 I am sure that this building has remained an annoying eyesore that is broadly hated by New Yorkers to this day!
Taylor Swift explains a large part of the appeal of New York City, that you don’t have to plan things within physical space, you can much more allow things to simply happen. She talks about the night, it’s also true of the day and life in general. It doesn’t seem like it should matter so much, but it actually does. Also for cultural reasons that may be related in a non-obvious way, New York plans, when they do get made, are more reliable than plans elsewhere, not less.
Mayor Eric Adams has some issues, to say the least, but he does support the City of Yes, and general efforts to build more housing where people want to live, if not in the exact ways or to the degree I would prefer.
The richest places where people most want to live mostly voted yes. The poorer places, despite how the amendments ‘shielded them from change’ mostly voted no.
The latest Adams proposal is called “City of Yes for Families.’ This involves zoning changes and additional housing initiatives, alas including foolish ones like down payment assistance. I am down for emphasizing family housing (as in 2+ bedroom apartments rather than 1-bedrooms and studios) but mostly I wish we would just focus on building more housing. The rest will take care of itself.
A fun fact about the world is that people remarkably rarely say ‘well, that would be a super bad look, maybe we should try and not appear maximally unreasonable so we don’t give them a great talking point.’
I mean, I respect the hell out of not doing that. It’s just, wow, all right then.
If Sacramento was serious, which it isn’t, this would spark immediate action.
I don’t understand how this happened but it’s great: San Francisco approves $700/month ‘pod’ housing at a former bank building in 12 Mint Plaza. You get a pod bed to sleep in, plus there is communal space, and they’re looking to expand to another larger location.
Armand Domalewski: it is really frustrating that so many people have tried to shut these sleeping pods down by arguing they’re inhumane while every single person I’ve met who lives in them is desperate for the city not to shut them down.
Like I’ve talked to at least three people who live in these pods and they’re all baffled by why people think evicting them somehow advances the cause of social justice.
Kelsey Piper: There’s something about small housing that brings out the absolute worst in people – instead of being rightfully angry at scarcity they get deeply and personally angry at the existence of small options and everyone who isn’t trying to shut them down.
Judge strikes down San Francisco’s vacant home tax. Very California. They have not as far as I know struck down the vacant storefront tax, but neither do we have reason to think they are enforcing it. I find it hard to tax empty storefronts given both how hard it is to actually open a store in San Francisco, and also SF’s general failure to enforce laws? As usual, the arguments of ‘this tax won’t be effective’ raise the question of ‘if the tax wouldn’t change behavior, doesn’t that mean it’s a great tax?’
It remains a bunch of suburbs at best, despite the immense amount of lost value.
Nate Silver: People can comment on whatever they want but Silicon Valley is a bunch of suburbs. Like go live in a real city if you have a Take on NYC.
Hayden: Silicon Valley could’ve been one of the most unbelievable and prosperous places on the planet, but elected officials decided to listen to NIMBYs for decades, and this is what the commercial corridor where the world’s most valuable company is headquartered looks like:
Imagine if nearly all the most innovative and wealthy companies on the planet descended came with jobs and investment enough to make the Vanderbilts blush and you keep it a glorified strip mall. I touch on it here:
William Eden: Texas Property Code:
“In addition, a property owners’ association can neither prohibit nor regulate the following:
– possession of firearms or ammunition (Section 202.021)
– lemonade stands (Section 202.020)
[end of list]”
I have a startup idea and the HOA can’t stop us 😏
It’s the [end of list] that gets me. These are the entirety of your enumerated protections from HOA tyranny in Texas. Thanks to @jamespayor for his diligent research of the Texas Property Code 🫡
Apple dropped a big batch of medium-size software updates for nearly all of its products this afternoon. The iOS 18.4, iPadOS 18.4, macOS 15.4, tvOS 18.4, and visionOS 2.4 updates are all currently available to download, and each adds a small handful of new features for their respective platforms.
A watchOS 11.4 update was also published briefly, but it’s currently unavailable.
For iPhones and iPads that support Apple Intelligence, the flagship feature in 18.4 is Priority Notifications, which attempts to separate time-sensitive or potentially important notifications from the rest of them so you can see them more easily. The update also brings along the handful of new Unicode 16.0 emoji, a separate app for managing a Vision Pro headset (similar to the companion app for the Apple Watch), and a grab bag of other fixes and minor enhancements.
The Mac picks up two major features in the Sequoia 15.4 update. Users of the Mail app now get the same (optional) automated inbox sorting that Apple introduced for iPhones and iPads in an earlier update, attempting to tame overgrown inboxes using Apple Intelligence language models.
The Mac is also getting a long-standing Quick Start setup feature from the Apple Watch, Apple TV, iPhone, and iPad. On those devices, you can activate them and sign in to your Apple ID by holding another compatible Apple phone or tablet in close proximity. Macs running the 15.4 update finally support the same feature (though it won’t work Mac-to-Mac, since a rear-facing camera is a requirement).
On Thursday, the Trump administration issued an executive order that took aim at one of the US’s foremost cultural and scientific institutions: the Smithsonian. Upset by exhibits that reference the role of racism, sexism, and more in the nation’s complicated past, the order tasks the vice president and a former insurance lawyer (?) with ensuring that the Smithsonian Institution is a “symbol of inspiration and American greatness”—a command that specifically includes the National Zoo.
But in the process of airing the administration’s grievances, the document specifically calls out a Smithsonian display for accurately describing our current scientific understanding of race. That raises the prospect that the vice president will ultimately demand that the Smithsonian display scientifically inaccurate information.
Grievance vs. science
The executive order, entitled “Restoring Truth And Sanity To American History,” is filled with what has become a standard grievance: the accusation that, by recognizing the many cases where the US has not lived up to its founding ideals, institutions are attempting to “rewrite our nation’s history.” It specifically calls out discussions of historic racism, sexism, and oppression as undercutting the US’s “unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness.”
Even if you move past the obvious tension between a legacy of advancing liberty and the perpetuation of slavery in the US’s founding documents, there are other ironies here. For example, the order slams the Department of the Interior’s role in implementing changes that “inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures” at the same time that the administration’s policies have led to the removal of references to transgender individuals and minorities and women.
Two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission who were fired by President Trump sued him today, saying their removals are “in direct violation of a century of federal law and Supreme Court precedent.”
“Plaintiffs bring this action to vindicate their right to serve the remainder of their respective terms, to defend the integrity of the Commission, and to continue their work for the American people,” said the lawsuit filed by Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya in US District Court for the District of Columbia.
Trump last week sent Slaughter and Bedoya notices that said, “I am writing to inform you that you have been removed from the Federal Trade Commission, effective immediately.” They were then cut off from their FTC email addresses, asked to return electronic devices, and denied access to their offices.
There are legal restrictions on the president’s authority to remove FTC commissioners. US law says any FTC commissioner “may be removed by the President for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”
The Supreme Court unanimously held in a 1935 case, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, that “Congress intended to restrict the power of removal to one or more of those causes.” The case involved President Franklin Roosevelt’s firing of Commissioner William Humphrey.
Trump’s Department of Justice has argued the ruling was incorrect, but it is still in effect. “Congress has continually relied on Humphrey’s Executor, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly refused to upset this landmark precedent,” the Slaughter/Bedoya lawsuit said. “As Humphrey’s Executor recognized, providing some protection from removal at the President’s whim is essential to ensuring that agency officials can exercise their own judgment.”
The lawsuit continued:
In short, it is bedrock, binding precedent that a President cannot remove an FTC Commissioner without cause. And yet that is precisely what has happened here: President Trump has purported to terminate Plaintiffs as FTC Commissioners, not because they were inefficient, neglectful of their duties, or engaged in malfeasance, but simply because their “continued service on the FTC is” supposedly “inconsistent with [his] Administration’s priorities.”
“Indefensible under governing law”
In addition to Trump, the lawsuit’s defendants include FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson, FTC Commissioner Melissa Holyoak, and FTC Executive Director David Robbins. The Democratic commissioners asked the court to “declare the President’s attempted removals unlawful and ineffective,” and “permanently enjoin the FTC Chairman, Commissioner Holyoak, and the FTC Executive Director from taking any action that would prevent Plaintiffs from fulfilling their duties as Commissioners and serving out the remainder of their terms.”
AI overviews invaded Google search last year, and the company has consistently expanded its use of these search summaries. Now, AI Overviews will get some new travel tweaks that might make it worth using. When you search for help with trip planning, AI Overviews can generate a plan with locations, photos, itineraries, and more.
You can easily export the data to Docs or Gmail from the AI Overviews screen. However, it’s only available in English for US users at this time. You can also continue to ignore AI Overviews as Google won’t automatically expand these lengthier AI responses.
Google adds trip planning to AI Overviews.
Credit: Google
Google adds trip planning to AI Overviews. Credit: Google
Google’s longtime price alerts for flights have been popular, so the company is expanding that functionality to hotels, too. When searching for hotels using Google’s tool, you’ll have the option of receiving email alerts if prices drop for a particular set of results. This feature is available globally starting this week on all mobile and desktop browsers.
Google is also pointing to a few previously announced features with a summer travel focus. AI Overviews in Google Lens launched in English late last year, which can be handy when exploring new places. Just open Lens, point the camera at something, and use the search option to ask a question. This feature will be launching soon in Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish in most countries with AI Overview support.
Updated March 27 with details of on-device image processing in Maps.
The product has evolved into something akin to Slack, but for personal use. It’s used by artist communities, game developers, open source projects, influencers, and more to manage communities and coordinate work. In some cases, people simply use it as an extremely robust group messaging tool for groups of friends without any games or projects involved.
Limited ads to tackle limited revenue
For years, Discord proudly touted a “no ads” policy, but that dam has broken in some small ways in recent months. Discord began offering game publishers opportunities to create special “quests” that appear in the Discord interface, wherein players can earn in-game rewards for doing specific tasks, like streaming a game to friends. A new format, called video quests, is planned for this summer, too.
The new ad products are meant to drum up Discord’s revenue potential in the lead-up to an IPO; the platform already offered premium subscriptions for access to more advanced features and a marketplace for cosmetics to jazz up profiles.
So far, the ad products are, by and large, much less intrusive than ads in many other social networks and seem to be oriented around providing some user value. However, an IPO could lead to shareholders demanding more from the company in pursuit of revenue.
Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) don’t have to turn over information related to their government cost-cutting operations, at least for now, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday.
A federal judge previously ruled that 14 states suing the federal government can serve written discovery requests on Musk and DOGE. Musk, DOGE, and President Trump turned to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in an attempt to block that order.
A three-judge panel at the appeals court granted an emergency motion for a stay in an order issued yesterday, putting the lower-court ruling on hold pending further orders from the appeals court. “Petitioners have satisfied the stringent requirements for a stay,” the panel ruling said. “In particular, petitioners have shown a likelihood of success on their argument that the district court was required to decide their motion to dismiss before allowing discovery.”
Musk, DOGE, and Trump filed a petition to quash the district court’s discovery order at the same time that they filed their emergency motion for a stay. The appeals court did not rule on the petition to quash the discovery order. The three-judge panel included judges appointed by George H.W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump.
The states suing the US alleged that “President Trump has delegated virtually unchecked authority to Mr. Musk without proper legal authorization from Congress and without meaningful supervision of his activities.” They sought “planning, implementation, and organizational documents,” but no emails, text messages, or other electronic communications.
US District Judge Tanya Chutkan denied a request for depositions but otherwise found the states’ discovery requests to be “reasonable and narrowly tailored to their request for injunctive relief.”
Prior to running its follow-up article, The Atlantic asked Trump administration officials if they objected to publishing the full texts. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt emailed a response:
As we have repeatedly stated, there was no classified information transmitted in the group chat. However, as the CIA Director and National Security Advisor have both expressed today, that does not mean we encourage the release of the conversation. This was intended to be a an [sic] internal and private deliberation amongst high-level senior staff and sensitive information was discussed. So for those reason [sic]—yes, we object to the release.”
Obviously, The Atlantic moved ahead with publishing the texts. “The Leavitt statement did not address which elements of the texts the White House considered sensitive, or how, more than a week after the initial air strikes, their publication could have bearing on national security,” the article said.
On Monday, the National Security Council said it was “reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain.” Trump publicly supported Waltz after the incident, but Politico reported that “Trump was mad—and suspicious—that Waltz had Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg’s number saved in his phone in the first place.” One of Politico’s anonymous sources was quoted as saying, “The president was pissed that Waltz could be so stupid.”
Senate Armed Services Chairman Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) said the committee will investigate, according to The Hill. “We’re going to look into this and see what the facts are, but it’s definitely a concern. And you can be sure the committee, House and Senate, will be looking into this… And it appears that mistakes were made, no question,” he said.
The White House said its investigation is being undertaken by the National Security Council, the White House Counsel’s office, and a group led by Elon Musk. “Elon Musk has offered to put his technical experts on this to figure out how this number was inadvertently added to the chat, again to take responsibility and ensure this can never happen again,” Leavitt told reporters.
There’s a new “exciting, small EV” on the way, to be launched early next year by Also, a spinoff of the electric vehicle maker Rivian. Details are light on exactly what that product will be, but don’t go expecting a $20,000 electric hatchback or the like—think more like an e-bike. Also will be into micromobility, not competing with Mini or Smart.
Also started out as an internal project to see if Rivian could use its knowledge of electric powertrains, vehicle electronics, and software to build other “small vehicle form factors.” In fact, in 2023, news broke of a Rivian e-bike in the works at Rivian, although it was unclear if it would be something with pedals or more like an electric motorcycle.
Things are still rather vague. Also’s announcement says its “flagship product” will launch in early 2026 and that the company will focus on the US and Europe at first. It will build “an exciting range of electric vehicles that are efficient, sustainable, and delightful to use,” using in-house technology.
But Rivian founder RJ Scaringe told TechCrunch that “there’s a seat, and there’s two wheels, there’s a screen, and there’s a few computers and a battery.”
Since Also doesn’t have the cost of having to buy that tech like most e-bike makers do, it may be able to make its products a lot cheaper.
Also will be independent of Rivian, but Rivian will own a minority stake in the startup, which is also being financed by Eclipse, a venture capital company. Scaringe will be a board member, but Chris Yu, Rivian’s former VP of future programs, will be Also’s president.
AI bots hungry for data are taking down FOSS sites by accident, but humans are fighting back.
Software developer Xe Iaso reached a breaking point earlier this year when aggressive AI crawler traffic from Amazon overwhelmed their Git repository service, repeatedly causing instability and downtime. Despite configuring standard defensive measures—adjusting robots.txt, blocking known crawler user-agents, and filtering suspicious traffic—Iaso found that AI crawlers continued evading all attempts to stop them, spoofing user-agents and cycling through residential IP addresses as proxies.
Desperate for a solution, Iaso eventually resorted to moving their server behind a VPN and creating “Anubis,” a custom-built proof-of-work challenge system that forces web browsers to solve computational puzzles before accessing the site. “It’s futile to block AI crawler bots because they lie, change their user agent, use residential IP addresses as proxies, and more,” Iaso wrote in a blog post titled “a desperate cry for help.” “I don’t want to have to close off my Gitea server to the public, but I will if I have to.”
Iaso’s story highlights a broader crisis rapidly spreading across the open source community, as what appear to be aggressive AI crawlers increasingly overload community-maintained infrastructure, causing what amounts to persistent distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on vital public resources. According to a comprehensive recent report from LibreNews, some open source projects now see as much as 97 percent of their traffic originating from AI companies’ bots, dramatically increasing bandwidth costs, service instability, and burdening already stretched-thin maintainers.
Kevin Fenzi, a member of the Fedora Pagure project’s sysadmin team, reported on his blog that the project had to block all traffic from Brazil after repeated attempts to mitigate bot traffic failed. GNOME GitLab implemented Iaso’s “Anubis” system, requiring browsers to solve computational puzzles before accessing content. GNOME sysadmin Bart Piotrowski shared on Mastodon that only about 3.2 percent of requests (2,690 out of 84,056) passed their challenge system, suggesting the vast majority of traffic was automated. KDE’s GitLab infrastructure was temporarily knocked offline by crawler traffic originating from Alibaba IP ranges, according to LibreNews, citing a KDE Development chat.
While Anubis has proven effective at filtering out bot traffic, it comes with drawbacks for legitimate users. When many people access the same link simultaneously—such as when a GitLab link is shared in a chat room—site visitors can face significant delays. Some mobile users have reported waiting up to two minutes for the proof-of-work challenge to complete, according to the news outlet.
The situation isn’t exactly new. In December, Dennis Schubert, who maintains infrastructure for the Diaspora social network, described the situation as “literally a DDoS on the entire internet” after discovering that AI companies accounted for 70 percent of all web requests to their services.
The costs are both technical and financial. The Read the Docs project reported that blocking AI crawlers immediately decreased their traffic by 75 percent, going from 800GB per day to 200GB per day. This change saved the project approximately $1,500 per month in bandwidth costs, according to their blog post “AI crawlers need to be more respectful.”
A disproportionate burden on open source
The situation has created a tough challenge for open source projects, which rely on public collaboration and typically operate with limited resources compared to commercial entities. Many maintainers have reported that AI crawlers deliberately circumvent standard blocking measures, ignoring robots.txt directives, spoofing user agents, and rotating IP addresses to avoid detection.
As LibreNews reported, Martin Owens from the Inkscape project noted on Mastodon that their problems weren’t just from “the usual Chinese DDoS from last year, but from a pile of companies that started ignoring our spider conf and started spoofing their browser info.” Owens added, “I now have a prodigious block list. If you happen to work for a big company doing AI, you may not get our website anymore.”
On Hacker News, commenters in threads about the LibreNews post last week and a post on Iaso’s battles in January expressed deep frustration with what they view as AI companies’ predatory behavior toward open source infrastructure. While these comments come from forum posts rather than official statements, they represent a common sentiment among developers.
As one Hacker News user put it, AI firms are operating from a position that “goodwill is irrelevant” with their “$100bn pile of capital.” The discussions depict a battle between smaller AI startups that have worked collaboratively with affected projects and larger corporations that have been unresponsive despite allegedly forcing thousands of dollars in bandwidth costs on open source project maintainers.
Beyond consuming bandwidth, the crawlers often hit expensive endpoints, like git blame and log pages, placing additional strain on already limited resources. Drew DeVault, founder of SourceHut, reported on his blog that the crawlers access “every page of every git log, and every commit in your repository,” making the attacks particularly burdensome for code repositories.
The problem extends beyond infrastructure strain. As LibreNews points out, some open source projects began receiving AI-generated bug reports as early as December 2023, first reported by Daniel Stenberg of the Curl project on his blog in a post from January 2024. These reports appear legitimate at first glance but contain fabricated vulnerabilities, wasting valuable developer time.
Who is responsible, and why are they doing this?
AI companies have a history of taking without asking. Before the mainstream breakout of AI image generators and ChatGPT attracted attention to the practice in 2022, the machine learning field regularly compiled datasets with little regard to ownership.
While many AI companies engage in web crawling, the sources suggest varying levels of responsibility and impact. Dennis Schubert’s analysis of Diaspora’s traffic logs showed that approximately one-fourth of its web traffic came from bots with an OpenAI user agent, while Amazon accounted for 15 percent and Anthropic for 4.3 percent.
The crawlers’ behavior suggests different possible motivations. Some may be collecting training data to build or refine large language models, while others could be executing real-time searches when users ask AI assistants for information.
The frequency of these crawls is particularly telling. Schubert observed that AI crawlers “don’t just crawl a page once and then move on. Oh, no, they come back every 6 hours because lol why not.” This pattern suggests ongoing data collection rather than one-time training exercises, potentially indicating that companies are using these crawls to keep their models’ knowledge current.
Some companies appear more aggressive than others. KDE’s sysadmin team reported that crawlers from Alibaba IP ranges were responsible for temporarily knocking their GitLab offline. Meanwhile, Iaso’s troubles came from Amazon’s crawler. A member of KDE’s sysadmin team told LibreNews that Western LLM operators like OpenAI and Anthropic were at least setting proper user agent strings (which theoretically allows websites to block them), while some Chinese AI companies were reportedly more deceptive in their approaches.
It remains unclear why these companies don’t adopt more collaborative approaches and, at a minimum, rate-limit their data harvesting runs so they don’t overwhelm source websites. Amazon, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta did not immediately respond to requests for comment, but we will update this piece if they reply.
Tarpits and labyrinths: The growing resistance
In response to these attacks, new defensive tools have emerged to protect websites from unwanted AI crawlers. As Ars reported in January, an anonymous creator identified only as “Aaron” designed a tool called “Nepenthes” to trap crawlers in endless mazes of fake content. Aaron explicitly describes it as “aggressive malware” intended to waste AI companies’ resources and potentially poison their training data.
“Any time one of these crawlers pulls from my tarpit, it’s resources they’ve consumed and will have to pay hard cash for,” Aaron explained to Ars. “It effectively raises their costs. And seeing how none of them have turned a profit yet, that’s a big problem for them.”
On Friday, Cloudflare announced “AI Labyrinth,” a similar but more commercially polished approach. Unlike Nepenthes, which is designed as an offensive weapon against AI companies, Cloudflare positions its tool as a legitimate security feature to protect website owners from unauthorized scraping, as we reported at the time.
“When we detect unauthorized crawling, rather than blocking the request, we will link to a series of AI-generated pages that are convincing enough to entice a crawler to traverse them,” Cloudflare explained in its announcement. The company reported that AI crawlers generate over 50 billion requests to their network daily, accounting for nearly 1 percent of all web traffic they process.
The community is also developing collaborative tools to help protect against these crawlers. The “ai.robots.txt” project offers an open list of web crawlers associated with AI companies and provides premade robots.txt files that implement the Robots Exclusion Protocol, as well as .htaccess files that return error pages when detecting AI crawler requests.
As it currently stands, both the rapid growth of AI-generated content overwhelming online spaces and aggressive web-crawling practices by AI firms threaten the sustainability of essential online resources. The current approach taken by some large AI companies—extracting vast amounts of data from open-source projects without clear consent or compensation—risks severely damaging the very digital ecosystem on which these AI models depend.
Responsible data collection may be achievable if AI firms collaborate directly with the affected communities. However, prominent industry players have shown little incentive to adopt more cooperative practices. Without meaningful regulation or self-restraint by AI firms, the arms race between data-hungry bots and those attempting to defend open source infrastructure seems likely to escalate further, potentially deepening the crisis for the digital ecosystem that underpins the modern Internet.
Benj Edwards is Ars Technica’s Senior AI Reporter and founder of the site’s dedicated AI beat in 2022. He’s also a tech historian with almost two decades of experience. In his free time, he writes and records music, collects vintage computers, and enjoys nature. He lives in Raleigh, NC.
Infinite Reality, a media, ecommerce, and marketing company focused on 3D and AI-powered experiences, has entered an agreement to acquired Napster. That means that the brand originally launched in 1999 as a peer-to-peer (P2P) music file-sharing service is set to be reborn again. This time, new owners are reshaping the brand into one focused on marketing musicians in the metaverse.
Infinite announced today a definitive agreement to buy Napster for $207 million. The Norwalk, Connecticut-based company plans to turn Napster into a “social music platform that prioritizes active fan engagement over passive listening, allowing artists to connect with, own, and monetize the relationship with their fans.” Jon Vlassopulos, who became Napster CEO in 2022, will continue with his role at the brand.
Since 2016, Napster has been operating as a (legal) streaming service. It claims to have over 110 million high-fidelity tracks, with some supporting lossless audio. Napster subscribers can also listen offline and watch music videos. The service currently starts at $11 per month.
Since 2022, Napster has been owned by Web3 and blockchain firms Hivemind and Algorand. Infinite also develops Web3 tech, and CEO John Acunto told CNBC that Algorand’s blockchain background was appealing, as was Napster’s licenses for streaming millions of songs.
To market musicians, Infinite has numerous ideas for helping Napster users interact more with the platform than they do with the current music streaming service. The company shared goals of using Napster to offer “branded 3D virtual spaces where fans can enjoy virtual concerts, social listening parties, and other immersive and community-based experiences” and more “gamification.” Infinite also wants musicians to use Napster as a platform where fans can purchase tickets for performances, physical and virtual merchandise, and “exclusive digital content.” The 6-year-old firm also plans to offer artists abilities to use “AI-powered customer service, sales, and community management agents” and “enhanced analytics dashboards to better understand fan behavior” with Napster.
NASA’s existing architecture still has a limited shelf life, and the agency will probably have multiple options for transporting astronauts to and from the Moon in the 2030s. A decision on the long-term future of SLS and Orion isn’t expected until the Trump administration’s nominee for NASA administrator, Jared Isaacman, takes office after confirmation by the Senate.
So, what is the plan for SLS?
There are different degrees of cancellation options. The most draconian would be an immediate order to stop work on Artemis II preparations. This is looking less likely than it did a few months ago and would come with its own costs. It would cost untold millions of dollars to disassemble and dispose of parts of Artemis II’s SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft. Canceling multibillion-dollar contracts with Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin would put NASA on the hook for significant termination costs.
Of course, these liabilities would be less than the $4.1 billion NASA’s inspector general estimates each of the first four Artemis missions will cost. Most of that money has already been spent for Artemis II, but if NASA spends several billion dollars on each Artemis mission, there won’t be much money left over to do other cool things.
Other options for NASA might be to set a transition point when the Artemis program would move off of the Space Launch System rocket, and perhaps even the Orion spacecraft, and switch to new vehicles.
Looking down on the Space Launch System for Artemis II. Credit: NASA/Frank Michaux
Another possibility, which seems to be low-hanging fruit for Artemis decision-makers, could be to cancel the development of a larger Exploration Upper Stage for the SLS rocket. If there are a finite number of SLS flights on NASA’s schedule, it’s difficult to justify the projected $5.7 billion cost of developing the upgraded Block 1B version of the Space Launch System. There are commercial options available to replace the rocket’s Boeing-built Exploration Upper Stage, as my colleague Eric Berger aptly described in a feature story last year.
For now, it looks like NASA’s orange behemoth has a little life left in it. All the hardware for the Artemis II mission has arrived at the launch site in Florida.
The Trump administration will release its fiscal year 2026 budget request in the coming weeks. Maybe, then, NASA will also have a permanent administrator, and the veil will lift over the White House’s plans for Artemis.
