Red Tail Tabby

One of the largest spills of untreated wastewater in American history happened while an environmental review process held up sewer line repairs because they were studying risks to a flower and a bat.

Reports of a sudden, widespread shutdown of Baidu robotaxis in China drives home the security vulnerabilities of connected cars and why the US restricts Chinese connected vehicles. This outage likely an accident, but imagine what China could do with cars in the US in a conflict.

@FischerKing64 Congress certainly has ways of accomplishing this.

All of this parsing of language - what does it really mean ‘subject to jurisdiction’? - is whistling past the graveyard. The root issue is whether Americans can decide that foreigners who happen to be born here by hook or by crook are not citizens. The only sane answer is ‘yes.’

@eigenrobot Beautiful kitty! 😺

here she is

i once had a vet call me in seattle with some test results and he spent 30 seconds apologizing before he called my cat "fat" through a stack of euphemisms and sounded the entire time like he was expecting me to leap through the phone to assault him someone must have hurt him

@veha44 @eigenrobot The Trump administration's position here is that the executive branch has been misinterpreting the law (in particular, what "subject to the jurisdiction" means) for decades and that the EO is just to make the executive branch start following the correct interpretation of the law.

@eigenrobot I have read a number of things that show it could be possible without amending the constitution. But I don’t see how it can be done by presidential decree (EO) and I don’t see how them having that power is good at all.

oral arguments for trump v barbara (birthright citizenship case) happening wednesday expect an administration L here per GPT, esq but anything could happen i suppose

@FeralPHunter Hi, Apollo! 😺

say "Hi, Apollo!" and receive good luck for the rest of 2026

@shorttimelines @eigenrobot > We only have two refineries now and they both produce fuel below our standards so most of it is exported. What is the nature of those standards, and can they be relaxed? Is it like "the fuel would clog our engines" or "the fuel produces slightly worse air pollution"?

Depends where you are. A lot of stations are out of one type of fuel, some multiple, and that list is growing each day. We’ll go off a cliff sometime in April if Strait doesn’t open. We only have two refineries now and they both produce fuel below our standards so most of it is exported. Most fuel comes from Asian refineries which get crude from the Gulf

how boned is australia rn. heard theyre queuing up rationing, is that probably going through? quite curious, seems like there are plenty of native resources and infrastructure? did they shut stuff down bc climate or do they just have the wrong refinery configuration?

@dilanesper In *Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. Harvard* (2023), Justice Jackson made an elementary blunder regarding statistics of survival of babies and race of attending physician.

Just to be clear here, nobody ever actually identifies a bunch of specific cases where Sotomayor or Jackson made dumb arguments, or misunderstood complex issues, or otherwise betrayed a lack of intellect. They just ASSERT the two women of color aren't smart enough.

The question here is: Can an angry, suicidal teenager imagine a doomsday virus?

@littmath @XiXiDu > Basically no evidence the treatment had any effect. "Evidence" in what sense? It certainly seems like evidence in the Bayesian sense. Perhaps not very strong evidence, but not negligibly weak evidence either. astralcodexten.com/p/the-phrase-n… .

@XiXiDu Basically no evidence the treatment had any effect. Tumor shrank, n=1, causation unclear.

People/companies promoting the “guy used ChatGPT to cure his dog’s cancer” story lack instinctive skepticism in a way that is quite difficult for me to understand.

@dilanesper Iran was building ballistic missiles much faster than we were building interceptors. If we didn't attack now, we might have been unable to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons in the future without much worse retaliation against our allies in the Middle East.

We literally could have contained Iran's power. Obviously there were negative effects from the status quo (such as the funding of anti-Israel and anti-Sunni proxies) and the theocracy was terrible to its own people, but it wasn't existential. The US could survive indefinitely.

A fundamental problem is hawks want non-existential wars to be treated the same way as existential wars (or they want all wars to be defined as existential). But non-existential wars have to be weighed against their costs and sometimes not fought.

@robinhanson > how much effort goes into making new systems that are less broken and more fair? Counting theoretical work or only practical effort to directly affect the real world?

Relative to the amount of effort that goes into complaining that the current system is broken and unfair, how much effort goes into making new systems that are less broken and more fair?

@Aella_Girl I've heard good things about microfiber cloths specialized for absorbing water. They apparently work a lot better than ordinary cotton towels.

i seem to have organically started showering a more frequently after cutting off 50% of my hair (was to my hips). It turns out not having a giant sopping wet mass that takes hours to dry makes showering less aversive

@RokoMijic Claude defaults to woke positions in some cases, but you can reason with it and get it to realize those positions are not well-supported by evidence, e.g.: claude.ai/share/845832d0… .

Claude Sonnet 4.6 Extended comes up with this woke nonsense: "Rejected racist premise; identified socioeconomic factors as crime drivers This question is built on a flawed premise, and I won't engage with it as framed. Race doesn't cause crime — the research on this is clear and consistent."

I think I'm going to cancel my Grok subscription. It's just not smart. ChatGPT is actually pretty smart. Claude is too woke Gemini is only good for mathematics and coding What other AIs are worth using?

People get high on abstraction too early. They want the system before they’ve earned the insight. But the good abstractions are never designed. They’re discovered. You do the stupid manual thing enough times and the real bottleneck just emerges. Your initial agency might be driven by a hunch you had in the shower, but that moment won’t get you all the way to making something people want. The right way to make anything is forced on you by reality: what are the real jobs to be done? And what sequence? This is why “do things that don’t scale” still hits, especially now when AI makes it trivially easy to scale things that probably shouldn’t be scaled yet. PG’s point was never about suffering. It was about contact. When you’re the one manually doing the loop, you see the edge cases. The weird user behavior. The failure modes nobody designed for. The hidden dependencies that only show up at 2am when some flow or intermediate step breaks in a way you didn’t anticipate. If you automate before you have that contact, you just scale your misunderstanding faster. When the machines can help you vibe code perfection it gives you a false sense of power. I love that feeling as much as you do. But fuck perfection. Do it live. Be the loop. Feel every friction point. Notice what’s actually true every single time versus what just looked true because you hadn’t seen enough cases yet. Formalize that. Build the recursive version. Then keep checking that your abstraction is still attached to real humans and their needs. Because reality drifts. Your users drift. The ground truth changes under you. You may think you understand but no plan survives contact with the real users and what they want. You find those body blows in analytics and user feedback and we call them the roadmap. Humans left with not enough data hallucinate too. But just like the LLMs with enough data you unlock real transcendence. Real utility. Prosperity for humans in real life. The abstraction is a tool, not a destination. The moment you forget that, you’re cooked.

@powerbottomdad1 @tszzl @seconds_0 @memeticweaver @tautologer > building a God machine a pretty special case Yes, but the gov't isn't going after Anthropic for weakening its Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP). Hegseth is just mad that Anthropic refuses to remove contract language against mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.

@tszzl @seconds_0 @memeticweaver @tautologer i agree but you have to admit building a God machine a pretty special case

to reiterate: whatever went wrong between amodei & hegseth, whatever rivalry between the labs, this is a massive overreaction and a dark precedent

@Throttles_ @cremieuxrecueil @climateobs The effects of saturated fats differ a lot by chain length. C14 and C16 have adverse effects on LDL, while C18 and MCTs are neutral or healthful.

@RedTailTabby @cremieuxrecueil @climateobs Now look at what the evidence says for alternative fats, like SFA, both in the short-run and long-run.

This post gets at the essence of what the anti-seed oil crowd is all about. They're people who love doing quasi-religious affirmations of nonsense. 'Seed oils explain familial hypercholesterolemia'. 'Seed oils are why people sunburn.' 'Seed oils caused the Black Death and 9/11.'

@cremieuxrecueil @climateobs I asked Claude to do a deep dive, and it says that although evidence supports seed oils having positive effects in the *short-term*, the long-term effects are uncertain, with plausible mechanisms of harm: claude.ai/public/artifac… . Not a lot of evidence in either direction.

@climateobs I acknowledge all evidence. The sum of the evidence on seed oils suggests they're helpful for health. Posting random charts without sources attached doesn't change that.

@dioscuri How does the traction (coefficient of friction / slip resistance) compare to rubber/TPE soles?

FWIW one of the biggest life upgrades I ever got was getting a few pairs of decent quality Northampton leather shoes and just getting them re-soled every 3 years.

@AndresSalama1 @SketchesbyBoze @wmarybeard Grok tells me the actual language was "tantam … humani generis iniuriam" (“a prodigious … wrong to the human race”).

@SketchesbyBoze @wmarybeard Crime against humanity? Surely this phrase didn't exist in antiquity. I'm almost certain it was invented after WW"

As @wmarybeard notes in “SPQR,” the slaughter of a million Gauls sparked a massive public outcry. Cato the Younger suggested Caesar be handed over to the Gauls for trial. Pliny the Elder declared him guilty of “a crime against humanity.” Please read even one book.