Steve Michaels 🔍

People admitted to Ivies have the same average income whether they attended or went to a state school instead. It's just selection. Humans aren't that malleable.

Some very simple math: if a country has 5% of the world's population and ability is evenly distributed, then 95% of the people who are best at any given thing will be born abroad.

One fascinating consequence of GLP-1s/Ozempic: For decades, people said that big pharma would never release actually effective obesity drugs because they’d lose too much money from downstream chronic disease treatment. We’re seeing almost the exact opposite.

These @Dyson strawberries are from an advanced fully automated farm. Europe is a leader in Agri-Tech! 🇪🇺

As summer comes into view, always remember that more Europeans regularly die in heat waves than Americans die in guns violence.

If this is true, using the best public estimates we have of LLM resource use, solving this Erdos problem took 0.6–6.3 kWh of electricity and about 3–31 liters of water. So that is less than three almonds worth of water and the electricity equivalent of 2-20 miles of EV driving.

This is impressive: it is a problem I had actually heard of. It looks like the solution approach is surprising to mathematicians. It was a general reasoning model rather than a specialized one: bitter lesson time. I think the stochastic parrot is now nuked from orbit.

Anthropic just had a profitable quarter at a $44 billion annual run rate with a fairly enormous compute shortage that's forced them to ration service and pushed some customers (perhaps just in the short term) into the arms of competitors. I don't think it's crazy to think their annual revenue would be $100b or more with sufficient compute for inference.

San Diego fell from 5th to 12th most expensive rental market by building more multifamily housing per capita than any other California city. This is what happens when you actually build. The lesson isn't complicated.

Larry Bushart spent 37 days in jail for posting a meme on Facebook. I’ve been doing this work for 25 years, and I can honestly say this is the worst First Amendment case I’ve ever seen. Not because Larry threatened anyone. He didn’t. Not because he committed violence. He didn’t. Not because this was a close call. It wasn’t. He posted a political meme — the kind of thing millions of Americans do every day — and local officials decided to treat it like a crime. And because they had badges, prosecutors, jail cells, and the terrifying machinery of the state behind them, they got away with it for 37 days. Larry is a retired police officer and National Guard veteran. The meme he shared quoted Donald Trump’s “we have to get over it” comment after a 2024 Iowa school shooting. Whatever you think of Trump, the meme was plainly political commentary. Perry County officials knew what it referred to. They knew it wasn’t a threat against a Tennessee school. They arrested him anyway. In the middle of the night. They set his bond at $2 million. He lost his job. He missed family milestones. He sat in jail for more than a month before the charges finally collapsed — because, of course, there was no crime here. Today, @theFIREorg secured a measure of justice: Perry County agreed to pay Larry Bushart $835,000 for violating his constitutional rights. This case should scare the hell out of people across the political spectrum. Because if the government can jail you for a meme by pretending not to understand obvious political commentary, your rights are only as secure as the good faith of the most authoritarian official in your town. That is exactly why we have the First Amendment. Not for speech everyone likes. Not for opinions that flatter the powerful. Not for the bland, safe, committee-approved stuff. It exists for moments when fear, outrage, politics, and authority all line up and say: “Surely this is the exception.” No. It isn’t. I’m incredibly proud of @theFIREorg’s legal team. And I’m even prouder of Larry Bushart for refusing to let the government get away with treating his constitutional rights like a suggestion. But despite the correct verdict, I'll probably always get angry every time I think of this case. Let’s make this the last time anyone in America is arrested — let alone thrown in jail — for a meme. Celebrate your independence. Defend your First Amendment. fire.org/news/victory-t…

Based on this manifesto, it seems entirely possible the San Diego shooters intended to target a Jewish synagogue and ended up at a mosque because they’re idiots.

Corruption on a genuinely breathtaking scale.

Many Americans already have a data center in their backyard and don't even know it!

In some very real sense, Ozempic was invented in 1990. Pfizer ran the human trials and just never published them. They showed it lowered blood glucose in diabetics, slowed gastric emptying, and killed hunger; the same 3 things that make Ozempic work today. The joint venture agreement said internal data stayed internal, and that was that. Pfizer killed the program in 1991. The reasoning, as far as I can tell, was that nobody would ever want an injectable diabetes drug besides insulin. So, the license went back to the hospital in Boston that held the patents. Novo picked it up in 1992 and spent the next two decades building liraglutide, then semaglutide. It's insane that data sat in a filing cabinet for 30+ years. I only know this because Jeffrey Flier, one of the Harvard scientists in the room, finally wrote it up. He's in his late 70s and didn't want the history to die with him. This makes you wonder what else is in those filing cabinets. Ozempic could've existed 27 years ago.

There are 0 high-cost, high housing production cities in the US.

Trump is stealing $1,700,000,000 of your money

@slop_bucket @AndyMasley One of the most impactful things Andy has done in his career was write a string of *annoyingly* skeptical/curious pieces about the impact of data centers, which proved to be massively influential. So I'm pretty sure I know which way he leans 🙂

@AndyMasley Is this a good or a bad thing? Lol.

The way /r/atheism is teaching you to be annoying is more important than you can possibly imagine

the average person has only ever used ChatGPT 3.5 Instant and has no idea what the models can do

The Industrial Revolution would probably not have been approved by a public vote

Your periodic reminder that the US spends far more on entitlements than defense: