California Curated

A rare earth metals mine in California could be the United States answer to Chinese dominance. open.substack.com/pub/california…

A rare California fish might today be extinct if not for the heroic efforts of one man. Here's the story: californiacurated.substack.com/p/the-man-who-…

@viralvortex51 My god those birds are dumb.

This might be the smartest trap ever built 😱😱

An Orange County man has died after he was bitten by a rattlesnake while mountain biking in Irvine. Details: ktla.com/news/orange-co…

@aakashgupta I say fuck you a lot because it gets so many things wrong.

Sam Altman said people saying “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT costs OpenAI tens of millions of dollars a year in compute. 67% of Americans do it anyway. Run the math on why. A 2024 Waseda University study tested LLM responses across politeness levels in English, Chinese, and Japanese. Impolite prompts produced measurably worse outputs: more bias, more errors, more refusals. Moderate politeness consistently beat both extremes. The mechanism makes sense once you see it. Polite prompts pattern-match to higher-quality training data. When you write “Could you help me structure this analysis?”, the model pulls from professional, well-reasoned text. When you write “give me the answer,” it pulls from Reddit. Google DeepMind’s Murray Shanahan explained it simply: the model is role-playing a smart intern. Treat the intern like a colleague, you get colleague-quality work. Bark orders, you get minimum-viable compliance. Now look at the cost side. OpenAI handles over a billion queries daily. Each GPT-4 query uses roughly 2.9 watt-hours, ten times a Google search. But OpenAI just raised $40 billion at a $300 billion valuation. Tens of millions in politeness tokens is a rounding error on a rounding error. 67% of users do it anyway, and 55% of them say it’s because it’s “the right thing to do.” They’re maintaining a behavioral habit that governs every other interaction in their life. The parent who teaches their kid to say please to Alexa isn’t doing it for Alexa. They’re doing it because the alternative is raising someone who learns that being rude gets faster results. Telling 900 million people to stop saying thank you so OpenAI can save 0.01% of operating costs is the most engineer-brained optimization take on the internet. You’re training yourself to treat every interaction as a transaction. And that habit doesn’t stay in the chat window.

😮😮😮😬😬😬 The FBI has warned that Iran wants to launch drone attacks against the West Coast. nytimes.com/2026/03/11/wor…

After three years of construction, the San Diego Zoo Safari Park unveiled a new Elephant Valley habitat designed for its eight endangered African savanna elephants. kpbs.org/news/environme…

How is Altadena coming along more than a year after the fires? Well, we busted out the drone to show you: instagram.com/reel/DUop2A2CR…

The 2026 wildflower bloom is already dazzling folks across California. The photographer Elliot McGucken arrived last week in Death Valley to find the park awash in yellows and purples. “It’s the best I’ve ever seen,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle. Here's an interactive forecast map using observational data from past seasons to recommend where and when to catch the bloom. #h-5" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">californiasun.co/newsletter/wea…

California’s wine industry is being crushed. Winemakers of all sizes are laying off staff, closing facilities and, in some cases, leaving grapes to rot on vines.🍷I looked into why: latimes.com/business/story…

Wow.

@Therra Probably true.

@ScienceWeekly Graceland would like a word.

News you can use, sort of: ‘Brady Bunch’ house declared a historic landmark. The "Brady Bunch" house in Studio City is said to be the most photographed house in America, after the White House. latimes.com/california/sto…

I did a deep dive (pun intended) on one of California's amazing ocean research institutions: the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, also known as MBARI: californiacurated.substack.com/p/mbari-and-th…

When the sea turns white: hundreds of beluga whales gather in the Arctic waters

Carbon transport, by squid This is a Teuthowenia pellucida, according to Rachel Chen, from the #OBVI #LivingBioreactors team. After glass squids make the daily trip to surface waters to feed, they return to depths, transferring carbon from the surface ocean to the deep sea.

There's an old west town in Santa Clarita just outside of Los Angeles. instagram.com/reel/DVZtffZIE…

One of California’s greatest environmental tragedies is barely remembered. The clearcutting of Converse Basin erased thousands of giant sequoias and reshaped the conservation movement that followed. californiacurated.substack.com/p/giants-falle…

@nicolatwilley @penguinpress I just bought this. So far, really interesting.

I'm even more thrilled to have written it! The artificial cryosphere we've built for our food to live in has been my obsession for more than a decade & I cannot wait to share it with the world. Thanks @penguinpress for letting me dive so deep it seemed like I would never come up!