Links
3 stars
The Epic Rise and Fall of a Dark-Web Psychedelics Kingpin | WIRED
33-minute read
Interdimensional travel, sex with aliens, communion with God. Anything is possible with just a sprinkle of DMT. Akasha Song’s secret labs made millions of doses—and dollars—until the feds showed up.
Original link | Archive.is link
The curse of Toumaï: an ancient skull, a disputed femur and a bitter feud over humanity’s origins | The Guardian
20-minute read
The discovery was announced to the world the following year on the cover of Nature, the leading scientific journal, and in a televised ceremony in the Chadian capital, N’Djamena. “A new hominid is born,” Brunet declared. “By virtue of his age, he is the ancestor of all Chadians. But also the ancestor of the whole of humankind!”
[...]
But immediately questions were raised about whether the species was correctly assigned to the human lineage. The authors of a sneering letter in Nature suggested renaming it “Sahelpithecus” (“Sahel Ape”), most notably because it did not, according to their counter-analysis of the skull, walk on two feet – bipedalism being one of the very few available criteria for identifying ancient members of our evolutionary branch. Yet it escaped the notice of no one in the field that some of the letter-writers were affiliated with another hominid species, which had, until the arrival of Sahelanthropus, held the record for the oldest known. And while the question of Sahelanthropus’s gait was acknowledged to be a crucial one, the skull alone was not going to provide a definitive answer. For that, “postcrania” would be required: remains from the neck down, especially the lower body – a pelvis, a femur. Unfortunately, Brunet reported in Nature, none had been recovered.
[...]
He saw immediately that Bergeret’s long bone was the shaft of a left-hand femur. He took note of its robust diameter, its pronounced posterior ridge, its forward curvature: it was evident to Macchiarelli that it had belonged to a primate. “Aude, where is this piece from?” he asked, attempting to mask his mounting agitation. The femur’s inventory number suggested it had been collected from the same site, on the same day, as the Sahelanthropus skull. The crucial postcrania that Brunet said did not exist evidently did. “Don’t cut anything,” he said to Bergeret. “This appears to be the femur of Toumaï.”
Is Jeff Bezos Selling Out the Washington Post? | The New Yorker
27-minute read
In the days of Woodward and Bernstein, the Post’s remit had seemed clear: to hold the nation’s most powerful officials to account. Now its journalists were shaken not just by what some saw as Bezos’s capitulation to Trump but by a broader identity crisis at the paper. Those who could find work elsewhere left. In January, a former executive editor, Leonard Downie, Jr., and a former managing editor, Robert Kaiser, wrote in an e-mail to Bezos, “In our experience going back to the early 1960s, morale at The Post has never been lower.” Bezos never replied.
Original link | Archive.is link
Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America | The New Yorker
28-minute read
In the spring and summer of 2008, when Donald Trump was still a registered Democrat, an anonymous blogger known as Mencius Moldbug posted a serial manifesto under the heading “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives.” Written with the sneering disaffection of an ex-believer, the hundred-and-twenty-thousand-word letter argued that egalitarianism, far from improving the world, was actually responsible for most of its ills. That his bien-pensant readers thought otherwise, Moldbug contended, was due to the influence of the media and the academy, which worked together, however unwittingly, to perpetuate a left-liberal consensus. To this nefarious alliance he gave the name the Cathedral. Moldbug called for nothing less than its destruction and a total “reboot” of the social order. He proposed “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law,” and the eventual transfer of power to a C.E.O.-in-chief (someone like Steve Jobs or Marc Andreessen, he suggested), who would transform the government into “a heavily-armed, ultra-profitable corporation.” This new regime would sell off public schools, destroy universities, abolish the press, and imprison “decivilized populations.” It would also fire civil servants en masse (a policy Moldbug later called RAGE—Retire All Government Employees) and discontinue international relations, including “security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration.”
[...]
In another timeline, Yarvin might have remained an obscure and ineffectual internet crank, a digital de Maistre. Instead, he has become one of America’s most influential illiberal thinkers, an engineer of the intellectual source code for the second Trump Administration. “Yarvin has pushed the Overton window,” Nikhil Pal Singh, a history professor at N.Y.U., told me. His work has revived ideas that once seemed outside the bounds of polite society, Singh said, and created a road map for the dismantling of “the administrative state and the global postwar order.”
Original link | Archive.is link
Neither Here Nor There | Urban Omnibus
16-minute read
All of this played out haphazardly in Flushing, Queens, a neighborhood that was speed-running through world-historic changes at the far end of the 7 train. For most of my lifetime, Flushing was the humble immigrant enclave that could. It built itself upon a backbone of thrift and cheap labor into a network of restaurants, accountants, medical offices, travel agencies, and cram schools — leveraging its insularity and esotericism into a diversified economy of second-order business services. The food was good, the kids did well on the SHSAT, small business dynamism was high, intergenerational upward mobility was attainable — all such rarities for a low-income, working-class neighborhood in post-industrial America that Flushing seemed like an exceptional place. There was a triumphant story you could tell along these lines, and as an urban planner and child of the neighborhood, sometimes I told it.
Then, Flushing became something different altogether. Over the past 15 years or so — running in parallel with the economic and cultural rise of Asia — basement food courts gave way to billion-dollar megadevelopments funded by the combination of overseas capital and a wealthier, homegrown second generation.
How Chinese drones could defeat America | Noahpinion
7-minute read
As you read this, military planners all over the world are scrambling to come up with defenses against the kind of raid that Ukraine just carried out. Dozens of container ships arrive in American ports from China every day, each with thousands of containers. The containers on the ships then get unloaded and sent by road and rail to destinations all over the country. Imagine a hundred of those containers suddenly blossoming into swarms of drones, taking out huge chunks of America’s multi-trillion-dollar air force and navy in a few minutes. That’s obviously a terrifying thought. How can the U.S. defend against that sort of attack? Possible countermeasures include hardened aircraft shelters and various forms of air defenses — guns, jammers, electromagnetic pulses, laser cannons, drone interceptors — along with improved surveillance of incoming container traffic. But whatever the eventual defenses are, the advent of cheap battery-powered drones has changed the game and made essentially the entire world into a battlefield.
[...]
Unfortunately, Trump and the GOP have decided to think of batteries as a culture-war issue instead of one of national security. They think they’re attacking hippie-dippy green energy, sticking it to the socialist environmentalist kids and standing up for good old red-blooded American oil and gas. Instead, what they’re actually doing is unilaterally disarming America’s future drone force and ceding the key weapon of the modern battlefield to China.
In any case, unless America’s leaders wake up very quickly to the military importance of batteries, magnets, injection molding, and drones themselves, the U.S. may end up looking like the British Navy in 1941 — or the Italian Navy in 1940. A revolution in military affairs is in process, and America is willfully missing the boat.
2 stars
Cambridge Latin Course Unit 1, by the Cambridge School Classics Project | Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf
11-minute read
The Psmiths review books, so I guess this is technically a book review. But really it's a fascinating piece about Latin and how you should (and shouldn't) learn it:
The Cambridge Latin Course is incredibly popular: since its original publication in 1970, it’s gone through six editions and is currently used in something like 40% of secondary school Latin classes worldwide. The stories are delightful, the conceit of hanging them on real archaeology whenever possible is inspired, and students love it. It’s just terrible at teaching Latin. And worse, it’s terrible on purpose.
Why I don’t think AGI is right around the corner | Dwarkesh
7-minute read
Very insightful:
But the fundamental problem is that LLMs don’t get better over time the way a human would. The lack of continual learning is a huge huge problem. The LLM baseline at many tasks might be higher than an average human's. But there’s no way to give a model high level feedback. You’re stuck with the abilities you get out of the box. You can keep messing around with the system prompt. In practice this just doesn’t produce anything even close to the kind of learning and improvement that human employees experience.
The reason humans are so useful is not mainly their raw intelligence. It’s their ability to build up context, interrogate their own failures, and pick up small improvements and efficiencies as they practice a task.
Greyhound Racing in West Virginia: Home of America's Last Active Tracks | Oxford American
24-minute read
They look ancient because they are. Eight in all, each one led by a teenaged handler in a royal purple t-shirt, the dogs cut a silhouette at odds with their surroundings. Moving from the paddock to the gated starting blocks, they squat and sniff and occasionally bark, appearing most themselves, or most familiar, when flattened in profile: the elegant, tapered snout, stretched-out torso, and tiny waist; the massive haunches and sickle-shaped curve of the belly. The same stark, primeval outlines can be found in Roman mosaics and temple drawings dating back to 6000 BC. The Greeks, the Celts, the Egyptians—they all loved the greyhound, or its close relations. Bred and cherished for its perceived nobility as much as its hunting prowess, no dog has been depicted as frequently, across as many millennia, or by a broader range of humans.
[...]
Time was, even ten or fifteen years ago, Wheeling Island ran thirty races a day. By state mandate, they must hold live races on no fewer than two hundred days each year. Since 2019, the year after Florida voters approved an amendment to ban greyhound racing at the eleven remaining tracks in that state, the already diminished number of racing patrons at Wheeling Island has declined by more than half. These numbers are not the stuff of happy executives, or budget meetings. Florence and White had agreed to meet with me but asked that the details of our conversation be off the record.
Haines man finds long lost father in Scotland | Chilkat Valley News
8-minute read
Lovely piece:
Stephen Winn died on Monday in Nairn, a small beach town in Scotland. From Nairn, a social worker placed a call to another small, rainy town, half a world away, to notify Winn’s son, Mike Thompson, of Haines. Thompson said he was glad to hear that his father passed peacefully and without pain; Winn had recently told his son that his life was a good life – an easy life – without the physical work and accompanying aches and pain his son carries.
Until the news, Thompson had been considering a move to Scotland, pending a DNA test that would have established Winn’s paternity. With that he could have applied for Scottish citizenship. Now, he’ll never know. But for Thompson, the test was always just a formality. He was confident what the result would have been.
Thompson, though he likes to greet people with “g’day,” is a lifelong Alaskan. He retired to Haines this year, to a home next to the fort with a fifteen foot-tall picture window in the living room. And while the home is still in varying states of unpacking, there’s a neatly arranged trail of how Thompson arrived there.
It's OK not to be fat | Noahpinion
9-minute read
In general, I think technological solutions to human problems are severely underrated. Progressive writers love to declare that “tech won’t save us”, and decry the vile techbros who think a magic venture-funded gadget can overcome the eternal foibles of human nature. Instead, what most writers think we need are social solutions — we need to restructure our institutions, our politics, our mores, and our culture in order to balance out, or perhaps to better accommodate, our timeless flaws.
This approach has occasional successes, but in general I think it fails. In the Covid pandemic, for example, social solutions — social distancing, lockdowns, universal masking — weren’t valueless, but they ended up being a lot less important than vaccines, Paxlovid, dexamethasone, and other technological solutions. Society failed us, and tech saved us.
With regards to the problem of weight loss, the social approach has been especially ineffective. Decades of awareness campaigns, education, social shaming, and public health failed to stop the obesity rate from climbing and climbing. Eventually, in despair, the social-solutionists turned to “fat acceptance” instead — they accepted that most people were going to be fat as an immutable fact of biology, and so our only hope was to just feel good about that. Victoria’s Secret put chubby lingerie models in its ad campaigns.
I have no moral or aesthetic problem with fat acceptance — in fact, I think shaming fat people is pointless, because effective weight loss usually doesn’t come from shame. But I think that fat acceptance is generally bad for society, because obesity is very, very unhealthy. We shouldn’t accept poor health if there’s something we can do about it.
And now there is something we can do about it!
Twain Dreams | Harper's Magazine
23-minute read
Unlike most Missourians or other Americans, the Clemenses sometimes owned a few slaves, and Clemens himself accepted the South’s peculiar institution well into his twenties.
[...]
Yet he eventually married into an abolitionist family, befriended Frederick Douglass, financed a black artist’s apprenticeship in Paris, and supported several black students through Yale Law School. As Mark Twain he lectured in all-black churches, championed the cause of Booker T. Washington, wrote blistering essays about atrocities committed against blacks, and gave large doses of dignity and power to three of the outstanding black characters in nineteenth-century literature. He began his career as a segregationist, turned himself into a champion of interracial brotherhood, and ended his life as a prophet of racial war.
Original link | Archive.is link
Does it matter if your romantic partner is similar to you? | Psyche
4-minute read
In one of our studies, we analysed previously collected data from two groups: couples who had been dating for less than 12 months, and established couples in the first two years of parenthood. In both groups, we found evidence of similarity between partners. Generally, there was much more evidence for similarity in their characteristic adaptations. These included relationship-specific characteristics like: responsiveness, or being seen as understanding and validating; go-to conflict resolution strategies, such as collaboration; and trust in one’s partner. The results suggest that being similar in characteristics like these, which are most directly tied to relationship functioning, might be more important than similarity in general traits when it comes to choosing a partner or maintaining a relationship past the earliest stage.
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In another study we conducted, established romantic couples provided data on their own and their partners’ personality states five times per day for a week. One intriguing finding was that co-fluctuations in emotions – or, how much partners’ emotional states moved in sync – were more strongly related to relationship satisfaction than similarities in general personality traits were. For example, when partners experienced positive emotions together (such as feeling joyful or excited at the same time), their relationship satisfaction tended to be higher.
Worm-inspired treatments inch toward the clinic | Knowable Magazine
4-minute read
Bruno Guigas, a molecular biologist at the Leiden University Center for Infectious Diseases in the Netherlands, led this study some years back and the results, he says, were “quite spectacular.” The mice lost fat and gained less weight overall than mice not exposed to worms. Within a month or so, he recalls, the scientists barely needed their scale to see that the worm-infested mice were leaner than their worm-free counterparts. Infection with worms, it seems, reversed obesity, the researchers reported in 2015.
[...]
“It was quite convincing that the worms were having some sort of beneficial effect,” says Giacomin. The subjects were convinced too: When the study was over, the researchers offered deworming, but most participants elected to keep their worms.
Why Trump and the New Right Declared War on Bureaucrats | New York Times
5-minute read
Anti-managerialism is back. Well positioned to answer decades of frustration with mainstream conservatives’ failure to deliver results, this old idea has become the central principle of the new right.
In fact, much of what is commonly called “populist” politics can be more accurately described as part of an anti-managerial revolution attempting to roll back the expansion of overbearing bureaucratic control into more and more areas of life.
Though it has so far met with limited success amid stiff resistance, grasping the nature of this anti-managerialism is essential to understanding the Trump administration’s effort to transform America’s institutional landscape, from government to universities and major corporations.
The idea’s intellectual history begins with the political philosopher James Burnham, who argued in his seminal 1941 book, “The Managerial Revolution,” that the aristocratic capitalist class was in the process of being overthrown by a revolution — just not, as the Marxists predicted, by the working class.
Original link | Archive.is link
1 star
How Common is Multiple Invention? | Construction Physics
7-minute read
Overall, I found that within this sample of historic inventions, multiple invention was extremely common. Out of the 190 inventions I looked at, 105 of them had some type of multiple effort. In 72 cases, these were multiple successes or near successes.
Probe lenses and focus stacking: the secrets to incredible photos taken inside instruments | DPReview
4-minute read
After lots of trial and error, Brooks landed on a process involving a combination of focus stacking and panoramic stitching. He uses the probe to rotate around the inside of the instrument, almost like a clock. However, the probe only focuses on roughly 2mm at a time. He wants it all in focus so that it doesn't look like a classic macro shot, so he's taking 20 to 30 images to get it all in focus. He also takes dark frames, like astrophotographers, to prevent hot pixels. Plus, given that the probe lens isn't made for photography, the light transmission isn't even across the frame. So, he photographs a piece of paper to identify where the vignetting starts, determining where he needs to take additional photos to compensate.
The recent history of AI in 32 otters | One Useful Thing
5-minute read
That future is not far away, as you can see from this final video, which I made with simple text prompts to Veo 3. When you are done watching (and I apologize in advance for the results of the prompt “like the musical Cats but for otters”), look back at the first Midjourney image from 2022. The time between a text prompt producing abstracts masses of fur and those producing realistic videos with sound was less than three years.
The Tragedy of Elon Musk | Persuasion
3-minute read
Francis Fukuyama:
Elon Musk is Exhibit A in what’s wrong with our oligarch-dominated society. The accolades that were piled on him before he ventured into politics were well-deserved. Tesla created a new category of industrial product and out of nowhere became a serious car company; SpaceX is the backbone of the American launch industry; and Starlink has proven its worth on the battlefields of Ukraine. As Noah Smith once observed, Musk’s real talent is not as an engineer or technologist, but as a master of industrial organization on a par with pioneers like Henry Ford.
But Musk illustrates perfectly our oligarch problem. The United States has produced an impressive group of tech entrepreneurs who have created world-beating companies. But a number of them don’t know how to stay in their lane. They think that because they have become rich and successful in one line of work, they will be good at anything, and stray into areas where they are way out of their depth.
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The tragedy for U.S. politics is that Musk may have destroyed his one outstanding creation, Tesla, by his misguided foray into politics.
Ideological Reversals Amongst Economists | Marginal Revolution
1-minute read
Most optimistically, authors who have left-to-right (right-to-left) reversals not only attract a new rightwing (left-wing) audience for their recent work, this new audience also engages with and cites the author’s previous left-wing (right-wing) papers, thereby helping to break down echo chambers.
White Liberals Present Themselves as Less Competent in Interactions with African-Americans | Yale Insights
3-minute read
According to new research by Cydney Dupree, assistant professor of organizational behavior at Yale SOM, white liberals tend to downplay their own verbal competence in exchanges with racial minorities, compared to how other white Americans act in such exchanges. The study is scheduled for publication in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
[...]
The researchers found that liberal individuals were less likely to use words that would make them appear highly competent when the person they were addressing was presumed to be black rather than white. No significant differences were seen in the word selection of conservatives based on the presumed race of their partner. “It was kind of an unpleasant surprise to see this subtle but persistent effect,” Dupree says. “Even if it’s ultimately well-intentioned, it could be seen as patronizing.”
Meta Aims to Use AI to Fully Automate Ad Creation | Wall Street Journal
2-minute read
Meta Platforms is betting that automation is the future of ads.
The social-media company aims to enable brands to fully create and target ads using artificial intelligence by the end of next year, according to people familiar with the matter.
[...]
Using the ad tools Meta is developing, a brand could present an image of the product it wants to promote along with a budgetary goal, and AI would create the entire ad, including imagery, video and text. The system would then decide which Instagram and Facebook users to target and offer suggestions on budget, people familiar with the matter said.
[...]
Meta also plans to enable advertisers to personalize ads using AI, so that users see different versions of the same ad in real time, based on factors such as geolocation, the people said. A person seeing an advertisement for a car in a snowy place, for example, might see the car driving up a mountain, whereas a person seeing an ad for that same car in an urban area would see it driving on a city street.
Original link | Archive.is link
Where Would You Prefer that Women Be Oppressed? | Bet On It
1-minute read
Immigration restrictions are a great way to make sure that Muslim women are not oppressed in Europe. But that does less than zero to improve the lives of Muslim women. The regulation simply forces them to stay back in their home countries where conditions are worse and far harder to escape.