Links
Really fun set this week!
4 stars
What’s Actually Inside Your Phone’s Brain? | Epic Spaceman [YouTube]
19-minute video
I shrunk down into an M5 chip | MKBHD [YouTube]
12-minute video
Two wonderful videos from a collaboration between Epic Spaceman and MKBHD
If there was a chance that one of the greatest wonders of the modern world was in your pocket right now, wouldn’t you want to know how that was possible? I’m here to tell you it is and I’m going to do my very best to take you on a journey there so you can see and experience it for yourself.
I shrunk myself down to explore the scale of transistors.
2025 letter | Dan Wang
36-minute read
After a one-year hiatus due to his new book, Dan Wang’s annual letter is back and is as much a must-read as always. (As usual, it meanders and is hard to summarise in an excerpt.)
One way that Silicon Valley and the Communist Party resemble each other is that both are serious, self-serious, and indeed, completely humorless.
If the Bay Area once had an impish side, it has gone the way of most hardware tinkerers and hippie communes. Which of the tech titans are funny? In public, they tend to speak in one of two registers. The first is the blandly corporate tone we’ve come to expect when we see them dragged before Congressional hearings or fireside chats. The second leans philosophical, as they compose their features into the sort of reverie appropriate for issuing apocalyptic prophecies on AI. Sam Altman once combined both registers at a tech conference when he said: “I think that AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.” Actually that was pretty funny.
[...]
While I feel apprehensive about the US, I am much more gloomy about Europe. I have a hard time squaring the poor prospects of Europe over the next decade with the smugness that Europeans have for themselves. I spent most of the summer in Copenhagen. There’s no doubt that quality of life in most European cities is superb, especially for what I care about: food, opera, walkable streets, access to nature. But a decade of low economic growth is biting. European prices and taxes can be so high while salaries can be so low. For all the American complaints about home affordability, relative housing costs can be even worse in big European cities. London has the house prices of California and the income levels of Mississippi.
3 stars
Notes on Taiwan | The Fitzwilliam
30-minute read
Long-time readers know that my family is from Taiwan and that I therefore have a bias, but I do think this piece is quite enjoyable:
For obvious reasons, Taiwan often comes up in the news. I assume that Taiwanese get sick of their home only being brought up by Westerners in the context of Cold War 2.0 and/or thermonuclear annihilation. This is one reason why some of the other travelogues I read rubbed me the wrong way. For my trip, I hoped to surface some of the lesser-appreciated aspects of Taiwan in the West. Here are my notes on that attempt.
[...]
The first thing I noticed after I arrived in Taipei was that the English language versions of the street names are written confusingly on Google Maps. It seemed that different streets, which I thought represented the same concept or location, were being transliterated differently.
You might innocently ask: ‘Why?’ Like everything about Taiwan, understanding the answer will require a monstrously complicated digression.
[...]
What kind of a thing is Taiwan? There are obviously lots of border disputes around the world, and the question of how many countries there are depends on who you ask. Nevertheless, there is a strong case to be made that Taiwan’s status is sui generis. As such, there isn’t really a general principle of international relations that would cause you to take one side or another on its history.
George Bell Served 24 Years in Prison for a Crime He Didn’t Commit. Now He’s Learning to Live Again. | Esquire
17-minute read
George never killed a cop, never killed anybody. But the world thought he did because the DA said he did. The world hated him. Now the world feels bad for him and he’s trying to figure out how he feels about the world, a world in which what happened to him could happen to a person at all.
[...]
Did they know George Bell?
Hmph, the other man said. George Bell, yeah. He blowin’ all his money. Fancy cars and all-a that stuff.
How would they know this? George hadn’t been back to the neighborhood in years. Had they seen him?
The man bats away the question with his hand.
Everyone knows. People talking about it. He ain’t gonna have no money left, he says. He shakes his head, and it looks like disdain.
George doesn’t need that either—disdain. He doesn’t need your pity or your doubt, he doesn’t need your judgment, and he didn’t need all that damn money. He’ll take it—hell yeah, he’ll take it. But what he needs? From you and me and the cops and the prison guards and the old guy on the corner and his family and everyone?
He needs what we all need, but especially him. He needs you to try to understand something that in your world is incomprehensible.
He needs you, just for a few minutes, to listen.
New York’s Grand Central Terminal Helped Provide the Blueprint for American Cities. It Happened by Accident | Smithsonian Magazine
11-minute read
A train wreck that caused the death of more than a dozen commuters near the turn of the 20th century was the impetus behind a monumental project that changed the urban landscape
[...]
In 1902, Wilgus immediately set his mind to solving the unprecedented problems facing New York Central. “Suddenly, there came a flash of light,” he wrote years later. “It was the most daring idea that ever occurred to me.” Wilgus laid out his ambitious scheme in a three-page memo to the Central’s president. First, sink all of the tracks coming into Manhattan deep below ground (only possible once they were running on non-polluting electricity). In addition, stack them on top of each other to create two levels, one for commuter trains and one for long-distance, allowing the four tracks that enter Manhattan in Harlem to expand to more than 40 as they approach Grand Central. And finally, to service the new, underground infrastructure, build a new, larger, even grander terminal designed to handle an ever-increasing ridership, which had risen 300 percent in the previous three decades alone.
“The whole thing was a technological leap, an unbelievably complicated feat of engineering,” Schlichting says. “And it was going to cost a fortune.” Three million cubic yards of earth and rock would need to be dug up and carted out of Midtown Manhattan, and an electrical power system created to accommodate new locomotives. Wilgus estimated a total outlay of $35 million—nearly half the Central’s annual revenue of $82 million—an estimate that rose in the following years to upwards of $71 million.
The Price of Remission | ProPublica
18-minute read
But Revlimid is also, I soon learned, extraordinarily expensive, costing nearly $1,000 for each daily pill. (Although, I later discovered, a capsule costs just 25 cents to make.)
That steep tab has put the drug’s lifesaving potential out of reach for some cancer patients, who have been forced into debt or simply stopped taking the drug. The price also helps fuel our ballooning insurance premiums.
For decades, I’ve reported on outrageous health care costs in the U.S. and the burden they place on patients. I’ve revealed the tactics used by drug companies to drive sales and keep the price of their products high.
Even with my experience, the cost of Revlimid stood out. When I started taking the drug, I’d look at the smooth, cylindrical capsule in my hand and consider the fact I was about to swallow something that costs about the same as a new iPhone. A month’s supply, which arrives in an ordinary, orange-tinged plastic bottle, is the same price as a new Nissan Versa.
I wanted to know how this drug came to cost so much — and why the price keeps going up. The price of Revlimid has been hiked 26 times since it launched. Some of what happened was reported at the time. But no one has pieced together the full account of what the drugmaker Celgene did, how federal regulators failed to rein it in and what the story reveals about unrestrained drug pricing in America.
2 stars
Pickle Expose: Sliced and Diced | X
12-minute read
Maybe this is a bit niche, but it’s very satisfying to have an expert debunk marketing hype...
I believe Pickle (@pickle) is fraudulently representing their product, the Pickle 1 AR glasses.
This is a big claim. First, I’ll go over every technical claim across their launch video and website. Then, I’ll reveal what I discovered about Pickle’s team and the company’s history. Finally, I’ll bet Pickle’s CEO - Daniel Park - all of their pre-order revenues if they miss their Q2 2026 delivery estimate for US customers. If he delivers in Q2, I’ll pay him all the money they’ve accepted from pre-orders; if he doesn’t, he pays me (should he accept).
By the end of this exposé, you’ll understand how wildly impossible their claims of current hardware and software capabilities are. You might even agree with me that these dubious propositions could only have been made knowingly by Pickle’s team.
Rethinking statistical significance | Reason.com
7-minute read
A century ago, two oddly domestic puzzles helped set the rules for what modern science treats as “real”: a Guinness brewer charged with quality control and a British lady insisting she can taste whether milk or tea was poured first.
Those stories sound quaint, but the machinery they inspired now decides which findings get published, promoted, and believed—and which get waved away as “not significant.” Instead of recognizing the limitations of statistical significance, fields including economics and medicine ossified around it, with dire consequences for science. In the 21st century, an obsession with statistical significance led to overprescription of both antidepressant drugs and a headache remedy with lethal side effects. There was another path we could have taken.
I sell onions on the Internet | Deep South Ventures
3-minute read
They’re classified as a sweet onion, and because of their mild flavor (they don’t make your eyes tear up), some folks can eat them like an apple. Most of my customers do.
During a phone order one season – 2018 I believe – a customer shared this story where he smuggled some Vidalias onto his vacation cruise ship, and during each meal, would instruct the server to ‘take this onion to the back, chop it up, and add it onto my salad ‘. That story made me smile.
Folks who love Vidalias, love Vidalias.
Let me stop, though. I don’t want to get ahead of myself.
How did all this start? I’m a web guy. I’m not a farmer.
[...]
Oddly enough, it didn’t start with an idea.
Back in 2014, the domain name VidaliaOnions.com expired, and went up for auction. For some reason the original owner abandoned it, and being a Georgia native, I recognized it ’cause I was familiar with the industry. I’ve been buying expired or abandoned domain names for a while, and enjoy developing them into niche businesses. This one was different though – I backordered the domain as a spectator, but for kicks & giggles, I dropped in a bid around $2,200 ’cause I was confident I’d be outbid.
5 minutes later, I was the proud owner of VidaliaOnions.com. I had no idea what to do with it. Ready, fire, aim.
How to Fix a Typewriter and Your Life | New York Times
6-minute read
Eleven years ago, Paul Lundy was dying a slow, workingman’s death under fluorescent light.
[...]
Lundy had planned to stay 20 minutes. He stayed four hours. What captured him was not nostalgia. What captured him was watching Mr. Montgomery work, the old man dismantling a machine while carrying on a conversation, barely glancing at the complexity beneath his fingers.
[...]
Lundy bought the business at the end of 2014. Soon, he quit his job and walked away from its stultifying steadiness, its salary and benefits. His colleagues were sure he had lost his mind. But Lundy knew he was trading security for meaning, predictability for possibility. “I was happy,” he says simply.
Original link | Archive.is link
Good Intentions Gone Bad | The Atlantic
8-minute read
Attend a public event in Canada and you will likely hear it open with a land acknowledgment. In the city of Vancouver, for example, the script might read:
“This place is the unceded and ancestral territory of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh speaking peoples, the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, and has been stewarded by them since time immemorial.”
I’ve been present for many of these recitations, which are common in liberal areas of the United States too. They are usually received by their audiences as a Christian invocation might once have been: a socially required ritual in which only some believe, but at which it would be rude to scoff. After all, what harm does it do?
In the past few months, Canadians have learned that these well-meaning pronouncements are not, in fact, harmless. Far from it. Canadian courts are reinterpreting these rote confessions of historical guilt as legally enforceable admissions of wrongful possession.
In August, a British Columbia court ruled that the titles to public land across 800 acres south of downtown Vancouver must be subordinated to a new “Aboriginal title” belonging to a group of about 5,500 Indigenous Canadians.
Original link | Archive.is link
The realities of being a pop star. | charli’s substack
5-minute read
One of the main realities of being a pop star is that at a certain level, it’s really fucking fun. You get to go to great parties in a black SUV and you can smoke cigarettes in the car and scream out of the sunroof and all that cliche shit. At these parties you sometimes get to meet interesting people and those interesting people often actually want to meet you. You get to wear fabulous clothes and shoes and jewelry that sometimes comes with its own security guard who trails you around the party making sure you don’t lose the extortionate earrings sitting on your lobes or let some random person you’ve just met in the bathroom try on the necklace around your neck that is equivalent to the heart of the ocean. You get good free shit like phones and laptops and vinyl and trips and shroom gummies and headphones and clothes and sometimes even an electric bike that will sit in your garage untouched for the best part of 5 years. You get to enter restaurants through the back entrance and give a half smile to the head chef (who probably hates you) and the waiters (who probably hate you too) as they sweat away doing an actual real service industry job while you strut through the kitchen with your 4 best friends who are tagging along for the ride. You get to feel special, but you also have to at points feel embarrassed by how stupid the whole thing is.
The Penicillin Myth | Asimov Press
16-minute read
For decades, scientists and historians have puzzled over inconsistencies in Fleming’s story. For starters, the window to Fleming’s lab was rarely (if ever) left open, precisely to prevent the kind of contamination that supposedly led to penicillin’s discovery. Second, the story is strikingly similar to Fleming’s earlier discovery of lysozyme, another antibacterial substance, which also featured lucky contamination from an open window. Third, Fleming claimed to have discovered the historic culture plate on September 3rd, but the first entry in his lab notebook isn’t dated until October 30th, nearly two months later.
Last, and most important: penicillin only works if it’s present before the staphylococci. Fleming did not know it at the time, but penicillin interferes with bacterial cell wall synthesis, which only happens when bacteria are actively growing. Visible colonies, however, are composed mostly of mature or dead cells. By the time a colony can be seen, it is often too late for penicillin to have any effect. In fact, the Penicillium mold typically won’t even grow on a plate already filled with staphylococcus colonies. For years, scientists have attempted to replicate Fleming’s original discovery. All have met with failure.
How a Government Think Tank Trained The First Generation of US Software Developers | Construction Physics
4-minute read
By 1959 SDC had 800 programmers working on SAGE, and it’s estimated that SDC employed half of the programming manpower in the US.
Because of how nascent computers, and computer programming, was, hiring the number of programmers SAGE required wasn’t straightforward. Part of the interview process was asking whether candidates knew what computer programming was, and one hired programmer noted that “most of us didn’t know what a programmer was until we came to work at SDC”. In the absence of experienced programmers, SDC recruiters looked for “good logical minds and a math or science background”, but it proved hard to predict who would end up being an adept programmer. Hired candidates were given four months of training (two on the IBM computers, and then another two on the SAGE system). Nearly 90% of those hired were between the ages of 22 and 29.
Imagine 130,000,000 washing machines | The Pursuit of Happiness
5-minute read
The real issue is not “Who will get the profits from AI?”; the most interesting question is whether AI will lead to the production of 130 million household servant robots, or the production of another 2000 mega-yachts. When examining issues of inequality, it often makes more sense to focus on the structure of output, not the distribution of income. If AI leads to the production of 130 million household servant robots, then it is very likely that the benefits of AI will be widely shared, even if it takes a UBI to make it happen. The same is true if it leads to self-driving cars.
“We analysed Hitler’s DNA – and what we discovered made us gasp” | History Extra
8-minute read
First, thanks to the work of colleagues at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, we found that Hitler had a well-known deletion in a gene that is associated with Kallmann syndrome and the elaborately named Congenital hypogonadotropic hypogonadism. While the severity can vary from person to person, this mutation can result, among other things, in an impaired testosterone production, low libido, abnormalities in the development of sexual organs, and, by extension, a disrupted reproductive function.
[...]
Hitler’s results were, again, striking. His polygenic score placed him in the top 1 per cent for schizophrenia, for autism and for bipolar disorder.
However, we have to be really clear here: Hitler’s polygenic score being high is not diagnostic. We cannot, from his DNA, say that he would have been diagnosed with any of these conditions. Even people with the highest scores aren’t diagnosed with the disorder 95 per cent of the time. What makes Hitler so unusual is not the possibility that he might have had any one of these disorders on its own, but rather the fact that his placement in the top 1 per cent for the polygenic scores of all three of these conditions is exceptional: none of the other individuals in the population analysis had the same result.
1 star
News Daddy ❤️ New York Times 🤡 | The Verge
9-minute read
America’s Polarization Has Become the World’s Side Hustle | 404 Media
4-minute read
A couple pieces on new news sources:
Ankit Khanal gets his news from News Daddy. More than 20 times a day, Khanal, a sophomore at George Mason University, opens TikTok to have the biggest stories of the day delivered to him by a bleach-blonde 26-year-old named Dylan Page, one of the leading faces in a growing community of news influencers. Based in the United Kingdom, Page began posting content on TikTok in August 2020 and has since grown his “News Daddy Empire,” his posts amassing over 1.5 billion likes. His content spans breaking news, politics, pop culture, and sometimes, personal workout videos — delivered in the increasingly common, enthusiastic “YouTube accent.” While Page doesn’t explicitly cite his sources in every video, News Daddy appears to get his information from a mix of conventional news outlets, social media, and other influencers.
Original link | Archive.is link
Inauthentic viral accounts on X are just the tip of the iceberg, though, as we have reported. A huge amount of the viral content about American politics and American news on social media is from sock puppet and bot accounts monetized by people in other countries. The rise of easy to use, free AI generative tools have supercharged this effort, and social media monetization programs have incentivized this effort and are almost entirely to blame. The current disinformation and slop phenomenon on the internet today makes the days of ‘Russian bot farms’ and ‘fake news pages from Cyprus’ seem quaint; the problem is now fully decentralized and distributed across the world and is almost entirely funded by social media companies themselves.
[...]
Americans are being targeted because advertisers pay higher ad rates to reach American internet users, who are among the wealthiest in the world. In turn, social media companies pay more money if the people engaging with the content are American. This has created a system where it makes financial sense for people from the entire world to specifically target Americans with highly engaging, divisive content. It pays more.
For the most part, the only ‘psyop’ here is one being run on social media users by social media companies themselves in search of getting more ad revenue by any means necessary.
Original link | Archive.is link
How birds got human names | weird medieval guys
4-minute read
I was recently extremely enthused to learn that a fair few birds’ common names originated as human names. Magpies were originally known simply as “pies” until the nickname “Mag”, short for Maggie, short for Margaret was added to the front sometime in the Middle Ages. Before it began to be treated as a single word, it was rendered as “Mag Pie”, a sort of fanciful full name for the creature. I tried to tell this to a friend and he refused to believe me (I think he still doesn’t) but the provenance is quite clear: pie originated from the Latin name for the bird, pica. You may have heard pica used to describe the human disorder of consuming inedible substances, which comes from the magpie’s reputation as an indiscriminate eater. The English form of pie (sans mag) is still preserved in the term piebald, a descriptor for any animal with a splotchy dark-on-white coat. In Middle English, piebald literally meant something like “magpie-spotted”.
[...]
Some of these epithets drew on stereotypes about certain human names. Today, Karen has become synonymous with a certain type of nagging woman and, here in the UK, Barry calls to mind the image of a man who’s a sort of red-faced, spherical booze-swiller. 500 years ago, Mag was a common generic name for a chattering, gossipy woman, Robin was a charming nickname for little boys, and Jack was associated with mischievous men (I would argue it still is today! Think of how many dashing rogues of literature and cinema are named Jack).
Was Daft Punk Having a Laugh When They Chose the Tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger? | Made by Windmill
4-minute read
But I think our helmet-clad robot friends might have been making a little joke that we’ve apparently all missed. The BPM of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger is actually 123.45.
Underrated reasons to be thankful V | Dynomight
4-minute read
A random, wonky list:
That if we wanted to, we surely could figure out which of the 300-ish strains of rhinovirus are circulating in a given area at a given time and rapidly vaccinate people to stop it and thereby finally “cure” the common cold, and though this is too annoying to pursue right now, it seems like it’s just a matter of time.
[...]
That radioactive atoms either release a ton of energy but also quickly stop existing—a gram of Rubidium-90 scattered around your kitchen emits as much energy as ~200,000 incandescent lightbulbs but after an hour only 0.000000113g is left—or don’t put out very much energy but keep existing for a long time—a gram of Carbon-14 only puts out the equivalent of 0.0000212 light bulbs but if you start with a gram, you’ll still have 0.999879g after a year—so it isn’t actually that easy to permanently poison the environment with radiation although Cobalt-60 with its medium energy output and medium half-life is unfortunate, medical applications notwithstanding I still wish Cobalt-60 didn’t exist, screw you Cobalt-60.
Economic inequality does not equate to poor well-being or mental health | Marginal Revolution
1-minute read
A meta-analysis of 168 studies covering more than 11 million people found no reliable link between economic inequality and well-being or mental health. In other words, living in a place that has large gaps between the rich and poor does not affect these outcomes, with implications for policy.