Links
4 stars
One of the Greatest Polar Bear Hunters Confronts a Vanishing World | New Yorker
24-minute read
In early 1993, the Icelandic photographer Ragnar Axelsson arrived at the most remote settlement in Greenland, a lonely town in the east that is tucked away in the world’s largest fjord system, which is usually locked in by ice. The temperature was minus forty degrees, in both Fahrenheit and Celsius—right where the scales converge. Sled dogs howled through the night, a warning against polar bears. The dogs smelled the bears. The bears smelled the children.
The only other humans who had settled on that side of Greenland were five hundred miles to the south, separated by impassable mountains and glaciers. To the north was nine hundred miles of frozen wilderness, inhabited only by animals and a dozen or so Danish soldiers who were doing two-year shifts on the world’s most arduous patrol. To the west was the Greenlandic ice sheet—up to two miles thick and filled with perilous crevasses. The town was supplied by a ship from Denmark, fourteen hundred miles to the east: once in late summer and once in early autumn, before the pack ice re-formed, rendering passage impossible. Amid this isolation, the town’s name rang out as a riddle: Ittoqqortoormiit, the “place of the large houses.” Large houses? Compared with what?
Original link | Archive.is link
3 stars
Watched, Tracked, and Targeted in Gaza | New York Magazine
18-minute read
Israel’s military assault that began in the aftermath of October 7, 2023, has left Gaza unrecognizable. The campaign of mass killing, of severing communities, of making homes unlivable, was pursued with bombs and bullets and tanks. It operated, too, through a system of watching, knowing, and collecting us: drones that hovered endlessly overhead, quadcopters that dipped near windows and entered houses, facial-recognition scans at checkpoints, movements followed through phone tracking, calls that broke with static before an air strike. The Israeli army was using artificial intelligence to generate kill lists, monitoring our social-media accounts, and storing in bulk the audio of our phone calls. Journalists, human-rights researchers, and legal scholars have mapped pieces of the surveillance apparatus in Gaza. What has largely been missing is how this technology landed on bodies, homes, and neighborhoods; how it reshaped daily life for people forced to live inside the matrix; how it reordered our minds.
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After October 7, 2023, the system that had been built quietly over years revealed its full capacities. We learned that several western governments and some of the world’s largest tech companies had helped the Israelis watch and catalogue us.
Original link | Archive.is link
‘Don’s Best Friend’: How Epstein and Trump Bonded Over the Pursuit of Women | New York Times
18-minute read
The president has tried to minimize their friendship, but documents and interviews reveal an intense and complicated relationship. Chasing women was a game of ego and dominance. Female bodies were currency.
Original link | Archive.is link
Thinking fast, slow, and super slow | David Bessis
11-minute read
How mathematicians train their intuition
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The ball and bat problem is a perfect illustration of the theory of cognitive biases, which Kahneman developed with Amos Tversky. According to this theory, we have two distinct cognitive systems, System 1 and System 2.
System 1 allows you to give immediate and instinctive responses, without even trying. When someone asks you how much is 2 + 2, what year you were born, or which weighs more between an elephant or a mouse, you don’t even have to think. But it’s also System 1 that makes you answer, incorrectly, that the ball costs 10¢.
System 2 is what you have to use when you’re asked to calculate 47 x 83, or how many days have passed since your birth. You know how to get the answer, but you’d have to think. You probably need pencil and paper. One thing is certain: you don’t really want to do it. Even if System 2 is more reliable and rigorous, you only use it when you have no other choice, because thinking hard, doing calculations, and logical reasoning are all tiresome.
[...]
When I need to make an important decision in my life, if my intuition tells me to choose option A and my reason tells me to choose option B, I tell myself there’s something going on and I’m not ready to make the decision.
That’s the moment to resort to what I call System 3.
Shadow navy: How China’s civilian fleet could be a potent weapon in a Taiwan invasion | Reuters
9-minute read
Great visualisations
China is mobilizing an armada of civilian ships that could help in an invasion of Taiwan – a mission that could surpass the Second World War’s Normandy landings. Reuters used ship tracking data and satellite images to monitor the role civilian vessels played in Chinese maritime exercises this summer. The drills revealed that China is devising concrete invasion plans, naval warfare experts say, and rehearsing new techniques aimed at speeding up beach landings of troops and equipment in a bid to overwhelm Taiwan’s defenders.
2 stars
Amateur sleuth may have solved the Black Dahlia and Zodiac killings | Los Angeles Times
7-minute read
Alex Baber, a 50-year-old West Virginia man who dropped out of high school and taught himself codebreaking, now says he has cracked the Zodiac killer’s identity — and in the process solved the Black Dahlia case as well.
[...]
To attack the problem, Baber used artificial intelligence and generated a list of 71 million possible 13-letter names. Using known details of the Zodiac killer, based on witness descriptions, he cross-checked those names against military, marriage, census and other public records.
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Giorgio said that many people have approached him over the years with similar claims, which were easily debunked. “All of Alex’s work checked out to me,” he said. To verify his work, Giorgio contacted two other former NSA crypto-mathematicians, Patrick Henry and Rich Wisniewski. Not only did they endorse the Z13 solution, but Henry discovered another detail cementing the link between the two unsolved cases: the Zodiac code was generated by the key word “Elizabeth.”
Were classical statues painted horribly? | Works in Progress
6-minute read
There is a single explanation for the fact that the reconstructions do not resemble the statues depicted in ancient artworks, the fact that their use of color is unlike that in ancient mosaics and frescoes, and the fact that modern viewers find them ugly. It is that the reconstructions are painted very badly. There is no reason to posit that ancient Europeans had tastes radically unlike ours to explain our dislike of the reconstructions. The Greeks and Romans would have disliked them too, because the reconstructed polychromy is no good.
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Nobody, to my knowledge, seriously claims that the methods used to produce the reconstructions guarantee a high degree of accuracy. And this should come as no surprise. The paints used in the reconstructions are chemically similar to the trace pigments found on parts of the surface of the originals. However, those pigments formed the underlayer of a finished work to which they bear a very conjectural relationship. Imagine a modern historian trying to reconstruct the Mona Lisa on the basis of a few residual pigments here and there on a largely featureless canvas.
Victorian diary-writers kicked off our age of self-optimisation | Aeon
10-minute read
While the Victorian diary might initially seem strange to us – the lists of books read, the constant references to religion, the fact that family members and spouses would exchange these private texts – contemporary social media accounts display the same tendencies towards performative self-improvement. In fact, the cultural obsession with self-improvement and ‘habit-tracking’ has intensified. Technology companies have successfully monetised this deep-rooted urge to better ourselves, providing new ways to document and compare our daily lives, which can create a perpetual sense of failure. The act of sharing stories about ourselves is no longer confined to a trusted circle of intimate friends and relatives.
How do the pros get someone to leave a cult? Manipulate them into thinking it was their idea | The Guardian
11-minute read
Their method goes something like this. A family reaches out about their daughter, husband, nephew or grandchild. Ryan and Kelly conduct an assessment that can take anywhere from a day to a week (they would not say exactly). They charge $2,500 for the assessment, then $250 an hour after that, interviewing the family until they understand the dynamics well enough to devise a strategy. Then, over months or sometimes years, they work to create the conditions in which a person might begin to question the beliefs their life has been built on.
Normally, Kelly and Ryan work by strengthening the existing relationships in a person’s life. It can be a long game. They will educate the family about the cultic group, and give advice about what to say (or not to say). They will bring in experts: psychiatrists, lawyers, priests that can provide perspective and counsel. The goal is to untangle the family dynamics that might have made someone vulnerable to a cult in the first place.
Very occasionally, they meet face to face with the person involved in a cult. But these encounters look nothing like a drug intervention, with friends gathered in a circle and the reason for the meeting laid bare. Instead, Ryan and Kelly will act covertly. In one case, a son (the cult member) came home for a few days. His parents told him that Ryan and Kelly were friends of theirs, “family mediators” who happened to be “in town for a few days, to meet with some colleagues” – both technically true.
Investigating a Possible Scammer in Journalism’s AI Era | The Local
10-minute read
I was embarrassed. I had been naively operating with a pre-ChatGPT mindset, still assuming a pitch’s ideas and prose were actually connected to the person who sent it. Worse, the reason the pitch had been appealing to me to begin with was likely because a large language model somewhere was remixing my own prompt asking for stories where “health and money collide,” flattering me by sending me back what I wanted to hear.
The Great Reckoning | The Ideas Letter
13-minute read
This essay doesn’t rehearse the familiar bill of particulars on China—constraints on political pluralism and independent media; expansive security powers and preemptive detention; pressure on religious and ethnic expression; and episodes of extraterritorial coercion—not because those concerns are trivial, but because the task here is different. We’ve all learned to recite that litany, as a way of protecting ourselves from what real comparison might imply. The aim here is to confront, with intellectual honesty, what China’s achievements oblige us to reconsider about modernity, state capacity, forms of political legitimacy, and our own complacencies. Recognizing real costs can coexist with taking the magnitude of transformation seriously. This argument asks us to face squarely what has been accomplished and then measure ourselves against it.
And let me be clear: This reckoning is not a surrender. It is not an argument for abandoning liberal values, declaring authoritarian systems superior, or slavishly imitating features of China’s governance. It is instead a call for the kind of frank, sober assessment that genuine confidence requires—the willingness to acknowledge challenges directly, to learn from others’ successes even when they unsettle our assumptions, and to strengthen our own institutions through clear-eyed recognition of their shortcomings rather than defensive denial of their failures. Liberal democracy is indeed undergoing a profound crisis, but that crisis need not be terminal.
The gift card accountability sink | Bits about Money
6-minute read
It surprises many people to learn that the United States aggressively defends customers from fraud over some payment methods, via a liability transfer to their financial institution, which transfers it to intermediaries, who largely transfer it to payment-accepting businesses. Many people think the U.S. can’t make large, effective, pro-consumer regulatory regimes. They are straightforwardly wrong… some of the time.
But the AARP, the FBI, and your friendly local payments nerd will all tell you that if you’re abused on your debit card you are quite likely to be made whole, and if you’re abused via purchasing gift cards, it is unlikely any deep pockets will cover for you. The difference in treatment is partially regulatory carveouts, partially organized political pressure, and partly a side effect of an accountability sink specific to the industrial organization of gift cards.
Every Mammalian Mother Sleeps in Close Physical Proximity to Her Babies. No Exceptions. | Motherhood Until Yesterday
8-minute read
So it should not surprise you that in virtually every known non-industrial human society–and certainly in every hunter-gatherer society–babies sleep in close physical contact with their mothers at night. Putting babies to sleep alone in a crib is truly one of the weirdest things we do in Western society, from an anthropological and evolutionary perspective.
The Lost Cat of Sullivan’s Island | Truly*Adventurous
15-minute read
The small Doll Face Persian wriggled from its owner’s arms on February 1, 2019, in a panic into a thicket of live oaks, dense red cedars, and the iconic palmettos that grace the island town’s seal. Scurrying through the needle grass, this was the cat’s first time out of the house.
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This was not unusual. House cats get out, get lost, and usually don’t get found. Benke’s confusion over this particular flyer stemmed from what’s printed just below the photo of the 5-pound Doll Face Persian: “$10,000 REWARD for Vail’s safe return home.”
‘The fate of nations and the fall of kingdoms’: History’s epic theories of what causes aurora | BBC
5-minute read
During the Jacobite Rebellion, the deposed Catholic Stuarts sought to regain the English throne from the Protestant monarchy, and the interpretation of these visions depended on an individual’s political and religious leanings. As one English clergyman and writer wrote at the time, some viewed the “portentous stranger” with anxious amazement. Others, he added, “read, in its glaring visage, the fate of nations, and the fall of kingdoms”.
In Finnish Lapland, the Northern Lights were the flick of an arctic fox’s tail through a snowdrift, a story still embedded in their Finnish name ‘revontulet (fire fox)’
Memories of an Enron Summer | At night we walk in circles and are consumed by fire
6-minute read
In 2000, I was close to defending my thesis at Stanford. My department had ties to Enron’s research department. I knew the literature on bandwidth pricing and a fair amount of mathematical finance, so I was considered a good fit to be a summer intern there. I accepted, and away I went.
Enron at the time was the place to be. It had been named the “most innovative company” by Fortune four years in a row. It seemed to have invented a new business model: create secondary markets everywhere and then become the market makers in these markets. First, gas. Then, electric power. Then, weather. Then, bandwidth. Wait, there’s more: water, pulp paper, TV advertising slots, RAM chips, freight container space. After the bandwidth announcement in 1999, the stock went from $40 to $70. In the process, Enron had dropped “energy” from his slogan “The World’s leading energy company”. Every other energy company was playing catch-up. Every MBA was applying. Enron was the New Economy rejuvenating the Old Economy. Fortune had also named Enron one of the best 25 companies to work for. All of this, and the money you could make if you performed well. The place was so incredibly cool that even Paul Krugman was consulting for Enron at the time (for a mere $50K)!
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What Enron showed me was to prove that very good people can make very bad decisions, not because they are instructed to do so, but because of short-range interactions.
Why Everyone Loves Japan | Noahpinion
11-minute read
In March, I published my first book, Weeb Economy — but only in Japanese.
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In this third installment, I explain one of Japan’s most important advantages in attracting greenfield investment: the fact that everyone loves Japan and lots of people want to live there. I present data showing just how popular Japan is right now, and I try to give some explanations as to why people around the world love the Land of the Rising Sun so much.
The Shape of AI: Jaggedness, Bottlenecks and Salients | One Useful Thing
5-minute read
Back in the ancient AI days of 2023, my co-authors and I invented a term to describe the weird ability of AI to do some work incredibly well and other work incredibly badly in ways that didn’t map very well to our human intuition of the difficulty of the task. We called this the “Jagged Frontier” of AI ability, and it remains a key feature of AI and an endless source of confusion. How can an AI be superhuman at differential medical diagnosis or good at very hard math (yes, they are really good at math now, famously outside the frontier until recently) and yet still be bad at relatively simple visual puzzles or running a vending machine? The exact abilities of AI are often a mystery, so it is no wonder AI is harder to use than it seems.
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Bottlenecks can create the impression that AI will never be able to do something, when, in reality, progress is held back by a single jagged weakness. When that weakness becomes a reverse salient, and AI labs suddenly fix the problem, the entire system can jump forward.
The most powerful example of this from the last month is Google’s new image generation AI, Nano Banana Pro.
Dumb money triumphant | Acadian Asset Management
7-minute read
Is the U.S. stock market in a bubble? I doubt we’re there yet, but one sign of speculative froth is the recent success of retail investors. On average, retail investors exhibit anti-skill in their stock selection decisions, meaning that their holdings underperform the market. So when retail investors are winning, that tells you that market conditions are unusual.
Why Europe should resist the Second China Shock | Noahpinion
8-minute read
The Second China Shock is another name for the flood of high-tech exports that China has been sending out around the world in the last few years. China’s economy is still suffering from the prolonged effects of the real estate bust that began in late 2021. In response, Xi Jinping’s government has unleashed the most expensive and wide-ranging industrial policy the world has ever seen, promoting high-tech manufacturing across a variety of sectors. Because the economy is in the doldrums, Chinese consumers themselves aren’t able to buy all the stuff that their government is paying Chinese companies to make — electric vehicles, ships, machinery, and so on. So the companies are selling that stuff overseas, anywhere they can, for cut-rate prices.
Trump’s AI Policy Is Indefensible | Derek Thompson
5-minute read
For all the noise about tariffs and national rejuvenation, the one sector that is actually driving GDP right now is benefiting from a global trade policy that looks nothing like Trumpism.
At least five interesting things: Future of Humanity edition (#72) | Noahpinion
7-minute read
I usually don’t share these compilations, but there are several interesting tidbits in this one:
That said, it’s a fair question to ask why tariffs haven’t resulted in much inflation yet.
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What’s happening across Sub-Saharan Africa right now is the most ambitious infrastructure project in human history, except it’s not being built by governments or utilities or World Bank consortiums. It’s being built by startups selling solar panels to farmers on payment plans. And it’s working.
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Somewhat unexpectedly, the researchers found that in the last 200 years, there was no evidence for increasing extinction from climate change.
Against Against Boomers | Astral Codex Ten
6-minute read
Hating Boomers is the new cool thing. Amazon offerings include A Generation Of Sociopaths: How The Baby Boomers Betrayed America, the two apparently unrelated books How The Boomers Took Their Children’s Future and How The Boomers Stole Millennials’ Future, and Boomers: The Men And Women Who Promised Freedom But Delivered Disaster. “You don’t hate Boomers enough” has become a popular Twitter catchphrase. Richard Hanania, who has tried hating every group once, has decided that hating Boomers is his favorite.
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By this point, every institution in the world is either run by Boomers, used to be run by Boomers, or was shaped by Boomers in some way. It’s a cheap way of hating everything.
The future of war is the future of society | Noahpinion
7-minute read
For centuries after that fateful day, gun-toting infantry ruled the battlefield…But sometime in the near future, the autonomous, weaponized drone may replace the human infantryman as the dominant battlefield technology. And as always, that shift in military technology will cause huge social upheaval.
1 star
The Ars Technica AI coding agent test: Minesweeper edition | Ars Technica
6-minute read
To see how effective these modern AI coding tools are becoming, we decided to test four major models with a simple task: re-creating the classic Windows game Minesweeper.
Customizeable 3D Nuclide Chart | Etsy
1-minute read
This is very nerdy but (at least to me) very cool:
This nuclide chart shows the half life of each isotope from the periodic table. On the vertical axis is the number of protons and on the horizontal is the number of neutrons. The height of each column corresponds to the half life.
Waymo’s next five cities are all in red states | Understanding AI
2-minute read
It’s also not a coincidence that all of the new driverless cities are in Texas or Florida, Republican-dominated states with favorable regulatory climates.
‘Perfectly preserved’ Neanderthal skull bones suggest their noses didn’t evolve to warm air | Live Science
3-minute read
One theory for Neanderthals’ large noses is that they had equally large sinuses and an enhanced airway that evolved as adaptations to living in cold, dry environments. Their particular nasal anatomy may have been useful for warming and humidifying the air before it reached their lungs. But all previous studies of Neanderthal nasal anatomy were based on approximations of the delicate bones in the nose cavity, since these bones — the ethmoid, vomer and inferior nasal conchae — were broken or missing in every Neanderthal skull ever found.
Underneath a Breaching Humpback Whale | YouTube
1-minute video
What began as a calm ocean scene quickly turned into a once-in-a-lifetime encounter when the family of whales breached multiple times, at one point landing incredibly close to Alvaro.