Links
3 stars
The Software Tycoon Scaling AI Education to a Billion Kids | Colossus
42-minute read
Alpha School's origin story. (In case you missed it, here's the 4-star review of Alpha School I sent out last month.)
Even after agreeing to break his silence after 25 years, Joe Liemandt is still reluctant to talk about himself. It’s hard to get him to relive Trilogy, the enterprise software company he founded in 1989, which by age 27 put him on the cover of Forbes, twice, as America’s youngest self-made centimillionaire. He isn’t keen to expound on SalesBuilder, Trilogy’s flagship expert system from the 1990s and the world’s first billion-dollar artificial intelligence product in all but name. Ditto ESW, the investment arm of Trilogy that’s acquired hundreds of software companies since 2000 and helped make him a decabillionaire, yet the mention of which makes the otherwise inexhaustible Liemandt, who always seems to be straining at some invisible leash, seem drowsy and bored.
[...]
The one thing Liemandt will talk about for hours on end is Alpha School: the teacherless, homeworkless, K-12 private school in Austin, Texas, where students have been testing in the top 0.1% nationally by self-directing coursework with AI tutoring apps for two hours a day. Alpha students are incentivized to complete coursework to “mastery-level” (i.e., scoring over 90%) in only two hours via a mix of various material and immaterial rewards, including the right to spend the other four hours of the school day in “workshops,” learning things like how to run an Airbnb or food truck, manage a brokerage account or Broadway production, or build a business or drone.
[...]
Since the explosive debut of Generative AI in 2022, Liemandt has taken $1 billion out of Trilogy/ESW in order to fund and incubate proprietary AI software products at Alpha School, where he has also served quietly as “product guy,” dean of parents, and principal. After collecting a three-year data stream in these roles, while also working in a nearby stealth lab, Liemandt believes he now has “the single best product I’ve ever built, in four decades, by far.” The product is called Timeback, and its purpose, in essence, is to scale Alpha School’s concepts and results—learn 2x in 2 hours, test in the 99th percentile, and then give students the rest of their childhood back—to a billion kids.
America Against China Against America | @jasmi.news
18-minute read
This is a core belief shared by modern China and Silicon Valley alike: Who wins in technology, wins the world.
I returned to China this year first to see my family, and then to travel with friends [...] who all hoped to see China’s technological achievements firsthand. We had different levels of experience in China, but all of us are “tech writers” of a kind. We are interested in progress and abundance, in science and economics, in how tech diffuses across firms and borders. We are curious to understand the philosophies, talent communities, and political environments that nurture and stifle innovation. We are committed, also, to humanism: underneath the GDP statistics and geopolitical fights, we want to know how people’s lives actually change.
So in mid-August, we embarked from Hong Kong, then took trains to Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Yuyao, and Shanghai for a few days each. I’m cognizant that visiting a few places for a few weeks will never present a whole picture. But as with Wang Huning’s travelogues, perhaps there’s some value in an visitor’s eye. All narratives are simple from a distance; the hard part is seeing the cracks up close. This essay shares those observations.
[...]
Chinese culture is often described as conformist. But this can suggest a lack of personal ambition, whereas I felt that the individuals I met were some of the “highest agency” in the world. They didn’t focus on how many tariffs Trump levied, or that the state could shut down their startup any time. They knew that competition was tough and unfair, that margins were thin. The only way to survive was to believe—stupidly, irrationally, delusionally—that you might beat the odds.
99 Problems: The Ice Cream Truck's Surprising History | Longreads
14-minute read
From crime panics to TikTok, summer’s favorite vehicle has driven a bumpy road.
What We Find in the Sewers | Asimov Press
18-minute read
At first glance, then, the course of sewage history would seem the triumph of waste removal and sequestration. As cities grow larger, however, the need for innovation and greater resource efficiency has made sewage worthy of further consideration. Scientists and governments have begun to reexamine what valuable resources and data can be found in this brown gold. The Covid-19 pandemic demonstrated the vast potential of wastewater-based epidemiology, while research into the gut microbiome’s influence on human health and behavior continues to burgeon. Engineers have likewise begun to see sewage not simply as a waste stream but as a resource to be mined for valuable elements or even for energy.
A Tale of Sex and Intrigue in Imperial Kyoto | The Atlantic
13-minute read
In mid-April, I flew to Japan because I’d become obsessed with an 11th-century Japanese novel called The Tale of Genji. I also had a frantic longing to escape my country. At its best, literature is a way to loft readers so far above the burning present that we can see a vast landscape of time below us. From the clouds, we watch the cyclical turn of seasons and history, and can take a sort of bitter comfort in the fact that humans have always been a species that simply can’t help setting our world on fire.
I was bewildered that The Tale of Genji had such a hold on me at this particular moment: It is a wild, confounding work that many consider to be the first novel ever written, by a mysterious woman whose true name we’ll never know, but whom we call Murasaki Shikibu, or Lady Murasaki. The novel is more than 1,000 pages long, more than 1,000 years old, and larded with enigmatic poetry. It’s about people whose lives differ so much—in custom, religion, education, wealth, privilege, politics, hierarchy, aesthetics—from the lives of 21st-century Americans that most of their concerns have become nearly illegible to us through the scrim of time and language.
Even so, this novel, which I first encountered almost three decades ago, returned insistently. Once again, I was caught up in its radically unfamiliar world and literary form.
Original link | Archive.is link
How NASA’s Juno Probe Changed Everything We Know about Jupiter | Scientific American
9-minute read
September 2025 marks the end of Juno’s extended mission. Although it could get another reprieve—an extended-extended mission—the spacecraft cannot carry on forever. Eventually the probe is fated to plunge into Jupiter’s stormy skies, to lethal effect. Regardless of when that happens, the spacecraft’s legacy is indelible.
It revealed a whole different Jupiter than scientists thought they knew. Oddly geometric continent-size storms, in strange yet stable configurations, dance around its poles. Its heaviest matter seems to linger in its skies, while its abyssal heart is surprisingly light and fuzzy. Its innards don’t resemble the lasagnalike layers found in rocky worlds; they look more like mingling swirls of different kinds of ink.
Original link | Archive.is link
2 stars
The Great French Fry Mystery: My dogged attempt to solve a baffling fast food whodunit | Toronto Life
10-minute read
When an A&W takeout bag appeared on my neighbour’s porch in the middle of the night—followed by another, then another—I became obsessed with solving a fast food whodunit that was as baffling as it was beguiling
U.S. Intel | Stratechery
8-minute read
The beauty of being in the rather lonely position of supporting the U.S. government taking an equity stake in Intel is that I don’t have to steelman the case about it being a bad idea.
Did Women Hunt in Our Evolutionary Past? | Motherhood until yesterday
8-minute read
A lot of my work is predicated on the assumption that, throughout much of humanity’s evolutionary history, women mostly focused on gathering while men mostly focused on hunting.
[...]
Yet it is increasingly unpopular to say so. Whenever I talk about gender dynamics in hunter-gatherer societies and, by extension, our evolutionary past, I inevitably get a comment like this one:
“Check your science! The division of labor between men hunting and women gathering has been DEBUNKED ever since women started working in STEM.”
But has it? What’s the actual evidence? And, just as interesting, why do we want so badly to believe that women were hunters in our evolutionary past? What does that say about contemporary Western society?
[...]
Except that gathering and childcare was FAR more crucial than hunting throughout human history. Gathering actually brought in the majority of the calories, whereas hunting returns were highly variable, and more about status that provisioning. The group could survive without big game hunting but not without gathering. And breastfeeding and childcare were equally crucial and essential. Without breastfeeding and gathering, our species would long ago have ceased to exist. So what exactly do the authors mean by “crucial”?
Face it: you're a crazy person | Experimental History
9-minute read
I meet a lot of people who don’t like their jobs, and when I ask them what they’d rather do instead, about 75% say something like, “Oh, I dunno, I’d really love to run a little coffee shop.” If I’m feeling mischievous that day, I ask them one question: “Where would you get the coffee beans?”
If that’s a stumper, here are some followups:
Which kind of coffee mug is best?
How much does a La Marzocco espresso machine cost?
Would you bake your blueberry muffins in-house or would you buy them from a third party?
What software do you want to use for your point-of-sale system? What about for scheduling shifts?
What do you do when your assistant manager calls you at 6am and says they can’t come into work because they have diarrhea?
The point of the Coffee Beans Procedure is this: if you can’t answer those questions, if you don’t even find them interesting, then you should not open a coffee shop, because this is how you will spend your days as a cafe owner. You will not be sitting droopy-lidded in an easy chair, sipping a latte and greeting your regulars as you page through Anna Karenina. You will be running a small business that sells hot bean water.
The Coffee Beans Procedure is a way of doing what psychologists call unpacking. Our imaginations are inherently limited; they can’t include all details at once.
She was a quiet bird expert. Then she was called to investigate a murder in Maine. | Boston Globe
9-minute read
How a mild-mannered scientist named Roxie Laybourne created the field of forensic ornithology.
Original link | Archive.is link
Another Rave Review | The Fence
10-minute read
The illegal free party scene has come back: the green fields of the West Country and Wales rock to the sound of a repetitive beat for days on end.
Original link | Archive.is link
Sarajevo | The Unplugged Traveler
7-minute read
Later I would read that a weak economy and a gridlocked government had made funding the restoration of all those damaged buildings difficult. And like many places that have undergone unspeakable trauma, there was an ongoing debate over whether to commemorate or rebuild. But one other factor seemed undeniably to play a role in the presence of all those ghosts and scars. Sarajevo needs its Western tourists, and what Western tourists want, it seems, is war.
How else to explain the tables of bullet casings, some glued together into little toy tanks and all of them imported from China, for sale in the souvenir shops of Bascarsija. Or the placards erected in the square across the river from city hall, with large-scale black and white photos whose accompanying texts–written in English–gave eyewitness accounts of the most baroque atrocities? Or the proliferation of trauma galleries: The Siege of Sarajevo museum; the War Childhood museum; and the Crimes Against Humanity museum, which is not to be confused with the Genocide Gallery, which at the time was very prominently advertising its “special” exhibit on the Srebrenica massacre? All of which, as far as I could tell from their brochures, are rather sparsely and haphazardly curated and all of which, more to the point, are privately owned. Someone even told me that there was a guy who ran a hostel out of his house where, for the equivalent of 20 euros, the “guest” could have the experience of spending the night in a makeshift bunker, complete with hardtack rations and, thanks to a looping soundtrack, the noise of artillery fire just outside the door. But when I finally tracked down the house where it was located, there was no longer any hint of accommodations, just a sign warning it was private property.
He co-founded Burning Man. It was the least interesting thing he ever did. | SFGate
8-minute read
Now 66, Law has spent his life dangling from vertigo-inducing heights in the pursuit of an art form he describes as “psychogeography,” exploring corners of the urban landscape that time has — or at least security guards have — forgotten. As a co-founder of two of San Francisco’s most-lasting cultural imprints, SantaCon and Burning Man, as well as a member of the Suicide Club, San Francisco Cacophony Society and Billboard Liberation Front, his resume reads like a road map of San Francisco subcultures. Of SantaCon, the yearly bar crawl bacchanal that started in 1994, he insists the original intent wasn’t to throw a St. Patrick’s Day-style rager in December.
Growing up on Alcatraz | Gazetteer San Francisco
5-minute read
Until the day my grandfather retired from the prison service in 1954 and moved to San Francisco, Alcatraz was the only home my father would know. And he would have chosen no other. As he and many other children raised on the Island remembered it, Alcatraz was an idyllic small town, floating in the heart of San Francisco Bay. Despite the maximum security prison that shared the island, no one locked their doors. Indeed, as a toddler, my father used to call his neighbors yoo-hoos, because that’s how they’d announce themselves when they entered his house without knocking.
The myths of Chinese exceptionalism | The Pursuit of Happiness
14-minute read
I don't agree with several of Sumner's points (and as someone whose family is from Taiwan, I'm no CCP apologist), but I do think his overall argument holds true:
I use the plural of “myth” because there are numerous ways that the American government and media make inaccurate, exaggerated or misleading claims about China. Unfortunately, this misinformation poisons public opinion and contributes to the ongoing cold war between the US and China.
To be clear, most of the accusations made against China are not completely fabricated. There is often a bit of truth to claims about Chinese behavior. Rather the bigger problem is that many of the claims are either wildly exaggerated or presented in a highly misleading fashion that is out of context.
The $140 Billion Failure We Don’t Talk About | New York Times
4-minute read
Twenty years ago this week, Hurricane Katrina drowned our hometown, New Orleans.
[…]
Most Americans soon moved on, but the federal government did something extraordinary: It committed more than $140 billion toward the region’s recovery. Adjusted for inflation, that’s more than was spent on the post-World War II Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe or for the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan after the Sept. 11 attacks. It remains the largest post-disaster domestic recovery effort in U.S. history.
[...]
The core problem was the inability to turn abundant resources into a clear vision backed by political will. Federal dollars were funneled into a maze of state agencies and local governments with clashing priorities, vague metrics and near-zero accountability. Billions went to contractors and government consultants while public institutions such as schools, transit, health care and housing barely scraped by. For example, one firm, ICF International, received nearly $1 billion to administer Road Home, the oft-criticized state program to rebuild houses.
Original link | Archive.is link
REVIEW: Cuisine and Empire, by Rachel Laudan | Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf
9-minute read
What is food? What is cooking? What role do they play in human society and the natural world? How about the supernatural world? And what’s the relationship between cooking and the state?
Those sound like strange questions — what do you mean, what is food. It’s the stuff you put in your mouth to make your body run, next question. But even that simple version is itself a belief about food, and even the most reductive Soylent-swiller probably has some thoughts about macros.
[...]
Cooking was seen as a fundamental cosmic process, an integral part of a holistic, ordered, and hierarchical universe. Each kind of creature had its appropriate food: animals eat raw foods while standing, humans sit or recline while eating cooked foods, and the gods enjoy the fragrant aromas. But there were more hierarchies within these divisions: the right food for a slave or a peasant was very different than the food for a king, and eating the wrong kind of food might cause illness or even physical degeneration.
Philosophy in prison is a rowdy, honest and hopeful provocation | Aeon
11-minute read
We are several weeks into the semester-long course, innocuously titled ‘Introduction to Philosophy’. The class, held each Friday morning for three hours at a nearby women’s correctional facility, is part of the US national Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program. There are 20 students on the course. Half are ‘Outside’ students, that is, mostly 19- to 20-year-old residential students at the small liberal arts college where I teach. The other half are ‘Inside’ students with a much broader range of age, background and life experience. Today, 17 are in attendance. We get the sad-but-happy news that Shauna has been released early. Debbie can’t make it because her cell is being searched for contraband. Michael has the flu.
Since the beginning, each class begins with a round of ‘silly socks’. The students came up with this on their own. It’s funny – you can try so hard to achieve a sense of equity here, to acknowledge and address the obvious and unavoidable differences that define this space. Insiders have no phones, no laptops, no internet service in this space, so Outsiders don’t either. Outsiders have access to resources like office hours and tutoring, so Insiders should too. These black T-shirts with the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program logo are worn in part as Outsider uniforms in solidarity with Insiders, in part as a simple way to satisfy dress-code requirements within the prison. But silly socks is what really brings us together – a student-led weekly ritual of showing off the loudest, silliest, craziest socks you’ve got, which lets the students be students. This week, Jenn, who is one year shy of completing a 15-year sentence for vehicular homicide, is Best in Show for the bright socks embellished with kitten faces she knitted herself.
The Pope's House and the Fight for Dolton's Soul | Chicago Magazine
13-minute read
After a potential sale fell through in April, Radzik took the house off the market. Three days after he relisted it on May 5, the youngest Prevost boy, known to his friends as Bob or Bobby, walked out onto the balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City. The house on East 141st Place, still empty, was no longer an unassuming flip. It was the house that raised a pope.
Original link | Archive.is link
The book that showed me masculinity is not totally innate | Boston Globe
4-minute read
There’s a common belief that men are naturally dangerous — aggressive, predatory, criminally inclined. In truth, the average man is only slightly more adventurous, slightly more aggressive than the average woman. The difference is real, but it’s not dramatic. The average man isn’t wildly different from the average woman when it comes to traits like courage, assertiveness, or even the tendency toward violence.
This creates a strange paradox. The worst men — the true predators — need to be constrained. They need less boldness, less aggression, less entitlement. But the rest — the vast majority — need the opposite. They need encouragement. They need to be challenged to step up, take risks, and take responsibility.
The problem is, most public conversations don’t make this distinction. They flatten the male experience into one story. But blanket advice doesn’t work. A society that wants to flourish has to learn how to contain the worst men and cultivate the best ones.
Original link | Archive.is link
Nuclear Batteries Can Power Devices for Decades. Is That a Good Thing? | IEEE Spectrum
9-minute read
Technology never truly dies, and nuclear batteries are no exception. Research grew active again after 2000, although it lacked commercial translation. But over the last year, a host of companies and research groups around the world have announced advances that they say will invigorate the technology and extend its use to robots, drones, sensors, and solar farms, as well as spacecraft and biomedical implants.
Ford and the Birth of the Model T | Construction Physics
7-minute read
Then, in 1913, Ford began to install the system that would become synonymous with mass production: the assembly line. Though gravity slides and conveyors had existed prior to 1913, Ford hadn’t yet developed a systematic method for continuously moving the work to the worker during assembly. The first assembly line was installed in the flywheel magneto department. Previously, workers had stood at individual workbenches, each assembling an entire flywheel magneto. But on April 1, 1913, Ford replaced the workbenches with a single steel frame with sliding surfaces on top. Workers were instructed to stand in a designated spot and, rather than assemble an entire magneto, perform one small action, then slide the work down to the next worker, repeating the process over and over.
The results spoke for themselves. Prior to the assembly line, it took a single worker an average of 20 minutes to assemble a flywheel magneto. With the assembly line, it took just over 13 minutes.
Ford quickly found even more ways to improve the process. To prevent workers from having to bend over, the height of the line was raised several inches. Moving the work in a continuous chain allowed it to be synchronized, which sped up the slow workers and slowed down the fast ones to an optimal pace. Within a year, the assembly time for flywheel magnetos had fallen to five minutes.
Taiwan is preparing for a Chinese attack but its people don't think war is coming soon | BBC News
6-minute read
It was just another Friday morning on the Taiwanese island of Kinmen, a few kilometres from the coast of China, when an air raid siren pierced the calm.
At a local government office, people switched off their lights and dove under tables. Others fled to an underground car park. At a nearby hospital, staff rushed to treat people staggering in with bloody injuries.
But the blood was fake, and the casualties were volunteer actors. Together with the government workers, they were taking part in mandatory civil defence and military drills held across Taiwan last month.
The purpose? Rehearsing their response to a possible attack by China.
[...]
Lai and his government often repeat a particular phrase to explain what is driving them: "By preparing for war, we are avoiding war." They have stressed that they are not seeking conflict but exercising Taiwan's right to build up its defences.
As well as having initiated major military reforms, they also want to increase defence spending by 23% next year to NT$949.5bn (£23bn; $31bn), which would be more than 3% of their GDP, following US pressure to invest more in defence. Lai has pledged to increase it to 5% by 2030.
Singapore’s Pay Model Isn’t India’s: Market Wages vs. Civil-Service Rents | Marginal Revolution
1-minute read
In my post How High Government Pay Wastes Talent and Drains Productivity I pointed to evidence that high government compensation in poorer countries creates tremendous waste and drains the private sector of productive talent. A reader asked: What about Singapore?—famous for paying its top officials very well.
[…]
So far from being a counter-example, Singapore illustrates the lesson: Singapore pays market wages, not rents—thereby avoiding the rent-seeking and talent misallocation that plague countries where civil servants are paid far above their market value.
1 star
AI and jobs, again | Noahpinion
4-minute read
Some top economists claim AI is now destroying jobs for a subset of Americans. Are they right?
Yes, I Texted the Number on the Sign | KBBBLOG
6-minute read
Since the beginning of the summer, I’ve literally pulled over to take pictures of these colorful, playful, hand-painted signs nailed to a variety of telephone poles around Portland. They advertise roof cleaning, house washing, and gutter clearing—sometimes just “ROOF CLEAN” in big, blocky letters—all in a riot of vibrant colors and lettering styles that feel totally human, wonky, and great. I felt a real kinship with whoever was making these type and color choices, and spotting the signs became a highlight of my drives around Portland. Every time I shared one on Instagram, folks responded with love and adoration. I even joked in a few replies that I was going to text the number on the sign to find out more.
So I texted the number. That’s how I met Landon.
Landon owns the business and makes the signs. He paints them at night while watching sitcoms, mounts them with serious screws, and takes breaks to swim when it’s too hot to be on a roof. He is also the proud owner of a 100lb German Shepherd and 12 aquariums! Over several days, we had a long and lovely text conversation about work, color, signage, and his process for making these delightful signs.
Primate thumbs and brains evolved hand in hand | University of Reading
1-minute read
Researchers studied 94 different primate species, including fossils and living animals, to understand how our ancestors developed their abilities. They found that species with relatively longer thumbs, which help with gripping small objects precisely, consistently had larger brains.
Old master painting looted by Nazis spotted in Argentinian property listing | The Guardian
2-minute read
More than 80 years after it was looted by the Nazis from a Jewish art dealer in Amsterdam, a portrait by an Italian master has been spotted on the website of an estate agent advertising a house for sale in Argentina.
What A World (A Few Stories) | Collaborative Fund
5-minute read
A few short stories:
The CEO of Bronco Wine – which sells the Charles Shaw “Two Buck Chuck” wine at Trader Joe’s – was once asked how he’s able to sell wine for less than the cost of bottled water.
He replied: “They’re overcharging you for the water. Don’t you get it?”
Franklin Roosevelt looked around the room and chuckled when his presidential library opened in 1941. A reporter asked why he was so cheerful. “I’m thinking of all the historians who will come here thinking they’ll find the answers to their questions,” he said.
Scientists show how microbes team up to consume ocean methane | USC Dornsife
2-minute read
Methane — a potent greenhouse gas — constantly seeps from the ocean floor and can rise into the atmosphere. Now, an international team led by scientists with the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences has uncovered how tiny microorganisms work together as a living electrical network to consume some of this gas before it escapes, acting as a powerful living filter.