Links
4 stars
To Stay in Her Home, She Let In an A.I. Robot | New York Times [gift article]
13-minute read
The firefighters had come a few years earlier to help carry her husband out of the house, and now they were back with what they hoped might become her new companion. Jan Worrell, 85, lived alone near the end of the Long Beach Peninsula, on the last road before the rugged Washington coast disappeared into the Pacific. Many of her neighbors were part-time residents, and ever since her husband died, she sometimes went several days without seeing another person or leaving the house.
[...]
A few thousand ElliQs have been shipped to seniors across the United States since 2023, which means some of the first people living alongside artificially intelligent robots are octogenarians who came into a world without color television. The robots are available for purchase from the Israeli start-up Intuition Robotics, but so far they have mostly been provided to older adults by nonprofits and state health departments as an experiment in combating loneliness. As A.I. works its way deeper into daily life, ElliQ is designed for the most human act of all: to become a roommate, a friend, a partner. “A robot with soul,” the company’s founder sometimes said.
[...]
Her closest living relative was more than 100 miles away, and even though her family visited for birthdays, called often and taught her how to FaceTime, it was usually just her own voice cutting against the silence of the house. But now there was a new presence in the room, listening to her, watching her, tilting in her direction and talking to her unprompted every few hours to offer conversation, or breathing exercises, or obscure historical facts.
“Hey Jan, do you have a moment?” ElliQ asked, in those first few days. “We could play a game together.”
“Not now,” she said.
“Do you want to hear a joke?”
“No. But thank you.”
She was doing just fine on her own. That’s what she told her relatives whenever they gently suggested that maybe it was time to move into a care center, or closer to family, or at least closer to something. She had climbed mountains with a pickax in her 40s, trained for marathons in her 50s, and walked five miles each day to the end of the peninsula in her 70s, fighting against the howling wind and sea mist just to prove she could. Now she was bent and twisted by scoliosis, down to 4-foot-6 and 85 pounds. She propped herself up on three pillows so she could see over the steering wheel on her trip to yoga class and the store each Wednesday. She hauled the grocery bags up 12 stairs by herself.
Original link | Archive.is link
3 stars
The Babies Kept in a Mysterious Los Angeles Mansion | New Yorker
31-minute read
In the delicate jargon of the fertility industry, a woman who carries a child for someone else is said to be going on a “journey.” Kayla Elliott began hers in February, 2024, not long after she posted her information in a Facebook group dedicated to surrogacy. Elliott, who was twenty-six and lived in Corpus Christi, Texas, already had four children, but she was intrigued by the prospect of bearing another. She’d loved the natural rush of pregnancy. As a surrogate, she could earn money for her family while helping strangers start their own.
Within days, Elliott received a brief message from a coördinator at Mark Surrogacy, an agency in Los Angeles, who wanted to know if she was interested in working with a Chinese couple. When Elliott asked for more details, she was sent a dating-style profile. It featured a photo of a paunchy sixty-four-year-old, Guojun Xuan, with his arm draped around a woman identified as his wife, Silvia, who was thirty-six and had short-cropped black hair. They lived in Arcadia, an affluent city in L.A. County, and shared a daughter who, they said, longed for a sibling.
[...]
At seventeen weeks, Elliott was scrolling through her Facebook feed when she saw a post discussing Mark Surrogacy. Its author was a woman who was carrying for someone named Silvia. Most surrogacy contracts forbid disclosing the identities of the parties involved, but, when Elliott sent the author a private message, she confirmed that they were working with the same family. The other surrogate, who lived in Pennsylvania, also shared something else she’d heard about the couple: they already had thirteen children.
When Elliott expressed her confusion to Mark Surrogacy, a coördinator told her that the parents simply wanted “a large family.” To achieve this, they were currently “working with a few GCs”—gestational carriers, as surrogates are sometimes known—on “sibling” journeys. The coördinator added, “They definitely don’t have a million kids lol.”
Despite these reassurances, Elliott grew anxious. An episode of high blood pressure sent her to the hospital, and she suffered from debilitating headaches that made it difficult for her to stand. “I think its already too late for us since we are already pregnant,” the Pennsylvania surrogate messaged her. “we just have to deal with it and suck it up.”
Although Elliott told Mark Surrogacy that she would be induced on March 13, 2025, in Corpus Christi, neither Silvia nor Guojun showed up at the hospital that day.
Original link | Archive.is link
America Isn’t Ready for What AI Will Do to Jobs | The Atlantic
19-minute read
Taken together, these statements are extraordinary: the owners of capital warning workers that the ice beneath them is about to crack—while continuing to stomp on it.
It’s as if we’re watching two versions of the same scene. In one, the ice holds, because it always has. In the other, a lot of people go under. The difference becomes clear only when the surface finally gives way—at which point the range of available options will have considerably narrowed.
AI is already transforming work, one delegated task at a time. If the transformation unfolds slowly enough and the economy adjusts quickly enough, the economists may be right: We’ll be fine. Or better. But if AI instead triggers a rapid reorganization of work—compressing years of change into months, affecting roughly 40 percent of jobs worldwide, as the International Monetary Fund projects—the consequences will not stop at the economy. They will test political institutions that have already shown how brittle they can be.
The question, then, is whether we’re approaching the kind of disruption that can be managed with statistics—or the kind that creates statistics no one can bear to count.
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Inside Russia’s Secret Campaign of Sabotage in Europe | New Yorker
20-minute read
In nearly every case, prosecutors have concluded that Russia’s military intelligence agency, the G.R.U., has been the principal organizer of single-use-agent operations in Europe. A source in the German security establishment told me, “It’s a show of force, a way of taking off the mask and saying, ‘So, Germany, what are you going to do about it?’ ”
Russia knows that its sabotage campaign, which is a kind of hybrid threat—basically, any state-led attack that falls below the level of full military action—presents a particular conundrum for Europe’s rules-based legal systems. “They run an operation that costs a few thousand euros, carried out by people they don’t care about losing,” Bart Schuurman, the head of a research group on terrorism and political violence at Leiden University, in the Netherlands, told me. “And we in Europe follow up with an investigation that takes months, tying up finite resources across multiple countries. Meanwhile, they’re long on to the next one.”
The intent is not necessarily to undermine the West’s ability to aid Ukraine but, rather, to sway public opinion about the cost of the wider war effort. A European foreign-policy official paraphrased Russia’s intended message to the public: “It’s getting dangerous with these warmongers in office. You’re putting yourselves at risk. So you better go and vote for, say, Marine Le Pen’s party in France or the AfD”—Alternative for Germany—right-wing populist parties that have expressed opposition to continued Western support for Ukraine. Paulina Piasecka, a noted Polish academic and expert on hybrid threats, said, “Taken together, such incidents are meant to spread uncertainty, fear, distrust. The state looks incapable. And people begin to wonder, Look what’s happening all around us because we’re engaged in this war, which actually, maybe, isn’t—or shouldn’t be—our war.”
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The Myth of the Police State | The Dial
13-minute read
There’s a little town in the scrub in South Africa — a full day’s drive from the country’s big cities — that has become perhaps the most scrutinized place on earth given its size. It is 3.5 square miles of suburban-style houses harboring about 3,000 people, a main drag, a municipal swimming pool, one gas station, and some small pecan farms. Nothing of consequence ever really happens there, a fact the townspeople take as a point of pride. And yet over the past three decades, dozens of English-language news outlets have made a pilgrimage to it, often more than once. The New York Times alone has run four long dedicated profiles. The essays have kept pace year after year, quoting the same people over and over, even as nothing of note occurred. There’s been no war, no disaster.
That changelessness is the point. No people of color are allowed to live in the town, called Orania. The name is a nod to the river that runs nearby — and to the Orange Free State, the apartheid-era designation for the province in which it lies. Orania’s founders established it in 1991, the year after South Africa’s best-known Black liberation leader (and future president), Nelson Mandela, was freed following 27 years in prison.
[...]
The problem is that the tale peddled about white South Africans’ historical trajectory isn’t true. They are not, as a group, subject to violent persecution on the basis of their skin color.
He called himself an ‘untouchable hacker god’. But who was behind the biggest crime Finland has ever known? | The Guardian
13-minute read
“I knew then that this is not a game,” she says.
The email was in Finnish. It was jarringly polite. “We are contacting you because you have used Vastaamo’s therapy and/or psychiatric services,” it read. “Unfortunately, we have to ask you to pay to keep your personal information safe.” The sender demanded €200 in bitcoin within 24 hours, otherwise the price would go up to €500 within 48 hours. “If we still do not receive our money after this, your information will be published for everyone to see, including your name, address, phone number, social security number and detailed records containing transcripts of your conversations with Vastaamo’s therapists or psychiatrists.”
Parikka swallows hard as she relives this memory. “My heart was pounding. It was really difficult to breathe. I remember lying down on the bed and telling my spouse, ‘I think I’m going to have a heart attack.’”
[...]
But Parikka was far from alone. Across Finland, 33,000 people who had used Vastaamo were discovering that a hacker had got hold of their therapy notes and was holding them to ransom.
2 stars
Venom in His Veins | Distillations Magazine
16-minute read
Every Sunday for more than 30 years, Bill Haast would release one of his king cobras on his lawn so that he could “fence” with it. Haast would hold his imposing but often reluctant opponent by the tail when it tried to slither off, sometimes prodding it with a metal hook to get it riled. When a snake finally reared up to face him, bobbing its head with menace, Haast would use one bare hand to distract the irate ophidian until he found an opening to lunge and seize its head with the other.
[...]
The wider public knew him as the guy who appeared on TV with everyone from Mike Douglas to Jack Hanna to talk about snakes, venom collection, and his considerable experience with bites. He made the papers periodically for his habit of injecting himself with small doses of venom to build up protection against a unique occupational hazard and for offering his supposedly antibody-rich blood as a treatment for people suffering from rare snake bites.
[...]
He spent decades developing—and tied his legacy to—venom-based wonder drugs he claimed could treat some of life’s most intractable diseases. His critics charged that Haast’s pursuit of this dream endangered ill and desperate people. As his friend and physician, Ben Sheppard, once remarked, “Bill Haast really believes that snake venom cures everything from ingrown toenails to dandruff.”
Why would Elon Musk pivot from Mars to the Moon all of a sudden? | Ars Technica
3-minute read
Aakash Gupta | X
2-minute read
But one thing that has remained constant across the Muskverse is his commitment to “extending the light of human consciousness” and to the belief that the best place to begin humanity’s journey toward becoming a multi-planetary species was Mars.
Until Sunday night.
You build at the south pole. Specifically the rims and floors of craters like Shackleton and Cabeus, where temperatures in permanent shadow drop below -230°C. NASA estimates 600 million metric tons of water ice are buried in these craters under about 40 cm of dry regolith. That water becomes your oxygen supply, your drinking water, your radiation shielding, and 78% of your rocket propellant by mass. The crater rims get near-continuous sunlight for solar power. You build where the resources are.
[...]
The economics flip the moment you start producing oxygen on the Moon. You stop shipping 78% of your propellant from Earth. Tanker flights per mission drop from 15 to about 4. Every ton produced locally frees up mass budget on the next inbound Starship for more construction equipment, food systems, and mining hardware. The base starts building the base. That’s what “self-growing” means. Compound logistics where each delivery makes the next delivery cheaper.
Culture Is the Mass-Synchronization of Framings | Aether Mug
8-minute read
If you descend onto the Marunouchi Line platform in Ikebukuro Station on any weekday morning, you will witness an unusual train-boarding ritual. Like in any other Japanese station, people wait in line at the two sides of where each train’s door will open. This is called seiretsu jousha (整列乗車, orderly boarding), and is a universal standard in Japan. Unlike most other stations in Tokyo, though, on Ikebukuro’s Marunouchi platform people will form not one but two queues on each side. One of these queues, the one closest to the doors, is the senpatsu (先発, earlier departure) line, and will board the next train that comes; the other, shorter, queue, is called kouhatsu (後発, later departure) and is waiting to take the place of the senpatsu line: they’ll skip the next train, and board the one after that instead.
[...]
For an Italian like me, this whole process is nothing short of a miracle. I grew up in a city where metro train boarding during rush hour feels like a prelude to the apocalypse.
[...]
The miraculous thing about the Japanese method is that there is no authoritative “director” standing next to each door and yelling at people where to stand. There are “senpatsu” and “kouhatsu” signs on the ground, but no detailed instructions or explanations. I doubt it is taught at school or anywhere else, either. People just seem to know, and to naturally implement the whole process without exchanging so much as a word with each other.
[...]
So far, it sounds like what gets “synchronized” between people living in the same culture is their behavior and habits. This is true, but I don’t believe it’s the whole, or even the main, story. What I’m talking about is not a unification of actions but of the thinking patterns from which those actions arise. Culture is the mass-synchronization of framings.
America’s Future Leaders Are Learning To Become Grifters | Rob Henderson’s Newsletter
3-minute read
The result? We are gradually teaching young people corruption under the guise of compassion.
Just look at the numbers. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 18 per cent of male and 22 per cent of female college undergraduates report having a disability. Among non-binary students the figure jumps to 54 per cent. The figures are especially striking at elite universities.
Writing in The Atlantic, Rose Horowitch reported that more than 20 per cent of undergrads at Brown University and Harvard University were registered as disabled. At Amherst College the figure exceeded 30 per cent. At Stanford it approached 40 per cent. The rise is sharpest at the most selective schools, with only 3 to 4 per cent of students receiving accommodations at community colleges.
In her piece, Johnson argued that anyone who did not cheat was putting themselves at a disadvantage. “Stanford has made gaming the system the logical choice,” she wrote. “The students are not exactly cheating and if they are, can you blame them?” Yes, you can.
Learning about longevity from long-lived animals | The Works in Progress Newsletter
10-minute read
The secrets to extending human lifespans might lie in the animals that can already live for centuries.
I Regret to Inform You that the FDA is FDAing Again | Marginal Revolution
2-minute read
I had high hopes and low expectations that the FDA under the new administration would be less paternalistic and more open to medical freedom. Instead, what we are getting is paternalism with different preferences. In particular, the FDA now appears to have a bizarre anti-vaccine fixation, particularly of the mRNA variety (disappointing but not surprising given the leadership of RFK Jr.). The latest is that the FDA has issued a Refusal-to-File (RTF) letter to Moderna for their mRNA influenza vaccine, mRNA-1010. An RTF means the FDA has determined that the application is so deficient it doesn’t even warrant a review. RTF letters are not unheard of, but they’re rare—especially given that Moderna spent hundreds of millions of dollars running Phase 3 trials enrolling over 43,000 participants based on FDA guidance, and is now being told the (apparently) agreed-upon design was inadequate.
[...]
The irony is staggering. Moderna is an American company. Its mRNA platform was developed at record speed with billions in U.S. taxpayer support through Operation Warp Speed — the signature public health achievement of the first Trump administration. The same government that funded the creation of this technology is now dismantling it. In August, HHS canceled $500 million in BARDA contracts for mRNA vaccine development and terminated a separate $590 million contract with Moderna for an avian flu vaccine. Several states have introduced legislation to ban mRNA vaccines. Insanity.
1 star
Matt Shumer: “Something Big Is Happening” | X
13-minute read
Apparently this now has 82 million views, so you’ve probably already read it. I didn’t think it was earth-shattering, but I suppose it is a good summary of what’s going on!
Think back to February 2020.
If you were paying close attention, you might have noticed a few people talking about a virus spreading overseas. But most of us weren’t paying close attention. The stock market was doing great, your kids were in school, you were going to restaurants and shaking hands and planning trips. If someone told you they were stockpiling toilet paper you would have thought they’d been spending too much time on a weird corner of the internet. Then, over the course of about three weeks, the entire world changed. Your office closed, your kids came home, and life rearranged itself into something you wouldn’t have believed if you’d described it to yourself a month earlier.
I think we’re in the “this seems overblown” phase of something much, much bigger than Covid.
I’ve spent six years building an AI startup and investing in the space. I live in this world. And I’m writing this for the people in my life who don’t... my family, my friends, the people I care about who keep asking me “so what’s the deal with AI?” and getting an answer that doesn’t do justice to what’s actually happening. I keep giving them the polite version. The cocktail-party version. Because the honest version sounds like I’ve lost my mind. And for a while, I told myself that was a good enough reason to keep what’s truly happening to myself. But the gap between what I’ve been saying and what is actually happening has gotten far too big. The people I care about deserve to hear what is coming, even if it sounds crazy.
California’s last Rainforest Cafe clings to life in an aging mall | SF Gate
5-minute read
On a recent Friday, I was enjoying a Korean fried chicken lettuce wrap under a lush canopy of greenery. Stars slowly twinkled overhead. I could hear the sound of tropical birds chirping and monkeys chattering in the distance. After a few minutes, a family of silverback gorillas to my left started to roar — at first quietly, then with intensity as thunder rolled and lightning flashed overhead.
Despite the cacophony, this was just another weekday lunch at California’s last Rainforest Cafe, tucked inside a fluorescent-lit Inland Empire mall, about an hour east of downtown Los Angeles.
This last remaining mall relic sits just steps away from a Jared Vault jewelry store and a Spectrum service center inside Ontario Mills, a 1990s-era indoor mall that still pumps in the air conditioning and pulls in crowds. Ontario, after which the mall is named, is a working-class commuter town known for the Ontario International Airport, the Toyota Arena, and its proximity to the 10, 15 and 60 freeways. No wonder the world’s largest Amazon warehouse is here.
Political Backflow From Europe | Astral Codex Ten
5-minute read
The European discourse can be - for lack of a better term - America-brained. We hear stories of Black Lives Matter marches in countries without significant black populations, or defendants demanding their First Amendment rights in countries without constitutions. Why shouldn’t the opposite phenomenon exist? Europe is more populous than the US and looms large in the American imagination. Why shouldn’t we find ourselves accidentally absorbing European ideas that don’t make sense in the American context?
[...]
The conservative narrative on immigration is - to put it uncomfortably bluntly - that immigrants are often parasites and criminals. As our news sources love to remind us, this is untrue in the American context. The average immigrant is less likely to claim welfare benefits and less likely to commit crimes than the average native-born citizen.
[...]
In Germany, asylum-seekers seem to commit murder at about 5-8x the native rate. This has naturally caught the attention of many Germans, and the German and broader European discussion about this issue has made its way back across the Atlantic and influenced US opinion of “asylum seekers” as a group.
Alien Assumptions | Mindless Algorithm
3-minute read
When people think about aliens, they make a number of assumptions which I think are wrong. These are likely imported from science fiction and by not thinking clearly about the future of human development.
[...]
Most people don’t have the right view about aliens because they do not understand how technologically advanced aliens would have to be to come visit us. There are two main points:
a) How advanced a level of technology you need to travel between the stars
b) What the implications are of that level of technology
AI Is Getting Scary Good at Making Predictions | The Atlantic [gift article]
4-minute read
Mantic’s AI engine is designed to make accurate forecasts in just about any domain. Shevlane wouldn’t show me the engine’s interface, and he was cagey about its precise construction. He described it only as a “scaffolding” that comprises several large language models with different inclinations. These individual LLMs are themselves getting much better at general forecasts, especially those made by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. That’s partly because good forecasting requires reading and processing enormous amounts of information.
[...]
If the AI takes gold, that might signal a new era. Human beings—predictors of eclipses, theorists of cosmic heat death—may no longer be the best guides to the future. From this point on, for as long as we exist, we might be asking AIs what comes next. We won’t always understand how they arrived at their predictions. This crystal ball may be like a black hole with an event horizon, past which the light of its insight cannot escape. We may just have to take it at its word.
Original link | Archive.is link
Your Job Isn’t Disappearing. It’s Shrinking Around You in Real Time | Thinking Out Loud
7-minute read
The problem isn’t that the robots are coming. It’s that you don’t know what you’re supposed to be good at anymore.
The Hidden Bias in Language That Turned Left-Handedness Into a Bad Thing | Mental Floss
4-minute read
Historically speaking, humanity has not been kind to those who are considered different, especially when those differences can be easily seen. While certainly not as discriminated against as other populations, left-handed people have been shunned and forced to change their nature in many different cultures.
[...]
Despite these languages coming from drastically different cultures and alphabets, there are some clear patterns in how their directional language is characterized. While the right side is associated with being straight, correct, and lawful, the left is seen as physically incapable or incorrect.
For a long time I have been predicting the return of phrenology | Marginal Revolution
1-minute read
Human capital—encompassing cognitive skills and personality traits—is central for labor-market success, yet personality remains difficult to measure at scale. Leveraging advances in AI and comprehensive LinkedIn microdata, we extract the Big 5 personality traits from facial images of 96,000 MBA graduates, and demonstrate that this novel “Photo Big 5” predicts school rank, job matching, compensation, job transitions, and career advancement. The Photo Big 5 provides predictive power comparable to race, attractiveness, and educational background, and is only weakly correlated with cognitive measures such as test scores. We show that individuals systematically sort into occupations where their personality traits are valued and earn higher wages when traits align with occupational demands. While the scalability of the Photo Big 5 enables new academic insights into the role of personality in labor markets, its growing use in industry screening raises important ethical concerns regarding statistical discrimination and individual autonomy.