Links
4 stars
John Thune and the Senate’s Age of Irrelevance | New Yorker
40-minute read
Thune, a fourth-term senator from South Dakota, is an awkward leader for Trump’s ruthless Republican Party, in part because even Democrats invariably describe him as amiable and honest. A senior Democratic aide told me that Thune is “incapable of lying.” Kevin Woster, a former reporter for the Sioux Falls Argus Leader who covered Thune for decades, told me that the senator used to hold weekly conference calls with South Dakota journalists. When Thune tried to sell Republican talking points about the perfidy of whatever Democrats were doing, Woster recalled, “I’d ask him, ‘But, John, Republicans really did the same thing, didn’t they?,’ and he’d say, ‘Yeah, we’re really at fault, too. That’s true.’ Who does that?” Before Thune became the Party leader, journalists would crowd the hallway outside his Capitol office. Unlike Mitch McConnell, the taciturn and cunning leader at the time, Thune genuinely tried to answer questions. He was seldom cutting or caustic, and rarely tossed off a memorable line that might begin or end a newspaper article. As a veteran congressional reporter told me, Thune could be counted on for a reliable “middle quote.” A Republican aide who knows Thune described him to me as hypercompetitive but also “Midwestern nice.” (“Southern nice”—like Mike Johnson, the Louisiana Republican who is the Speaker of the House—can be double-edged, as in “Bless your heart!”) Lamar Alexander, a former Republican senator from Tennessee and a friend of Thune’s, noted a contrast between him and the two most recent Majority Leaders, McConnell and the Democratic senator Chuck Schumer: those men are renowned for their guile, and “you don’t think of guile when you think of John Thune.”
We sat down in mid-March for an interview in Thune’s grand new office, and I asked him how he communicated with Trump, given their differences in style and substance. “Very carefully,” he said, with a chuckle. Did he find it difficult to work with a President so little concerned with accuracy? “Well, I mean, we’re very different personalities,” Thune said—“a very big personality” and “a boring Midwesterner.” He argued that Trump had “qualities very useful for his job,” such as “enormous stamina.” Although Trump is beginning his second term as President, Thune expressed sympathy for him as “somebody who hasn’t been around a legislative body for any length of time” and for whom “in some ways it is all a little bit of a foreign language.” Thune said that he ran for leader “to be a bridge to the White House.” He added, “I’ve always felt like I can sort of get along with anybody,” noting that his relationship with Trump “on a personal level has gotten more comfortable over time.” He concluded, “I’m straight with him, and he’s straight with me.”
[...]
When Thune gave his first floor speech as Senate leader, he pledged, in effect, to stand up to the President. He vowed to preserve the filibuster—a Senate rule that checks the power of a majority by requiring sixty votes to cut off debate and get almost anything done. It would take only a simple majority to change the rule if the Majority Leader scheduled a vote on it, and Trump, during his first term, unsuccessfully demanded some thirty times that McConnell and the Republicans do so. It is axiomatic on Capitol Hill that Trump will resume that push the next time the Democrats use the filibuster to thwart him.
[...]
Manchin, now watching from the sidelines, urged patience with such seeming evasions. “John plays a long poker hand,” he told me. “It might seem out of character right now—going along with some things that maybe he normally wouldn’t—but when push comes to shove, and the survival of the separation of powers and basic independence of the legislature is on the line, when someone’s got to pull the trigger, John has the ability, the character, and the strength to do it.”
After the courts declare it illegal for Trump to rule by fiat, and after the Democrats thwart him in Congress, would come Thune’s moment of truth, Manchin predicted. Would the Majority Leader keep his promise to preserve the filibuster? Or would he capitulate to Trump? “If John caves to that,” Manchin said, “then I will be extremely disappointed in my buddy.”
Original link | Archive.is link
3 stars
Alien Poop Means We Are Not Alone. But Let Me Just Adjust This Model Parameter... | The Intrinsic Perspective
5-minute read
There are now even possible technosignatures of alien life, not just biosignatures. As I’ve written about, researchers have quietly identified 53 stars that are Dyson sphere candidates, detected via excess mid-infrared emissions. They’re just candidates requiring investigation, of course, but the search for Dyson spheres is now firmly in the realm of real science, not fiction. Then there’s ʻOumuamua: noticed back in 2017, it was the first identified interstellar object to wander through our solar system, and was also weird in almost every way, from its thin oblong shape to how it accelerated away. I don’t judge all of this as equally good evidence (ʻOumuamua has multiple natural explanations), but collectively the growing list of biosignatures and technosignatures represents a major change. Alien life is no longer about waiting for evidence, but debating the surprisingly not-crazy evidence we do have.
[...]
Yet as everyone has been distracted by all the fake UFO news, the actual scientific effort to find alien life has kept chugging along. The telescopes have gotten better. The data sets are bigger. More importantly, the social stigma is gone: scientists regularly write serious papers proposing candidates. This dry academic stuff is real. Meaning that the new data from K2-18b is the best evidence there’s been, ever, to indicate alien life—even if it’s still an uncertainty.
2 stars
A Year of Hate: What I Learned When I Went Undercover With the Far Right | The Guardian
12-minute read
Charlie, the leader of a white nationalist group, leaned over the sticky pub table. He pointed a big finger at me and locked eyes. “You better not turn out to be an infiltrator for Hope Not Hate,” he said. I froze. Flanked by several of his lieutenants, Charlie watched, waiting for my response. His face softened into a smile. He started laughing and yanked down his collar, pretending to talk into a hidden microphone. “Abort! Abort!” he shouted. I played along, lifting up my wrist like there was a wire stashed in my cuff. “Get me out of here!” I yelled into my sleeve. “They’ve discovered me!”
Charlie was right to be suspicious of me. I was, in fact, an infiltrator for the anti-fascist organisation Hope Not Hate. The only thing he got wrong was the location of my microphone: it wasn’t in my collar but strapped to my chest.
For more than a year, I went undercover in the British far right. Using the pseudonym Chris, I spent time with nine different groups of extremists. Among them were a political party, a circle of Holocaust deniers and an organisation backed by an American tech tycoon that sought to prove black people are genetically less intelligent than white people.
In the Calls of Bonobos, Scientists Hear Hints of Language | New York Times
6-minute read
In contrast, we humans can string words together in ways that combine their individual meanings into something new. Suppose I say, “I am a bad dancer.” When I combine the words “bad” and “dancer,” I no longer mean them independently; I’m not saying, “I am a bad person who also happens to dance.” Instead, I mean that I don’t dance well.
Linguists call this compositionality, and have long considered it an essential ingredient of language. “It’s the force behind language’s creativity and productivity,” said Simon Townsend, a comparative psychologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. “Theoretically, you can come up with any phrase that has never been uttered before.”
For decades, scientists found no clear sign of compositionality in other species. But a few years ago Dr. Townsend and his colleagues discovered a hint of it in chimpanzees.
[...]
Dr. Berthet said that the new results should address any skepticism about Dr. Townsend’s earlier study on chimpanzees. “Linguists would always say, ‘Yeah, OK, but it’s just one combination — what does it really tell us?’” she said. “Here we show actually bonobos have several compositional structures, and they use them a lot.”
Together, the two studies on bonobos and chimpanzees suggest that our common ancestor with these apes also possessed compositionality, the researchers argue.
Original link | Archive.is link
The future of silk | The Works in Progress Newsletter
9-minute read
But a company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, called Vaxess Technologies plans to sidesttep this common fear by abandoning stainless steel needles and switching to silk. Vaxess is testing a skin patch covered in dozens of microneedles made of silk protein and infused with influenza vaccine. Each needle is barely visible to the naked eye and just long enough to pierce the outer layer of skin. A user sticks the patch on his arm, waits five minutes, then throws it away. Left behind are the silk microneedles, which painlessly dissolve over the next two weeks, releasing the vaccine all the while.
[...]
Much of what we now understand about silk was discovered at Silklab, a branch of the department of engineering at Tufts University in Medford, a suburb of Boston. Here a visitor encounters silken lenses that project words and images when bathed in laser light; surgical gloves coated in silk that display a warning if they’ve been contaminated with pathogens; tiny silken screws that are strong enough to repair a broken bone, only to dissolve entirely once the injury is healed.
For Silklab director Fiorenzo Omenetto, silk is not a fashion statement. It’s a set of microscopic Lego blocks that he and his colleagues are pulling apart and reassembling into an array of unexpected products. ‘We make everything,’ said Omenetto. ‘We make plastics, we make edible electronics, we make coatings for food.’
Grandmaster Magnus Carlsen: The Freestylist | Spiegel
10-minute read
Magnus Carlsen, 34, is one of the greatest sportsmen of our times, a beacon of chess. Never in the 1,500-year history of this game was a grandmaster as famous as the Norwegian. People call him a "wunderkind,” and he became world champion at the tender age of 22. He has modeled for G-Star, put Bill Gates in checkmate on television and has had a cameo on the "Simpsons.” Carlsen has become a pop culture icon.
But two years ago, he gave up his world championship title without a fight, saying that classical chess had become too boring for him. Today, he primarily plays online, promotes his new passion of freestyle chess and says that he is in "semi-retirement.”
Nevertheless, he is once again engaged in a clash with the World Chess Federation (FIDE), engaging in a public dispute over a pair of jeans – and over who holds power in the world of chess.
Carlsen does what he wants. And by doing so, he may well be changing the sport.
Out of the Fog | The Verge
9-minute read
Americans had adopted children from abroad in previous decades, most notably from South Korea, but Operation Babylift created a story around adoption that transformed the displacement of a foreign baby to an American home into an act of charity. Out of the horrors of war came an opportunity for benevolence and absolution. “Everyone suffers in a war, but no one suffers more than the children, and the airlift was the least that we could do,” Ford wrote in his autobiography. This narrative has never been without its critics — Grace Paley, writing for Ms. Magazine at the time of the babylift, called it “a cynical political game” — but even those who acknowledged the alarming messiness of the campaign’s logistics thought of the adoptions themselves as a win-win. A Massachusetts senator put it this way: “Very simplistically, it is better to live in elitism in the United States than to be dead in Vietnam.”
[...]
How one viewed the babylift — as a mission to save children or to abduct them — depended in part on how one defined the purpose of adoption. Was it to provide for a child or to provide a child to eager Western parents? FCVN and other adoption agencies, as well as prospective parents, persisted with their adoptions in defiance of evidence that some children had other alternatives. They offered their belief in the restorative power of a loving family as reasoning.
Testosterone gave me my life back | Useful Fictions
6-minute read
I’ve been going back and forth for a long time — like, months — on how to frame this piece, which concerns the fact that taking testosterone has massively, unmistakably improved my quality of life. I’ve been vacillating because I can see how easily it could be weaponized as evidence that women don’t belong in leadership roles or in male-dominated fields. Conceding that there may be a biological foundation for certain disparities feels like it risks excusing bias against women, and like a betrayal of some of my core beliefs.
When I played poker professionally, I was a staunch advocate for the position that there are few women at the top of the game for reasons that are primarily sociological: women aren’t encouraged to learn (96% of serious players are male); the environment is unwelcoming to them (see “The Royal Flush Girls”); and they aren’t invited to join the study groups that are critical for cracking into the elite tier. When I won the Female Player of the Year award at the 2016 American Poker Awards, my acceptance speech was about why it was silly to have a separate category for women, when they are equally capable.
It is almost physically painful to me to now conclude that maybe I had it wrong — maybe men really do have an innate advantage at poker. And yet. In the earliest weeks of testosterone therapy, when I really started to feel it kicking in, one of my first thoughts was: “I would have been so much better at poker if I’d had this.”
Robot Dexterity Still Seems Hard | Construction Physics
8-minute read
While a lot of these capabilities are impressive, robot progress still seems somewhat uneven to me. It’s cool to see these robots move in such human-like ways, but as former OpenAI Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew notes, “Manipulation is the hard problem we need to solve to make humanoid robots useful, not locomotion.” The value of a humanoid robot isn’t whether it can dance, run, or flip, but how capable it is at manipulating objects in the real world. And while manipulation capabilities are improving, they appear to have a very long way to go.
I owe the libertarians an apology | Noahpinion
5-minute read
But I feel like I owe libertarians an apology, for severely underrating their ideology. I was so focused on its theoretical flaws that I ignored its political importance. I concentrated only on the marginal benefits that might be achieved by building on our economic system’s libertarian foundation, ignoring the inframarginal losses that would happen were that foundation to crumble. I had only a hazy, poor understanding of the historical context in which libertarianism emerged, and of the limitations of libertarianism’s most prominent critics.
[...]
Libertarianism is far from perfect as a governing ideology, and has had plenty of failures. But it’s the proper foil for progressivism, which is also far from perfect and has also had its share of debacles. The answer is that we need both ideologies, and we need both to be the most reasonable incarnations of themselves. We should be debating opportunity versus equality, freedom versus redistribution, government provision versus market provision of public goods. We should not be scrambling to stave off the depredations of a Mad King who doesn’t understand the first thing about economics. Perhaps we debated the libertarians too vigorously, and too well. Now I find myself wishing we had them back. In this world there are monsters far more terrifying than the market.
Testing AI's GeoGuessr Genius | Astral Codex Ten
8-minute read
The first time I felt like I was getting real evidence on this question - the first time I viscerally felt myself in the chimp’s world, staring at the helicopter - was last week, watching OpenAI’s o3 play GeoGuessr.
The Myth of Meritocracy: How Exams Helped Build an Empire | Broadstreet
4-minute read
If you ignore the strawman (who really thought Imperial China's bureaucracy was chosen entirely on merit?), this is a pretty interesting piece:
The results reveal a more complex picture than the traditional meritocracy narrative suggests. Out of 9,380 prefects who served under the Qing dynasty, only 57% came through the civil service exam system. The rest followed very different paths. Roughly 13% bought their way into office by making “contributions” to the state—cash, livestock, grain, and military supplies such as warships and camels—in exchange for academic credentials. Another 4% inherited eligibility from their fathers, thanks to a policy that awarded degrees to the sons of deceased or high-ranking officials. A small group—about 2%—got in through ad hoc channels like battlefield promotions or personal recommendations. Then there were the 23% who were Manchus. As the ruling ethnic group of the dynasty, Manchus were allowed to bypass the standard exam system entirely. They often entered the bureaucracy through parallel institutions or separate military-based evaluations.
[...]
So if there were so many other pathways to power—purchase, inheritance, favoritism—why did emperors still rely so heavily on the exams? The answer is simple but powerful: the exams didn’t just determine who governed—they shaped how they thought. They created a bureaucracy that was not only educated, but culturally and ideologically unified.
There may only be two people who can stop OpenAI's for-profit pivot | Understanding AI
7-minute read
A good explainer:
To address those fears, OpenAI is trying to convert itself into a more conventional for-profit company. Under a proposal announced last December, the non-profit parent would give up control over OpenAI’s technology in exchange for tens of billions of dollars it could use for charitable purposes. In a recent blog post, OpenAI boasted that such a transaction would create “the world’s best-equipped nonprofit.”
But opponents believe that this would betray the commitments OpenAI made when it was founded in 2015.
“Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return,” the founders wrote in the 2015 blog post announcing the creation of OpenAI. “Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact.”
Transforming OpenAI into a for-profit company would run directly counter to this founding vision. The question is whether statements like this are legally enforceable.
The Populist Right Must Own Tariffs | Astral Codex Ten
4-minute read
Don’t let them get away with this. Although it’s true that tariffs owe as much to Trump’s idiosyncrasies as to the inexorable logic of right-wing populism, the ability of a President to hold the nation hostage to his own idiosyncrasies is itself a consequence of populist ideology.
[...]
Populism, especially far-right Trump-style populism, isn’t just a grab bag of opinions on immigration, crime, etc. On a deeper level, it’s a toolbox of strategies, justifications, and beneficial memes for circumventing the institutional middle layer. Some of this is unitary executive doctrine. Some of it is an intense us/them distinction which treats any internal dissent as treason. Some of it is hard-forged antibodies to believing the media or expert class about anything. Some of it is a principled refusal to ever listen to or care about corruption allegations. Liberals treat these as anomalous vices, but they’re all load-bearing parts of a social technology for letting leaders ignore the institutional middle layer and govern without their consent.
Losing My Dad in Installments | Electric Literature
10-minute read
A year into the disease, he decided we were going on a holiday; he knew it would be the last. Growing up in Brazil, we were used to going to the beach on summer breaks. We’d make sandcastles, eat ice cream. I remember sitting on wet sand, picking up the heavy liquid with my hands and pilling the blobs like blocks. We’d make them close to the water, to get the perfect consistency for our project. As the day went on, the sea would get closer to us and the waves would take our work away, returning it to the ocean, its original place.
[...]
He’d shrunk in those two years; the disease was overtaking him. And it was our job to remember how we used to be. His essence never left, and only now can I acknowledge that, because back then, it was easier to split him in two—before and after his illness. Perhaps it was more palatable to feel like I was losing him in installments; that I could say goodbye to each part as they left. Bye, legs; bye, feet; bye voice. Stalling for as much as I could, dragging my feet, like him.
Americans Don’t Do This | The Atlantic
5-minute read
Caitlin Flanagan:
And yet despite my strongly held feelings about these matters, when I learned that Mahmoud Khalil had been arrested in the lobby of his New York apartment building, handcuffed, folded into an unmarked vehicle by men who would not give their names, and transported first to a facility in New York, then to a detention center in New Jersey, and then to one in Louisiana, every siren in my body screamed.
Down to the marrow of my bones, I am an American. And we don’t do this.
[...]
Yet Khalil’s position that a genocide is occurring in Gaza is exactly the kind of potentially offensive but protected speech America was designed to tolerate. Our country has had a legally enforceable right to free speech since the 18th century, and we did not become great in spite of it. We are the inheritors of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, not Joseph McCarthy or Leon Trotsky.
If America is folding up its tent, as it perhaps seems to be doing, hold your head high. Once you were part of the greatest idea in the history of the world.
Original link | Archive.is link
1 star
To Live and Be Perplexed By L.A. | The End of My Career
3-minute read
Just minutes before she would have arrived at my son’s school, a driver ahead of my wife on the 134 East freeway hit a car to his right and then yanked his car to the left across three lanes, seemingly on purpose, and took out another car. Which caused several more cars behind them to crash. One of the totaled cars was a Tesla that David Gonzalez bought two weeks ago.
Which means that while everyone was selling or burning their Teslas, David Gonzalez decided this was a great time to lease a new one. More insane, David said about the accident, “It’s amazing how one man can cause so much damage” as if this idea hadn’t occurred to him every day since Trump’s inauguration. The only possible conclusion to these data points is that David Gonzalez hasn’t watched the news since 2015.
The man who swerved the car was driving with two passengers. All three of them abandoned the vehicle and ran across the highway in different directions, as if they had trained at Ringling Bros. One of them jogged away holding his clothes in one hand and an electric guitar in another.
Millions of years-old dinosaur DNA to help build world-first T-Rex leather handbag | Interesting Engineering
2-minute read
To be taken with a large grain of salt:
The future of high-end materials might just lie buried in prehistoric dinosaur times.
Creative powerhouse VML, genomic innovators The Organoid Company, and sustainable biotechnology firm Lab-Grown Leather have joined forces to develop the world’s first T-Rex leather made using the extinct creature’s DNA.
[...]
“This project is a remarkable example of how we can harness cutting-edge genome and protein engineering to create entirely new materials. By reconstructing and optimizing ancient protein sequences, we can design T. Rex leather, a biomaterial inspired by prehistoric biology, and clone it into a custom-engineered cell line,” said Thomas Mitchell, CEO of The Organoid Company.
Swirling Green Aurora Captured From the ISS | kottke.org
1-minute video
I don’t have a whole lot to say about this video except wow. Wow wow. It’s almost inconceivable that we live in a world of sights like this. Feels like science fiction but is actually real. Captured by NASA astronaut Don Pettit aboard the ISS.