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3 stars
The Worst 7 Years in Boeing’s History—and the Man Who Won’t Stop Fighting for Answers | WIRED
Fatal crashes. A door blowout. Grounded planes. Inside the citizen-led, obsessive campaign to hold Boeing accountable and prevent the next disaster.
How Chinese Students Experience America | The New Yorker
The students rarely exhibited the kind of idealism that a Westerner associates with youth. They seemed to accept that the world is a flawed place, and they were prepared to make compromises. Even when Vincent wrote about his encounter with the Internet police, he never criticized the monitoring; instead, his point was that a Chinese citizen needs to be careful. In another essay, Vincent described learning to control himself after a rebellious phase in middle school and high school. “Now, I seem to know more about the world,” he wrote. “It’s too impractical to change a lot of things like the education system, the government policies.”
[...]
Vincent was thriving in his engineering classes, and he said that some of the math was easier than what he had studied in high school in China. His views about his home country were changing, in part because of the pandemic. Vaccines were now widespread, but the Party hadn’t adjusted its “zero COVID” strategy. “Their policy overreacts,” Vincent told me. “You should not require the government to do too many things and restrict our liberties. We should be responsible for ourselves. We should not require the government to be like our parents.”
“Let’s hire an ISIS suicide bomber to blow him up in the street!”: Europe’s most wanted man plotted my murder — and that of my colleague | The Insider
The hunt for me had apparently begun in December 2020, immediately after my investigative team at Bellingcat, where I then worked, teamed up with The Insider, Der Spiegel, and CNN to publish the definitive history behind Navalny’s poisoning. We exposed the real identities, flight logs, and phone billing data of multiple FSB operatives who had trailed Navalny across Russia before ultimately administering a near-fatal dose of the Soviet-era nerve agent onto his underpants after breaking into the opposition figure’s Tomsk hotel room. Within hours of our investigation going live, as we later found out, President Vladimir Putin had personally tasked the FSB’s Internal Security Directorate with finding out how on earth we’d obtained such sensitive information — information that greatly embarrassed the security service Putin himself had once headed.
[...]
This resulted in Roussev’s team staking out — and proudly sending photos of — a house that not only was not mine, but was not even in the same holiday settlement. Not surprisingly, when the group bribed a cleaning lady to penetrate “my” villa, they found “only women’s clothes and items,” which they naturally attributed to my superb talents of subterfuge and counter-surveillance.
My Friend Chooses How and When to Die | Common Reader
As the plates are whisked away, she says, “I have something for you,” and hands me a sheet of paper. “Not many people know,” she says. “I’m going to mail this to my dearest friends just before.”
“Before….?” I smile and take the sheet, wondering what she is up to. Skimming, I catch phrases: not something I arrived at without deliberation…. I have lived my life as well as I could…. limited resources on this planet…. what purpose could I serve by living on another five or ten years?
She has decided to end her life.
My mind goes blank with shock. “But—you’re still so vibrant!” I finally stammer.
The Golden Age of Japanese Pencils, 1952-1967 | Studio Notes
The result (and here, I'll reveal a strongly held personal belief) is the greatest pencil ever made, in any country, before or since. For Mitsubishi's designers, the ideal pencil would have "6B blackness with 9H hardness," able to make very dark marks while also wearing down slowly and offering pinpoint precision. Hi-Uni's core, with its innovative mixture of particle sizes, comes pretty close to this unachievable ideal. Better yet, despite its excellent point retention, Hi-Uni lead is also the industry leader in smoothness.
Hi-Uni was an authoritative and complete response to Tombow MONO, and it launched with the same legendary status it retains for pencil lovers today. At a princely price of 100 yen each in 1966 (that's almost $4 in today's dollars!), Hi-Uni represented the almost excessive pursuit of perfection in simple things. It spoke to the desire for a rich and comforting everyday life. And it expressed the powerful optimism of 1960s Japan.
2 stars
A ‘Jeopardy!’ Win 24 Years in the Making | The Ringer
It was January 2001 when Harvey Silikovitz first tried to get on Jeopardy! He was working as an attorney in New York City and turned up at the audition in a Manhattan hotel at the urging of his friend Adam Taxin, who had just won more than $45,000 on the show earlier that winter. But when Silikovitz, then 30, failed the on-site application test and was sent home from the audition early, he wasn’t particularly disappointed: He didn’t really like Jeopardy! In fact, he despised it.
In Search of the South Pacific Fugitive Who Crowned Himself King | The Guardian
But over the previous months I had become transfixed instead by the strange tale of Noah Musingku, a Bougainvillean scam artist who had made a fortune, lost it, then retreated to a remote armed compound in the jungle, where he declared himself the islands’ king. He wore crowns of brass and cowrie shells that, lest there be any ambiguity, spelled out king. An academic who has described Musingku as “Bougainville’s Bernie Madoff” wrote him off as an “irrelevance”, while a diplomatic envoy to Papua New Guinea told me he was a “fucking joke”.
Since Francis Fukuyama proclaimed ‘The End of History’ 25 years ago, he has been much maligned. His work now seems prophetic | Aeon
This year marks the 25th anniversary of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992). Rarely read but often denigrated, it might be the most maligned, unfairly dismissed and misunderstood book of the post-war era. Which is unfortunate for at least one reason: Fukuyama might have done a better job of predicting the political turmoil that engulfed Western democracies in 2016 – from Brexit, to Trump, to the Italian Referendum – than anybody else.
Inside the Fight to Save the World’s Most Endangered Wolf | Garden & Gun
Every twenty-four to fifty hours, a set of coordinates pings out from each of the orange radio collars fastened around the necks of seventeen tawny-hued canines roaming the Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula, in North Carolina. The latitudes and longitudes transmit to wildlife biologist Joe Madison’s cell phone, updating the seventeen lone dots on a map that represent the beating hearts of the only wild red wolves in existence.
OpenAI Nonprofit Buyout: Much More Than You Wanted To Know | Astral Codex Ten
Last month, I put out a request for experts to help me understand the details of OpenAI’s forprofit buyout. The following comes from someone who has looked into the situation in depth but is not an insider.
Book review: "Abundance" | Noahpinion
Currently, most American policy debates are framed in terms of ideology — small government versus big government. Instead, Klein and Thompson, like the YIMBY movement that inspired them, want to reframe debates in terms of results. Who cares if new housing is social housing or market-rate housing, as long as people have affordable places to live? Why should cutting burdensome regulation and hiring more bureaucrats be seen as alternatives, instead of complementary approaches? And so on.
What If Your Worry Problem Is Really a Planning Problem? | Psyche
While some researchers seek to better understand worry by studying neurochemistry, and others look to answers in people’s upbringing or past traumas, I believe it’s vital to study the inner workings of the mind – specifically those basic mental processes that cause worries to arise too easily and persist for too long.
Much of this comes down to how we plan for the future. When you think of planning, such as planning a meal or planning a holiday, it might seem like a benign mental activity that has little to do with pathological worry. However, planning can go wrong in various ways and scientists and clinicians have long suggested that worrying and planning are intimately linked.
Why America betrayed Europe | Noahpinion
His tone is plaintive, not accusatory or bitter. He really doesn’t understand why America, which has acted as Europe’s steadfast protector all of his life, is suddenly turning its back on its fellow democracies and aligning itself with Russia instead. His confusion is understandable. By all but abandoning Ukraine, endorsing Russia’s war aims, threatening not to defend NATO allies if they were attacked, and threatening to withdraw from NATO entirely, Trump is rapidly tearing up the global order that the U.S. built after World War 2.
Apple AI’s Platform Pivot Potential | Stratechery
This is such a humbling story for me as a strategy analyst; I’d like to spin up this marvelous narrative about Apple’s foresight with Apple Silicon, but like so many things in business, it turns out the best consumer AI chips were born out of pragmatic realities like Intel not being competitive in mobile, and Samsung becoming a smartphone competitor.
This Is What Happens When You Unleash 500 Singles on an IRL Date | Outside Online
Done with endless swiping on dating apps, more people are looking for love through in-person events. I traveled to one in the Alps with a group of rowdy singles in search of love.
When I Lost My Intuition | Aeon
Now something was different – off. I was filled with doubt, born of I knew not where, to which I returned unceasingly. How was this possible? One day I was perfectly fine, and now, after just a few weeks away, confidence and sureness were gone. Simply put, I had lost my professional intuition. Although that explanation may seem imprecise, intuition is real, and, without it, experts lose their bearings. What had once seemed sure and certain for them becomes a question for enquiry.
How a Global Online Network of White Supremacists Groomed a Teen to Kill | ProPublica
Over the next three years, Krajčík made hundreds — possibly thousands — of posts in Terrorgram chats and channels, where a handful of influential content creators steered the conversation toward violence. Day after day, post after post, these influencers cultivated Krajčík, who lived with his family in a comfortable apartment in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. They reinforced his hatreds, fine-tuned his beliefs and fed him tips, encouraging him to attack gay and Jewish people and political leaders and become, in their parlance, a “saint.”
More Drowning Children | Astral Codex Ten
People love trying to find holes in the drowning child thought experiment. This is natural: it’s obvious you should save the child in the scenario, but much less obvious that you should give lots of charity to poor people (as it seems to imply). So there must be some distinction between the two scenarios. But most people’s cursory and uninspired attempts to find these fail.
Some new insights on why Harris lost | Checks and Balances
Shor’s data outfit, Blue Rose Research, has conducted extensive post-election analyses about the 2024 election, and he shared some of their key findings in these interviews, findings that will likely surprise a lot of folks.
Is our universe trapped inside a black hole? This James Webb Space Telescope discovery might blow your mind | Space.com
This has another implication; each and every black hole in our universe could be the doorway to another "baby universe." These universes would be unobservable to us because they are also behind an event horizon, a one-way light-trapping point of no return from which light cannot escape, meaning information can never travel from the interior of a black hole to an external observer.
1 star
Roko on AI risk | Marginal Revolution
The Less Wrong/Singularity/AI Risk movement started in the 2000s by Yudkowsky and others, which I was an early adherent to, is wrong about all of its core claims around AI risk. It’s important to recognize this and appropriately downgrade the credence we give to such claims moving forward.
Which Planet Has the Most Moons? Saturn Dethrones Jupiter | Popular Science
Most of the newly discovered moons are located near the Mundilfari subgroup of Saturn’s moons. The team believes that given the size, number, and orbital concentration of these new moons, the Mundilfari subgroup is likely where this cosmic collision occurred.
Humans Arose From Two Ancestral Populations That United 300,000 Years Ago | Discover Magazine
The study, published in Nature Genetics, completely rewrites the story of humans. Scientists have long believed that Homo sapiens first appeared in Africa somewhere between 200,000 years and 300,000 years ago, having descended from a single ancestral lineage. The idea of genetic admixture flips the script, however, showing that human origins are much more complex than previously thought.
Hitler's Argument for Conquest | Bet On It
What was Hitler’s argument for attacking other countries? You might think he didn’t have one, but he did. His argument is frankly Malthusian: Our population is growing, and we will run out of food unless we get more land.
Bones of mammoths butchered for their ivory tusks 25,000 years ago unearthed by archaeologists | CBS News
Remains of three mammoths were discovered in the second area, their tusks dismembered and complete. The discovery of the tusks indicated that the area was used for ivory processing, researchers said.