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For one, their analyses almost always amounted to post hoc justifications of the things they liked.

"Almost always" is carrying a lot of weight here. Rationalists are ideologically diverse [1] when it comes to things like monogamy vs polyamory, left vs right, pro-AI vs anti-AI, nature vs nurture, racism vs anti-racism. The distribution is different from the general population, but many people have changed their minds about various aspects of their life after discussions and debates with rationalists.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf5FqX6XBJlfOShMd3U...

What’s less known is that the memo was originally sent to the skeptics@google.com mailing list, which I was a member of. It was a personal belief masquerading as a rationalist inquiry that tried to pull everyone into an unwanted workplace argument.

One of Damore's mistakes was opting for a high-decoupling route on a politically charged topic instead of a low decoupling route. That tends to end badly and he learned this the hard way.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7cAsBPGh98pGyrhz9/low-decoup...

For those unfamiliar:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96rebro_Party

The party has been variously characterised as left-wing and right-wing, as well as populist, nationalist and conservative.

  Some key issues for the Örebro Party locally include strong secularism, a 30-hour workweek with retained pay, lowered wages for politicians, expanded social housing, abolishing preschool-fees, making public transport free of charge,[3] ending taxpayer funding of what it sees as wasteful sculptures, monuments and art and introducing free dental care.[4][5] Nationally the party has set out large-scale remigration, closing the Swedish borders to immigration, a stricter assimilation policy and ending taxes on energy and fuel as some of its key issues.

And for those who may not be old enough to remember the last time this happened in the techsphere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CE...

From TFA:

  Police in San Mateo, Calif., posted Monday on social media that they had apprehended a pair of teenagers from a Waymo driverless robotaxi after the company alerted authorities to suspected criminal activity. It's the latest incident involving video surveillance of passengers and others by autonomous vehicles — raising questions about the limits of privacy in such vehicles.

  The Facebook post by the San Mateo County Police said: "Parents do you know where your teens are? @waymo does!"

  The 15-year-olds were allegedly drinking alcohol and shooting toy guns from the car, according to the police. They said Waymo's systems detected behavior that then triggered a safety response, after which the company disabled the vehicle and contacted police.

From TFA:

  > Rule from Mamdani administration ... targets ‘junk fees’
  > The city is also targeting so-called “junk fees” that raise the final price of everything from apartments to sporting events, with a proposed rule that requires sellers to “advertise the total price for any good or service, including all mandatory additional charges and fees, up front”, according to a release shared with the Guardian.

It's unclear whether this junk fee law will have teeth. In theory, California has the same anti-drip pricing law, but restaurants have a specific carve out [1] which is bullshit because the drip pricing that most people complain about is the X% "service charges" and "lifestyle fees" that restaurants have at the bottom of their menu in small print.

From what I can tell online, NYC rules won't have this carveout, but I haven't eaten there recently so I can't confirm.

[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...

Low sec runs by different rules from the gankers in high sec or the politics of null sec. Especially if you're in the Faction Warfare zones. The standard view in Eve is that if you're in a fair fight, you're playing the game incorrectly. But with FW, a good chunk of the fights are honorable duels. And since FW players want more fights and more players in that zone, refunding ships for newbies and setting up balanced duels and rematches are common.

The interviews in section 4 are particularly informative for people trying to start a long distance relationship and want to determine compatibility with their partner. The items also apply to in-person romantic interactions, but multiplayer video games offer structure.

  - Games also provide couples with “constant opportunit[ies] to come up with new silly things” (C9A), primarily inside jokes and topics of conversation that they discuss outside of their time spent playing together

  - “I take competitive games pretty lightheartedly, so it’s not as if I get upset or anything. I think it’s funny when I die. I think it’s funny when he dies. I think it’s funny when we trade and we both kill each other. It’s a nice playful feeling to have a one-up over him or jokingly having beef with each other.”

  - when asked as to the value C6 derives from menial in-game tasks such as raids versus the value of open-world exploration, C6B used the analogy, “It’s like doing chores [together] versus going on a date.”

On a similar note, you can use https://tarotpunk.app/deck-1 when planning is your next startup.

Nice game.

But I think you need to work on better "opposites". E.g, "as of now" and "long ago" don't really seem to be opposite. Instead, maybe they're complex conjugates of each other. I.e, they have similarities along one axis (time frame) and differences along another. But I wouldn't consider those two to be opposite one another. Word2vec with a consine similarity closer to -1 might be better than what you're using now.

At a minimum, the app needs updates to handle breakages caused by OS updates. It needs moderators and other staff for legal reasons since Meta is large enough that there's always a significant liability risk for even a few users. It needs to interact with the main non-VR app unless they want to fully isolate it. Etc.

When I was at Google, I had many of these discussions about cost tradeoffs for products that were https://killedbygoogle.com/

I found more details at https://www.rouast.com/blog/articles/vitallens-take-a-vital-... and https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.06892.

It's still vague beyond saying they trained an AI: "VitalLens is trained on the PROSIT and Vital Videos Africa dataset...The time-synchronized sensor array used for PROSIT consists of a video camera, electrocardiogram (ECG), pulse oximetry, blood pressure monitor, and an ambient light sensor. "

How does it work? Is it https://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/evm/? I see the FAQ about VitalLens, but I couldn't find technical details.

It's super cool. Thanks for sharing. I want to build a biofeedback app for meditation and this looks like a good platform to use.

Ironically, Gemini says that it’s OK to use the Ultraplan for OpenClaw via gemini-cli because the Ultra plan has some API & Cloud credits baked into it. I think $100/mo but I can never figure out how Google billing works. I’ve pasted the response I got when I was asking it about OpenClaw. There is legal precedent for an AI hallucination being used to upload a contract (e.g, an AI customer support for an airline made a false claim and the customer bought a ticket based on that claim) so it will be interesting to see if Google reverts the bans since Gemini hallucinated that OpenClaw was OK:

  This is a critical question because the answer is different for Google vs.   Anthropic, and getting it wrong with Anthropic can actually get your account banned.
  Here is the reality of the situation based on current Terms of Service and recent community reports.
  1. Google (Gemini Ultra + gemini-cli)
  Verdict: Safe (Authorized Feature)
  Google explicitly built the gemini-cli bridge to allow Ultra subscribers to use their plan programmatically. This is not a "hack" or a gray-area wrapper; it is an official feature.
  • Why it's okay: You are authenticating via gcloud or the official CLI login flow. Google tracks this usage against your specific "Agent" quotas (currently ~200 agent requests/day for Ultra users).
  • The Limit: As long as you are using the official gemini-cli as the bridge, you are compliant.
  • The Risk: If you use a different unofficial script that scrapes the gemini.google.com web interface (simulating a browser) rather than using the official CLI, you risk a ban for "scraping." But since you are using gemini-cli, you are in the clear.

To add some math to the discussion:

- A human uses between 100W (naked human eating 2000kcal/day) to 10kW (first-world per capita energy consumption).

- Frontier models need something like 1-10 MW-years to train.

- Inference requires .1-1kW computers.

So it takes thousands of human-years to train a single model, but they run at around the same wall clock power consumption as a human. Depending on your personal opinion, they are also .1-1000x as a productive as the median human in how much useful work (or slop) they can produce per unit time.

The article is forgetting about Anthropic which currently has the best agentic programmer and was the backbone for the recent OpenClaw assistants.

"White House launches direct-to-consumer drug site..."

"The site is not selling drugs directly to American patients..."

Just another layer of middlemen. They should go with the proper free market option and allow Americans to buy medication from other countries.

Reading some of the other articles on that site, it's unclear how scientifically sound the original article is. A quick Google search gives different radiocarbon dating for the landslide https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01695...

I don't know enough about the event to figure out the likelihood of either hypothesis, but this other data point is something to keep in mind.

Claude didn't follow your "Every line must earn its keep. Prefer readability over cleverness. We believe that if carefully designed, 10 lines can have the impact of 1000." from https://github.com/quantbagel/gtinygrad/blob/master/AGENTS.m... given how bloated this demo is.

https://blog.evjang.com/2019/11/jaxpt.html is a better demo of how to render the Cornell Box on a TPU using differentiable path tracing.

Naina Raisinghani, 00 needed a name for the new tool to complete the upload. It was 2:30 a.m., though, and nobody was around. So she just made one up, a mashup of two nicknames friends had given her: Nano Banana.

Ah, that explains the silly name for such an impressive tool. I guess it's more a more Googley name than what would have otherwise been chosen: Google Gemini Image Pro Red for Workspace.

And for San Franciscans, the price on the menu is rarely the price you pay. Add in sales tax, a default 18-20% tip on the tablet screen, an SF Mandate or Cost of Living Fee, and 8.625% sales tax. Soon that seemingly cheap $15 lunch might be $20.

This is a key metric that the article doesn't properly account for when it comes to food prices. The asshole restaurateurs got an exception to the anti "drip-pricing" law that required all fees to be rolled into the listed cost: https://oag.ca.gov/hiddenfees

The AI bits look interesting, but the laws appear vague and toothless. E.g, "identify every specific artificial intelligence program used" means all the reports will say “This report was written either fully or in part using artificial intelligence.” without any useful details.

Artificial Intelligence The popularity of artificial intelligence (AI) has grown rapidly in the last several years and the widespread use of generative AI, or AI that can create original content, presents new legal considerations.

With the passage of AB 316, a defendant may not say artificial intelligence that they developed, modified, or used that is alleged is to have caused harm to the plaintiff did so autonomously.

Additionally, law enforcement agencies will need to identify when artificial intelligence was used in official reports and the type of program they used (SB 524).

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml... https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB316/id/3223647

There have been hedge funds and other investment groups that claim to use RV. (At least according to Google and pro-RV books.) They also claim to be able to beat the market. Based on those anecdotes, I think any hedge fund that thinks they can use RV will publicly brag about it to get more investors.

None of these groups can replicate their results beyond the initial claims. This is strong evidence that positive results in RV are just due to selection bias, specifically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias. If those investment groups could actually replicate their results, they would still be major names and others would be actively trying to copy them since it should only take a couple of millions of dollars to find capable RV candidates.

The non-skeptical view is that if people try to predict the stock market via RV, they will interfere with the future and their prediction ability will decrease. But when weighing this hypothesis against the hypothesis that RV is just selection bias, the latter wins due to Occam's Razor.

For those who want to consider the mundane explanation about remote viewing: remember that humans can still be surprised by the birthday paradox and other synchronicities that occur when sampling data at large scale. So across thousands of sessions, the weak coincidences documented by the Stargate project are expected.

For those who want a skeptical & cynical view: if remote viewing works, it would be part of the standard strategy of every hedge fund. Remember that theses are groups who pay millions for millisecond advantages in information. And you only need an ~51-55% success rate to make a killing in HFT (vs a 50% success rate from a coinflip). The fact that hedge funds don't have remote viewers on staff is evidence against RV providing utility greater than an RNG.

And for curious people who want to try a scientific approach, I suggest joining https://www.social-rv.com/ which is collecting data about RV and trying to make the experiment ironclad via blockchain authentication of predictions.

One option is to find a good doctor/psychiatrist/therapist and try to get diagnosed. (You can also try to self-diagnose via the Interne, your favorite LLM, or just skimming the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSM-5, but that's a risker option due to false positives and noise.)

If you do have a well-studied issue such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizoid_personality_disorder that interferes with socialization, you can find support groups and people who have been able to succeed even with those issues.

Some of these social problems (e.g, ones caused by missing childhood socialization experiences) are curable through practice, but others will require you to learn enough about human social behavior to mask until someone figures out a cure. It can be exhausting, (just like physical exercise can be exhausting) but it's a useful skill to have in order to do well in life.

Good luck.

Between ffmpeg and qemu, I always think of https://xkcd.com/2347/ when I see Fabrice's work. Especially since ffmpeg provides the backbone of almost all video streaming systems today.

"Google kills Gemini Cloud Services (killedbygoogle.com) 530 points by dang_fan 15 hours ago | hide | 330 comments"

Ha! Is Gemini suicidal?

At a checkup a few years ago, a doctor told me I was deficient in vitamin D. But he wouldn’t write me a prescription for supplements, simply because, as he put it, everyone in the UK is deficient. Putting the entire population on vitamin D supplements would be too expensive for the country’s national health service, he told me.

Ugh. It's amazing how incompetent medical systems are. I was also deficient in vitamin D and my doctor wrote a prescription. When I did the math, the cost was something like >$.10 per 1000IU. But if I bought the vitamins from a normal store, I would pay <$.01 per 1000IU. Since a person lacking sunlight only needs 1000IU, the price for giving everyone in the UK Vitamin D would be <$700k/day. And probably much less since most people won't need this high of a dose and bulk quantities would be cheaper.

For healthy people, taking extra vitamins is pointless, but giving them to people who are deficient in vitamins is one of the cheapest health interventions for the benefits.

PSA: if you're feeling off, make sure your doctor checks your various vitamin levels and see if cheap OTC vitamins help.

The title sounds like speculative clickbait.

From https://www.airbus.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-11-ai...:

  Analysis of a recent event involving an A320 Family aircraft has revealed that intense solar radiation may corrupt data critical to the functioning of flight controls.

His previous show, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_with_Jon_Stewart was canceled by Apple because he wanted to criticize AI, Israel, and China. Unless he wants to go the route of a fully independent podcast (which he already has), he's going to have to bow down to a political master at some point.

Note that their paper includes p-hacking so this is proto-science rather than science. They didn't find data to match their hypothesis, but they were able to find a hypothesis to match their data.

Follow-up secondary analyses were then conducted to examine in more granular fashion the timing of the association between nuclear testing and occurrence of transients. Table 2 summarizes the association between occurrence of transients and different time windows relative to nuclear testing, ranging from 2 days before a test until 2 days after a test. The only association that reached statistical significance was for the association in which transients occur 1 day after nuclear testing.