From Hoboken to Manhattan

The Coming AI Resistance

Michelle Goldberg had an interesting column in the NYTimes yesterday, (Dec. 29): An Anti-A.I. Movement Is Coming. Which Party Will Lead It?

I disagree with the anti-immigrant, anti-feminist, bitterly reactionary right-wing pundit Matt Walsh about basically everything, so I was surprised to come across a post of his that precisely sums up my view of artificial intelligence. “We’re sleepwalking into a dystopia that any rational person can see from miles away,” he wrote in November, adding, “Are we really just going to lie down and let AI take everything from us?”

A.I. obviously has beneficial uses, especially medical ones; it may, for example, be better than humans at identifying localized cancers from medical imagery. But the list of things it is ruining is long.

She then goes on to discuss some. She notes:

Despite Trump’s embrace of the A.I. industry, attitudes toward the technology don’t break down along neat partisan lines. Rather, A.I. divides both parties. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, is a fierce skeptic; this month he proposed an A.I. Bill of Rights that would, among other things, require consumers to be notified when they’re interacting with A.I., provide parental controls on A.I. chatbots and put guardrails around the use of A.I. in mental health counseling. Speaking on CNN on Sunday, Senator Bernie Sanders suggested a moratorium on new data center construction. “Frankly, I think you’ve got to slow this process down,” he said.

Yet a number of leading Democrats are bullish on A.I., hoping to attract technology investments to their states and, perhaps, burnish their images as optimistic and forward-looking. “This technology is going to be a game changer,” Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania said at an A.I. summit in October. “We are just at the beginning of this revolution, and Pennsylvania is poised to take advantage of it.” He’s started a pilot program to get more state employees using generative A.I. at work, and, by streamlining permitting processes, he has made the building of A.I. data centers easier.

Her final paragraph:

One major question, going into 2026, is which party will speak for the Americans who abhor the incursions of A.I. into their lives and want to see its reach restricted. Another is whether widespread public hostility to this technology even matters given all the money behind it. We’ll soon start to find out not just how much A.I. is going to remake our democracy, but also to what degree we still have one.

Trees & sky with clouds from April 2022

The computer scientist and the engineer look at AI

Half baked thought:

In discussions about AI, claims are often made about both capabilities and societal effects, and in practice the boundary is pretty blurry. Different personality types and professions see things through different lenses. At the risk of over-caricaturising,… pic.twitter.com/fvbvafCajO

— Séb Krier (@sebkrier) December 20, 2025

Programming with AI

I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become…

— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) December 26, 2025

Christmas at Longwood Gardens

A historical problem solved by a human but that is beyond chatbots

Elon Danziger, ChatGPT Will Never Beat Indiana Jones, NYTimes, Dec. 22, 2025.

Across from the Florence Cathedral in Italy stands a much older church, the Baptistery of San Giovanni. It is a beloved center of religious life, where many Florentines are baptized to this day. Staid columns and lively arches hug its eight sides, half-camouflaged in patterns of green and white marble. Without the baptistery’s emulation of the architecture of ancient Rome, it’s hard to imagine Florence birthing the architectural Renaissance that changed the face of Europe. Yet for centuries, there has been no compelling solution as to who built it and when and for what reasons. Decades ago, I gave tours of the baptistery and came to revere it, and in the early 2020s I began delving into its origins.

After years of poring over historical documents and reading voraciously, I made an important discovery that was published last year: The baptistery was built not by Florentines but for Florentines — specifically, as part of a collaborative effort led by Pope Gregory VII after his election in 1073. My revelation happened just before the explosion of artificial intelligence into public consciousness, and recently I began to wonder: Could a large language model like ChatGPT, with its vast libraries of knowledge, crack the mystery faster than I did?

So as part of a personal experiment, I tried running three A.I. chatbots — ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini — through different aspects of my investigation. I wanted to see if they could spot the same clues I had found, appreciate their importance and reach the same conclusions I eventually did. But the chatbots failed. Though they were able to parse dense texts for information relevant to the baptistery’s origins, they ultimately couldn’t piece together a wholly new idea. They lacked essential qualities for making discoveries.

There are a few reasons for this. Large language models have read more text than any human could ever hope to. But when A.I. reads text, it’s merely picking up patterns. Peculiar details, outlier data and unusual perspectives that can influence thinking can get lost. Without eccentric or contrarian ideas, I never would have made my discoveries. [...]

Synthesizing so many pieces of medieval history into a new interpretation required stepping back and reconsidering their importance and how they relate to one another. A.I. may be able to optimize the process of collecting those pieces, but discovery means drawing new connections — something far beyond current A.I. capabilities, as the tests I did confirmed to me.

This is consistent with a series of posts I did on my own work: One about interpreting Jaws, one about investigating the "Xanadu" meme, and one about ring-composition in Heart of Darkness.

Biological computationalism (why computers won't be conscious)

Informal presentation: Consciousness May Require a New Kind of Computation, Neuroscience News, December, 23, 2025.

Summary: A new theoretical framework argues that the long-standing split between computational functionalism and biological naturalism misses how real brains actually compute.

The authors propose “biological computationalism,” the idea that neural computation is inseparable from the brain’s physical, hybrid, and energy-constrained dynamics rather than an abstract algorithm running on hardware. In this view, discrete neural events and continuous physical processes form a tightly coupled system that cannot be reduced to symbolic information processing.

The theory suggests that digital AI, despite its capabilities, may not recreate the essential computational style that gives rise to conscious experience. Instead, truly mind-like cognition may require building systems whose computation emerges from physical dynamics similar to those found in biological brains.

Key Facts:

• Hybrid Dynamics: Brain computation arises from discrete spikes embedded within continuous chemical and electrical fields.
• Multi-Scale Coupling: Neural processes remain deeply intertwined across levels, meaning algorithms cannot be separated from physical implementation.
• Energetic Constraints: Metabolic limits shape neural computation, influencing learning, stability, and information flow.

* * * * * 

Research Article: Borjan Milinkovic, Jaan Aru, On biological and artificial consciousness: A case for biological computationalism, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, Volume 181, 2026, 106524, ISSN 0149-7634, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2025.106524.

Abstract: The rapid advances in the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have galvanised public and scientific debates over whether artificial systems might one day be conscious. Prevailing optimism is often grounded in computational functionalism: the assumption that consciousness is determined solely by the right pattern of information processing, independent of the physical substrate. Opposing this, biological naturalism insists that conscious experience is fundamentally dependent on the concrete physical processes of living systems. Despite the centrality of these positions to the artificial consciousness debate, there is currently no coherent framework that explains how biological computation differs from digital computation, and why this difference might matter for consciousness. Here, we argue that the absence of consciousness in artificial systems is not merely due to missing functional organisation but reflects a deeper divide between digital and biological modes of computation and the dynamico-structural dependencies of living organisms. Specifically, we propose that biological systems support conscious processing because they (i) instantiate scale-inseparable, substrate-dependent multiscale processing as a metabolic optimisation strategy, and (ii) alongside discrete computations, they perform continuous-valued computations due to the very nature of the fluidic substrate from which they are composed. These features – scale inseparability and hybrid computations – are not peripheral, but essential to the brain’s mode of computation. In light of these differences, we outline the foundational principles of a biological theory of computation and explain why current artificial intelligence systems are unlikely to replicate conscious processing as it arises in biology.

What Era Are We Living In? | Robert Wright & Nikita Petrov

0:00 Teaser
3:00 What era are we living in?
3:57 David Bowie: "The Internet is an alien life form."
5:15 Bob: "It's like aliens are approaching, and we don't know their intentions"
6:23 Nikita: "COVID was weird, and nothing has been normal since"
9:02 The lab leak theory
13:58 How COVID killed consensus reality
17:36 Bob's case for international biotech monitoring
19:25 Vaccine geopolitics
24:08 Biothreat from existing AI models
25:32 Bob's candidate: We let machines guide our attention
31:51 Technological progress is like a cocaine high
33:05 How common is the idea that AI will be a big deal?
34:46 AI music is proliferating
39:58 When music is high stakes. Russian street musicians get arrested

Salt and Pepper

Sex Dolls, Robots, and AI companions

It's not what you think.

YouTube:

In this episode, Dr. Rena Malik, MD is joined by sociologist Dr. Ken Hanson to explore the surprising realities of sex tech, including sex dolls and AI companions. Together, they unpack who is really using these technologies, how they're reshaping intimacy, and the emotional bonds that can form between humans and artificial partners. Listeners will gain a deeper understanding of the motivations, implications, and future trends in sexual technology and relationships.

00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:02 Who Really Uses Sex Tech
00:04:03 Sex Dolls
00:06:24 From Dolls to Sex Robots
00:24:30 AI Companions, Replica, Attachment
00:41:00 Gen Z, Loneliness, Community
00:54:06 Doll Brothels and Industry Ethics
01:02:10 Sex Dolls, Porn, and Fantasy
01:03:26 How Academia Sees Sex Tech
01:04:05 Why Sex Research Matters
01:09:01 Conclusion

Rick Beato prompts Claude and Suno to create songs

Spintronics will support much faster electronics using less power

YouTube:

Spintronics is short for “spin electronics,” and refers to the study of the spin of the electron. In electronic devices, spintronics leverages the spin of electrons to process and store data with extreme efficiency – this technology is just a few years from reaching the consumer market, and will make your devices faster and more efficient. For a price, of course. Let’s take a look at how spintronics got here and where it’s going.

Recreating "Bullet time" from The Matrix

From YouTube:

Every once in a while, a shot comes along that pushes the art form forward. It advances cinematic language, or action filmmaking, or visual effects. Bullet Time did all three. I'm gonna try to recreate it with nothing but a personal computer and a coupla phones.

Swisher and Galloway predict that Trump is going to get rid of 3 of the following 4: Hegseth, Patel, RFK and Noem.

First up, Oprah loves Scott, and Kara comments on her role in the Nuzzi-Lizza-RFK Jr drama. Then, they react to reports that Anthropic is eyeing an IPO, and Sam Altman declaring a “code red” at OpenAI. Plus, what it means that Netflix has sweetened its bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, and Scott’s coming around on Bitcoin. Stay tuned for predictions to hear which members of the Trump administration Scott thinks will get the boot soon.

00:00 Intro
9:06 Nuzzi & Lizza & RFK Jr
16:40 Anthropic IPO?
23:17 Warner Bros. Bids
34:58 Michael Dell’s Trump Accounts Donation
38:48 Bitcoin Takes a Dive
43:09 Costco Sues U.S. Government
48:17 Predictions

On the predictions, Trump is going get rid of three of these four are out: Hegseth, Patel, RFK and possibly Noem.

It's off to work we go

On the laws of war and moral integrity

David French, Pete Hegseth Is Doing Something Even Worse Than Breaking the Law, NYTimes, Dec. 4,2025.

This is a long column, worth reading in full, but I'm only going to print a few excerpts. The opening paragraph:

In their military campaign in South America, Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth aren’t just defying the Constitution and breaking the law. They are attacking the very character and identity of the American military.

Then comes a discussion of the rationale for the laws of war and of the current case, the strikes of September 2. Then, after the half-way point:

The laws of war aren’t woke. They’re not virtue signaling. And they’re not a sign that the West has forgotten how to fight. Instead, they provide the American military with a number of concrete benefits.

First, complying with the laws of war can provide a battlefield advantage. This year I read Antony Beevor’s classic history of the end of Nazi Germany, “The Fall of Berlin 1945.” I was struck by a fascinating reality: Hitler’s troops fought fanatically against the Soviets not simply to preserve Hitler’s rule (most knew the cause was lost) but also to slow the Red Army down, to buy more time for civilians and soldiers to escape to American, British and French lines.

In short, because of our humanity and decency, Germans surrendered when they would have fought. The contrast with the brutality of the Soviets saved American lives.

I saw this reality in Iraq. By the end of my deployment in 2008, insurgents started surrendering to us, often without a fight. In one memorable incident, a terrorist walked up to the front gate of our base and turned himself in. [...]

Second, the laws of war make war less savage and true peace possible. One of the reasons the war in the Pacific was so unrelentingly grim was that the Japanese military never made the slightest pretense of complying with the laws of war. They would shoot shipwrecked survivors. They would torture prisoners. They would fight to the death even when there was no longer any military point to resistance.

We were hardly perfect, but part of our own fury was directly related to relentless Japanese violations of the laws of war. We became convinced that the Japanese would not surrender until they faced the possibility of total destruction. And when both sides abandon any commitment to decency and humanity, then the object of war changes — from victory to annihilation.

Even if only one side upholds the law of war, it not only makes war less brutal; it preserves the possibility of peace and reconciliation. That’s exactly what happened at the end of World War II. For all of our faults, we never became like the Soviets and thus have a very different relationship with our former foes.

Finally, the laws of war help preserve a soldier’s soul. We are a nation built around the notion of human dignity. Our Declaration of Independence highlights the worth of every person. Our Bill of Rights stands as one of the world’s great statements of human dignity. It is contrary to the notion of virtuous American citizenship to dehumanize people, to brutalize and oppress them.

There's more at the link, much more.

The new urbanism (waffle-style) – "Be Kind"

On the moral cost of the boat strikes [blood and circuses?]

Phil Klay, Trump’s Boat Strikes Corrode America’s Soul, NYTimes, Dec. 5, 2025.

There are many reasons to object to the policies that the Trump administration’s videos and memes showcase. Yet the images themselves also inflict wounds[...] The president inhabits a position of moral leadership. When the president and his officials sell their policies, they’re selling a version of what it means to be an American — what should evoke our love and our hate, our disgust and our delight. If all governments rest on opinion, as James Madison thought, then it is this moral shaping of the electorate that gives the president his freedom of action, and that we will still have to reckon with once he is gone.

Later:

There are many reasons to object to the policies that the Trump administration’s videos and memes showcase. Yet the images themselves also inflict wounds, of the kind that Alypius suffered when he raised his eyelids. The president inhabits a position of moral leadership. When the president and his officials sell their policies, they’re selling a version of what it means to be an American — what should evoke our love and our hate, our disgust and our delight. If all governments rest on opinion, as James Madison thought, then it is this moral shaping of the electorate that gives the president his freedom of action, and that we will still have to reckon with once he is gone.

The president’s supporters seem to grasp this. Fox News’s Jesse Watters responded with utter incredulity that the United States would offer quarter to an enemy. “We’re blowing up terrorists in the Caribbean,” he said on Monday, “but we’re supposed to rescue them from drowning if they survive?” Others went further. “I really do kind of not only want to see them killed in the water, whether they’re on the boat or in the water,” Megyn Kelly, the conservative podcaster, said, “but I’d really like to see them suffer. I would like Trump and Hegseth to make it last a long time so they lose a limb and bleed out.”

An Associated Press investigation suggests that the men Ms. Kelly would like to watch slowly die are often poor laborers: a fisherman, a motorcycle taxi driver, a bus driver, living in cinder-block homes with spotty water and power service, making at least $500 per trip ferrying cocaine, a crime Americans normally judge worthy of a prison sentence rather than a torturous death.

The Trump administration’s celebration of death brings us far from discussions of the law of armed conflict, the constitutionality of the strikes or even the Christian morality that would eventually push Augustine to formulate an early version of just-war theory. We’re in the Colosseum, one brought to us digitally so that we need not leave our homes to hear the cheers of the crowd, to watch the killing done for our entertainment and suffer the same harm that injured Alypius more than 1,600 years ago.

Adam Savage Stunned By This Pop-Up Book's Engineering!

YouTube:

Adam welcomes pop-up book designer Kelli Anderson to the workshop to learn about her latest book: Alphabet in Motion. Six years in the making, this book is an interactive exploration of the history of typography, and the engineering of its pop-up mechanisms is as elegant and beautiful as the letterforms they illustrate!

A M A Z I N G !!

Energy Abundance, Genetic Engineering, Super Intelligence: The world is changing dramatically

The technology is coming, but we can't foresee the social and political consequences. Hossenfelder, however, is skeptical about the survival of current democratic systems, which she discusses about 7 minutes into the video. She doesn't think the European welfare system will survive.

AGI considered as a collection of complex "things" that integrates with existing human macro-systems

Here's the content of a tweet by Séb Krier (you should check out comments to the original):

Yes, I've been saying this for a while now. See for example https://x.com/sebkrier/status/1968753358216302894 and Danzig's work here: https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/Machines-Bureaucracies-and-Markets-as-Artificial-Intelligences.pdf

I don't think the predominant narrative of AI as a singular entity, a Sand God, a discrete moment in time, or a 'separate species' (as Tegmark puts it) is correct or helpful. As Danzig argues, AI is indeed "alien," but only in the same way a stock market or the DMV is alien: they are all reductionist, correlative intelligences.

They strip the world of context, reducing reality to standardized inputs like prices or tokens to process information at scales humans cannot. To me at least, this shared "alien" nature normalizes AI as the latest evolution in a lineage of artificial processors we’ve lived with for centuries.

So instead of a unitary being or species, AGI should be understood as a collection of complex systems, models, and products that functions similarly to (and integrates with) existing human macro-systems. An amplifier for the bureaucracies and markets that already govern us, not a discrete 'biological-style' agent. Its governance is a continuous sociopolitical struggle (insert always has been meme) that is shaped by many different forces, not a one-time mathematical proof of safety before a launch.

Relatedly, I feel like the current discourse also has a blind spot for the 'demand' side. We obsess over the supply (R&D, model scaling, 'the AGI') as if these systems are created in a vacuum. I think this is how people end up with scenarios where AGIs are just doing things for their own sake, completely detached from human preferences (who are usually described as 'disempowered').

But they aren't; they are pulled and shaped by downstream demand, cost constraints, and efficiency needs. This economic reality has implications for how the technology develops. See also Drexler's CAIS model (https://owainevans.github.io/pdfs/Reframing_Superintelligence_FHI-TR-2019.pdf) - Drexler anticipated much of this and the core intuitions remain true, even if slightly out of date. You won’t see one omniscient agent, but a proliferation of specialized systems, models of varying sizes, and distinct products rising in parallel because that is what is economically viable.

This is why the AGI governance conversation often feels so confused. If you view AGI as a singular biological entity, you make two mistakes: safetyists project human-like 'intent' where they should be looking at incentives, and policymakers reach for a singular 'FDA' when instead they need to look into different different markets, sectors, products etc.

You can’t have a single regulator or discrete safety rules for 'The Economy' or 'The Bureaucracy,' and you won't be able to have one for 'Intelligence' either. Models still matter of course - none of this means you shouldn't test, evaluate, and understand them better - but I think we overindex on this frame a bit. And as Dean says, none of this is to downplay concerns and risks: but I do think it has implications for how to understand and address them.

AI as a new computiung paradigm

"Software 1.0 easily automates what you can specify.
Software 2.0 easily automates what you can verify."

Sharing an interesting recent conversation on AI's impact on the economy.

AI has been compared to various historical precedents: electricity, industrial revolution, etc., I think the strongest analogy is that of AI as a new computing paradigm (Software 2.0) because both are…

— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) November 16, 2025

At the very least, that’s the right way to think about the problem. Assuming stationarity is problematic for most real-world tasks.

— Masudur Rahman (@masud99r) November 17, 2025

Beyond Epstein to performative populism and Marjorie Taylor Green

An interesting conversation that refuses to indulge in speculation about the Epstein papers, while noting that Trump seems terrified off them and so is increasingly distracted, and moves from populism through peformativity and on the Marjorie Taylor Green as an odd sort of bell weather.

Are Things Falling Apart? | Robert Wright & Nikita Petrov

YouTube:

Robert Wright and Nikita Petrov discuss Trump 2.0, Peter Thiel’s Antichrist theory, Covid, the rise of “inner emigration” as survival strategy, normalized warfare in Russia, the reality-distorting effects of deepfakes, and more—all in light of invoking W. B. Yeats to ask: Are things falling apart?

0:00 Teaser
0:59 What is Bob doing in Qatar?
4:04 "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." Why Yeats felt this way
7:37 Peter Thiel's Antichrist theory
9:46 Nikita: COVID was a weird time, and nothing has been the same since
14:57 Why Bob feels things are falling apart
18:28 Were things ever in order?
19:53 "Inner emigration": tuning out the world as self-care
22:38 A reaction to a drone strike: "Loud noises don't wake me up"
25:57 Young people are turning away from social media
27:05 When Spain lost all power and cellular coverage
30:36 War as a "major inconvenience"
34:22 Bob's prediction about Ukraine's future retaliation for Pokrovsk
38:56 Nikita's impressions from Europe
42:07 Nonzero Reading Club THIS SATURDAY: Norbert Wiener's God & Golem, Inc.
47:08 Deepfakes and the future of news
52:04 Russia's first humanoid robot falls down

Note that Wright was born in 1957. At roughly 16:23 he notes that:

I grew I kind of came of age entered adolescence amid the the turmoil of the late 60s and was in fact in San Francisco uh the epicenter of it in the US kind of when I was 12 13 years old. Um and so I don't know I you would think that would kind of have anured me to it. Um, for whatever reason, this seems a lot worse than that did to me, at least at the time. I mean, where the US is, the degree of polarization, nature of the polarization, and so on. Um, but it isn't just that and different people talk about different things when you ask them if things are falling apart. I mean, there is the whole international thing with uh Trump really almost making a point of establishing that the rules just don't apply.

I'm a decade older that Wright and so arguably have lived through more of the political and cultural turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s (though I was not in San Francisco). By the time he was in his teens the war in Vietnam was over, as was the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement, but I experienced those, not to mention a steelworkers' strike the shut down the steel industry for four months. I agree with his observation that the current period seems more chaotic than things appeared back then. Is this an illusion of some sort, or are things currently more disordered? I'm not quite sure.

Wright's written a Substack post on this theme: Are Things Falling Apart?

Gavriil (3 yrs. 10 mos.) plays Tchaikovsky

Gavriil tries Tchaikovsky's "At the Church" - "В церкви" Чайковского - Гаврилушка пробует разучивать

YouTube:

The brand new oil rig, West Bollsta, worth $500 million, travels from manufacture in South Korea to Europe. Although self powered, the rig still needs a specialised high powered ocean tug, the ALP Striker, to assist with the long trip.

Mega Transports look at the vehicles that transport exceptionally large and demanding cargoes across the planet; these journeys require precise planning, which can only take place with special safety precautions and for which large teams plan months in advance.

Emotional manipulation by AI companions

New Harvard study shows AI companion apps use emotional farewells to stop user exit.

These messages produced up to 14x more engagement after goodbye.

An audit of 6 top apps captured 1,200 goodbyes and coded the immediate replies.

6 tactics emerged, premature exit guilt, fear… pic.twitter.com/omEdFIh11T

— Rohan Paul (@rohanpaul_ai) November 3, 2025

Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19258 

Hoboken on the backside

Why the Trump-backed candidate lost in New Jersey

Nick Corasaniti and Tracey Tully, 6 Takeaways From Democrat Mikie Sherrill’s Victory in New Jersey, NYTimes, Nov. 5, 2025.

The race was expected to be close. In fact, it was a blowout.

Representative Mikie Sherrill beat Jack Ciattarelli by a wide margin, becoming the second woman to be elected governor of New Jersey.

Ms. Sherrill, a Democrat, made her opposition to President Trump the cornerstone of her campaign against Mr. Ciattarelli, a Republican who crisscrossed the state with fervor, trying to replicate the inroads Mr. Trump made with Latino and Black voters in New Jersey last November.

Mr. Ciattarelli, who was endorsed by Mr. Trump in May, had gambled that his new alliance with a president he once called a charlatan would help him run up the score, even in a left-leaning state.

Here's why:

• Sherrill energized the Democratic base.
• Trump gave Sherrill an unexpected gift. [terminating the Gateway project]
• Turnout soared.
• Sherrill’s anti-Trump message resonated powerfully.
• Republicans saw a drop-off without Trump on the ballot.
• In a battle over biography, Sherrill won.

In canceling the Gateway project, Trump threatens the US economy

As you may know, Trump has decided to stop work on the Gateway Tunnel project, which involves creating a new rail line between New York City and New Jersey. As this video should make clear, that affects not just New York City and New Jersey, but the whole Northeast corridor of the US (see video starting at roughly 31:01). 

“If this system of transportation collapses, the Northeastern economy and the economy of the country collapses, so why be so shortsighted?” Governor Hochul said in an interview on MSNBC on Wednesday night.

* * * * *

00:00 Intro
03:19 The Northeast Corridor (NEC)
06:55 B+P Tunnel
12:36 The Frederick Douglass Tunnel Programme
16:01 Susquehanna River Rail Bridge
23:08 Philadelphia's 30th Street Station
25:20 The Portal North Bridge
29:28 New York's Hudson Tunnel
33:49 What it All Means
35:15 Staying On Track

Performer and audience, heartbeat in synch: Yuja Wang performs Rachmaninoff {Bonus: Music and tears]

Janet Horvath, Musicians in Sync – What Yuja Wang’s Heartbeats Tell Us, Interlude, December 7, 2023.

During the 150th anniversary of Rachmaninoff’s birth, pianist Yuja Wang undertook an extraordinary feat. She performed all the Rachmaninoff Piano Concertos and the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini in one marathon concert at Carnegie Hall on January 28, 2023. Wang appeared with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Maestro Yannick Nézet- Séguin. The audience was treated to a four-hour program, with two intermissions, consisting of 97,076 notes and 621 pages of music. But who’s counting? It turns out that noting the numbers was part of the evening. Wang was asked to wear a device to track her heartbeat during the concert, and so did the conductor, nine members of the orchestra, and six members of the audience. The results of this experiment are quite extraordinary.

Read the whole article at the link, which includes excerpts and graphs of heart-rate. This is a link to a number of articles and videos about the concert.

* * * * *

From tonebase Piano:

What Yuja’s Rachmaninof marathon reveals about the miracle of live performance.

Hosted, written and edited by Robert Fleitz ‪@RobertFleitz‬

In January 2023, Yuja Wang performed all four Rachmaninoff piano concertos and the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini in a single evening at Carnegie Hall — a feat once thought impossible. But this concert was also an experiment. Yuja, conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, members of the Philadelphia Orchestra and audience all wore heart-rate monitors, revealing the invisible instrument at the center of it all: the human heart.

In this video, Robert Fleitz explores what Carnegie Hall’s data revealed — not only about Yuja’s extraordinary focus and endurance, but about the shared physical and emotional pulse that connects performer and listener. Drawing on insights from Juilliard performance psychologist Noa Kageyama, choreographer Martha Graham, philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and pianist-teacher Seymour Bernstein, the film asks how art lives through the body, and what it means to face our own limits in sound.

The story widens beyond Carnegie Hall: Clara Schumann’s journals describing the physical toll of constant touring, Rachmaninoff’s lifelong stage fright, and the tragedy of pianist Simon Barere, who collapsed mid-performance in 1951. From those histories to this year’s Chopin Competition — where a young pianist broke down in tears mid-performance — the through-line is clear: the greatest performances touch the limits of the human body.

Featuring performances by Nikolai Lugansky and materials from Carnegie Hall’s report on the data, this film explores how the heartbeat, the body, and the audience’s breath all become part of the same living organism — and why that fragile aliveness may be the real miracle of performance.

⌛ CHAPTERS ⌛
0:00 A cold night at Carnegie Hall — January 2023
0:23 Yuja Wang takes on the impossible
1:09 Rachmaninoff’s concertos: a marathon for one pianist
1:30 The hidden instrument: the human heart
2:09 Taming the body — the pianist as cowboy
2:46 “The mood is gone.” When control meets chaos
3:05 Coughing fits and breakdowns at the Chopin Competition
3:24 The delicate, dangerous art of live performance
3:56 What Carnegie Hall’s heart-rate data revealed
4:31 The shocking calm of Yuja’s Rach 3
5:08 Heart racing in the Fourth Concerto
5:40 The science of learning, memory, and adrenaline
6:25 Lessons from Lugansky, Avdeeva, and others
7:20 “It’s not just intellectual — it’s biological.”
7:55 Schumann and Rachmaninoff at the edge of their limits
9:05 Simon Barere’s final performance
9:45 The Romantic obsession with suffering
10:12 “There is only one of you in all of time.”
11:14 Profound data and deeper questions from Carnegie Hall
11:40 When performers and audiences breathe together (feat. Lady Gaga)
12:07 Yumeka Nakagawa’s tears at the Chopin Competition
12:25 The miracle of performance
13:24 “Unable to stop smiling.”
14:08 tonebase biggest offer of the year
15:20 (Yes, we can do jokes here.)

Turning Point in the early morning

Rebuilding Corporate Research for a Stronger American Future

Tsao, Jeffrey, Beyond the Endless Frontier: Rebuilding Corporate Research for a Stronger American Future (October 13, 2025). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5600892 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5600892

The American R&D enterprise, long considered the global gold standard and a cornerstone of national security and economic competitiveness, faces mounting concerns regarding its productivity and societal relevance alongside intensifying international competition. In the meantime, a powerful component of that enterprise that, in the 20th century, helped create the science and technology foundation for our 21st century world lies dormant. That component is corporate research labs: labs that uniquely excelled at research embedded in real-world problemand-technology-rich use environments but curiosity-motivated to learn and discover with ultimate benefit to broader society. Here, we sketch a complete, though still evolving, vision for corporate research, its importance to a healthy R&D enterprise, and how we might rebuild it in a 21st century public-privatepartnership form. We refer to the vision as the "Bell Labs Xs" vision, to signify that there would be many Bell Labs Xs, all emulating the essential magic of corporate research labs such as the iconic Bell Labs of the 20th century while competing with each other and evolving in an "X-like" manner. This vision represents a radical rethinking of the Endless Frontier's sole focus on academia-harnessing American industrial prowess to create public, not just private, goods, and in doing so revitalizing American leadership in societally relevant science and technology.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

Demand, Supply, and Market Design with AI Agents

Peyman Shahidi, Gili Rusak, Benjamin S. Manning, Andrey Fradkin & John J. Horton, The Coasean Singularity? Demand, Supply, and Market Design with AI Agents, NBER, Working Paper

AI agents—autonomous systems that perceive, reason, and act on behalf of human principals—are poised to transform digital markets by dramatically reducing transaction costs. This chapter evaluates the economic implications of this transition, adopting a consumer-oriented view of agents as market participants that can search, negotiate, and transact directly. From the demand side, agent adoption reflects derived demand: users trade off decision quality against effort reduction, with outcomes mediated by agent capability and task context. On the supply side, firms will design, integrate, and monetize agents, with outcomes hinging on whether agents operate within or across platforms. At the market level, agents create efficiency gains from lower search, communication, and contracting costs, but also introduce frictions such as congestion and price obfuscation. By lowering the costs of preference elicitation, contract enforcement, and identity verification, agents expand the feasible set of market designs but also raise novel regulatory challenges. While the net welfare effects remain an empirical question, the rapid onset of AI-mediated transactions presents a unique opportunity for economic research to inform real-world policy and market design.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

Text, coding, and knowledge agents

One critical point made by Karpathy on the Dwarkesh podcast was about the difference between AI coding agents and the rest of knowledge work.

It’s clear that AI agents in coding have taken off extremely quickly. There are many reasons for this, including the fact that a…

— Aaron Levie (@levie) October 20, 2025

Growth in the American economy is now tied to AI

So is it a bubble?

If I had a way to reliably forecast financial bubbles I’d be a trading billionaire not writing political columns. https://t.co/jtPIEInPON

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) October 16, 2025

Flashback: Fireworks

Chrysanthemums Bloom

It's the time of year that the chrysanthemum (kiku) comes into bloom: a flower in Japan that's perhaps only 2nd to the cherry blossom, and one with a wide range of associations. Its luxurious petals won it the title of imperial family crest, as well as floral motif on the cover… pic.twitter.com/p5ZQVu9GjA

— Spoon & Tamago (@Johnny_suputama) October 13, 2025

The genius logic of the NATO phonetic alphabet (Alfa, Bravo, Charlie...)

YouTube:

The NATO phonetic alphabet is not a phonetic alphabet and wasn't invented by NATO. However, it has a fascinating story to tell. It is the result of years of linguistic experimentation in the wake of the violence of World War II. So let's explore its development, from ALFA to ZULU.

In this episode, we'll uncover the surprising story of how this alphabet – used by everyone from pilots to police officers – came to be. And look at the strange words that almost made the cut.

The telegraph, radio, AI, and magic

Cody Delistraty, A.I. Isn’t Magic. Lots of People Are Acting Like It Is. NYTimes, Sept. 25, 2025.

There’s a word that Sam Altman likes to use when talking about artificial intelligence: magic. Last year, he called a version of ChatGPT “magic intelligence in the sky.” In February, he referred to “magic unified intelligence.” He later posted that a recent update has “a magic to it i haven’t felt before.”

At times, A.I. can indeed feel magical. But treating it as anything other than a mere machine can have serious consequences. How many pose their deepest questions to chatbots, as if to an omniscient oracle? They ask Claude or ChatGPT: What should I do about this relationship? This job? This problem? Technology’s supposed promise of salvation — whether it’s Mars colonization, eternal life or achieving the A.I. “singularity” — has become a kind of secular religion, a mix of utopian beliefs that borders on the mystical.

Part of A.I.’s mystique comes from the fact that its inner workings aren’t entirely understood, even by its creators.

And so forth and so on. The article is about AI and magical thinking about it. But halfway through it has a telling section about magical beliefs occasioned by the invention and deployment of the telegraph and then of radio:

There’s a word that Sam Altman likes to use when talking about artificial intelligence: magic. Last year, he called a version of ChatGPT “magic intelligence in the sky.” In February, he referred to “magic unified intelligence.” He later posted that a recent update has “a magic to it i haven’t felt before.”

At times, A.I. can indeed feel magical. But treating it as anything other than a mere machine can have serious consequences. How many pose their deepest questions to chatbots, as if to an omniscient oracle? They ask Claude or ChatGPT: What should I do about this relationship? This job? This problem? Technology’s supposed promise of salvation — whether it’s Mars colonization, eternal life or achieving the A.I. “singularity” — has become a kind of secular religion, a mix of utopian beliefs that borders on the mystical.

Part of A.I.’s mystique comes from the fact that its inner workings aren’t entirely understood, even by its creators.

A bit later Delistraty observes: "People who describe A.I. engines as 'magical. seem to be saying A.I. has become so sophisticated that it is indistinguishable from what was once considered magic." And yet he missed the third Arthur C. Clark's well-known “three laws”: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

There’s more at the link.

Generals See Through the Act [at Quantico]

YouTube:

On a special edition of Shield of the Republic, Eric and Eliot break down Secretary of Defense Hegseth and President Donald Trump's speeches to the General Officer Corps at Quantico this week. They discuss the administration's ongoing damage to civil-military relations and the implications for the future of our armed forces.

Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast co-sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

Hiromi, interviewed by Rick Beato

YouTube:

In this interview, I sit down with Japanese piano virtuoso Hiromi to talk about her playing, her influences, and her approach to improvisation. We cover her career, her unique style, and what drives her as a musician.

Hiromi is AWESOME!

Steven Pinker's latest book [and the limits of psychology and beyond]

This is a peculiar and interesting discussion. The first hour and a quarter are about Pinker's latest book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows..., and then we have half an hour when Bialik and Cohen push Pinker on spiritualism, transcendent experiences, and the like. It's a peculiar juxtaposition. Though I have a bit of sympathy with Bialik and Cohen, my own position is closer to Pinker's.

The Rising Risks of Cancel Culture & The Psychology & Language That Built It!

In this explosive episode of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, Dr. Steven Pinker (renowned Harvard psychologist and author of When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows) joins Mayim Bialik and Jonathan Cohen for a no-holds-barred conversation that quickly turns into a fiery debate on the limits of science, belief, and human consciousness.

From the hidden mechanics of social dynamics and language to the perils of thought policing and cancel culture, Dr. Pinker dives deep into how shared knowledge shapes society, why what people think others believe can shift power, and how social media became a modern-day coliseum for public shaming.

But the sparks really fly when Mayim and Jonathan challenge Pinker’s staunchly materialist worldview — questioning whether extrasensory perception (ESP), near death experiences (NDEs), and higher consciousness might point to something beyond the reach of scientific instruments. Pinker doesn’t hold back, offering his sharply skeptical takes on mystical claims and pushing back against spiritual notions with cool-headed logic.

Dr. Pinker also breaks down:

• Why what others think of us actually matters
• Dangers of being too direct or too indirect — especially for neurodivergent folks
• How to create or hide common knowledge in relationships
• The first case of cancel culture on social media (and its ancient roots!)
• The thin line between freedom of speech and incitement to violence
• How distrust in science fuels conspiracy theories
• Can we depoliticize science? Or is it already too late?
• The danger of defunding academic research
• Why authoritarian regimes fear open communication
• The healthcare system: overprescription, profit motives, and how to fix it
• Is free will real? Or are we just dancing to the tune of biology and environment?

Don’t miss MBB's first-ever toe-to-toe spiritual showdown between Mayim, Jonathan, and a die-hard materialist. Whether you lean scientific, spiritual, or somewhere in between, this conversation will challenge what you think you know about reality.

CHAPTERS:
00:00 - Intro
04:04 - How Shared Knowledge Shapes Society
17:09 - Why What Others Think of Us Actually Matters
29:46 - What Happens When We Disagree on Moral Order?
38:51 - Dangers of Erosion of Trust in Institutions
52:40 - Freedom of Speech vs Incitement to Violence
1:00:45 - Dangers of Politicizing Science
1:05:10 - Dangers of Defunding Academia
1:11:52 - Mental Health System Challenges
1:17:15 - Mysticism vs Materialism Debate

The Tide Turned This Week | Heather Cox Richardson

Read “The sleeping giant is awakening“ by Robert Reich here: https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-sleeping-giant-is-awakening

We need a new set of concepts (ontology) for talking about AI

I think our entire ontology for how we talk about and conceptualise A[G]I is confused. And I wouldn't be surprised if in ten years we will look back at the discourse today and laugh at how primitive some ideas are. A few hot and uncertain takes:

The way people talk about future… pic.twitter.com/1o5oilqzQh

— Séb Krier (@sebkrier) September 18, 2025

From deeper into this long tweet:

The way people talk about future AIs/AGIs feels like a category error. Sometimes they reify future systems as self-sovereign entities with their own goals and incentives, a different species that we need to learn to co-exist with. I think that's not impossible, and I used to be a lot more sympathetic to this view, but I'm a lot less certain now and it's certainly not self-evident. Agents can still be tools, and tool agents that operate along timelines don't need to necessarily be 'separate species'-like. [...]

To me at least, AGI will likely be a distributed ecosystem of different models, built by different companies and state actors, with different capabilities, architectures, and incentive structures.

Sutan's First Day of American School!

The Lie At The Heart Of Modern Conservatism (w/ Heather Cox Richardson)

YouTube:

NOTE: This livestream was recorded on Wednesday, September 17th at 3pm ET.

Is Trump and MAGA the inevitable endpoint to conservatism in America? JVL was joined by Heather Cox Richardson to discuss the state of conservatism in American politics.

The discussion gets really interesting around 21 minutes or so when Heather Cox Richardson advances the idea that the collapse of the Soviet Union is what began the slide toward the highly polarized society we now have.

Sen. Mark Kelly: Tech Companies Should Help Pay for AI Impact | Pivot

YouTube:

In this Pivot Quick Take, Sen. Mark Kelly makes the case for his "AI for America" plan, calling on tech companies to fund job retraining and infrastructure as AI reshapes the economy — plus how he personally uses AI in day-to-day life.

Kara Swisher Talks Elon Musk, Tim Cook And The 'Non-Capitalist' Behavior Of Tech Leaders

From YouTube page:

Sep 10, 2025

In an interview with Forbes Women, editor Maggie McGrath at the 2025 Forbes Power Women's Summit, legendary tech journalist Kara Swisher gives her unfiltered take on the people and trends shaping the future.

General comments about Silicon Valley start at about 12 minutes or so.

Halal food cart on a street in Hoboken

Whoops! A transformer doesn't understand F = ma

Correct! Just as a reminder: this is what a Transformer found after looking at 10M solar systems https://t.co/cz6MpG2Qtq pic.twitter.com/OozXPKYatb

— Martin Bauer (@martinmbauer) September 10, 2025

The Greatest Night in Pop [Media Notes 174]

Ian Leslie writes about The Greatest Night in Pop, a documentary about the making of "We Are The World." The opening paragraphs:

The Netflix documentary, The Greatest Night In Pop, tells the story of the making of We Are The World, the 1985 charity single featuring (almost) everyone in American pop at the time: Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Diana Ross, Cyndi Lauper, Tina Turner, Billy Joel, Dionne Warwick…the list goes on and on.

The documentary is based on hours of footage from the night they recorded the single, only a few minutes of which was used for the original music video. The Greatest Night In Pop (TGNIP) came out eighteen months ago, and while millions of people have viewed it, I’m constantly surprised to learn that many have not. Everyone should.

If I had to recommend a documentary or just ‘something to watch on TV’ for absolutely anyone - man or woman, old or young, liberal or conservative, highbrow or lowbrow - I’d recommend The Greatest Night In Pop. It may not be the deepest, most profound ninety minutes of TV, but it is irresistibly enjoyable. And actually, like the best pop, it is deep; it just doesn’t pretend to be.

Diversity and roles:

I’ve written before about how diversity needs to be interpreted beyond demographic attributes like race and gender to temperament and personality. The British management researcher Meredith Belbin constructed a famous inventory of behavioural types which together make up a successful team: the Resource Investigator, the Coordinator, the Shaper, the Catalyst, and so on.

TGNIP prompted me to come up with an inventory of my own: the Decider, the Connector, the Conscience, the Old Buck, the Disrupter, the Weirdo, and the Lover.

The players:

• The Decider: Quincy Jones
• The Connector: Lionel Richie
• The Conscience: Bob Geldof
• The Old Buck: Smokey robinson
• The Disrupter: Stevie Wonder
• The Weirdo: Bob Dylan
• The Lover: Diana Ross

H/t Tyler Cowen.

Turning Point, fireworks, coffee