Hsieh Forbes Column: Dark Chocolate And Placebos Are Also Good For Your Health

My latest Forbes column is now out: "Dark Chocolate And Placebos Are Also Good For Your Health"

Clocks Fool AI

"AI Sucks at Reading Clocks". (Via H.R.)

Waymo Safety

Waymos seem pretty safe, after one looks at all the data: "After 50 million miles, Waymos crash a lot less than human drivers"

Nvidia Optics

IEEE: "A Crucial Optical Technology Has Finally Arrived"

AI-Resistant Jobs

Quartz: "The 10 most AI-resistant jobs".

I disagree with several the jobs on that list; I think many of them will be replaced by AI more easily than expected.

No Plutonium For You

"Sydney 'science nerd' may face jail for importing plutonium in bid to collect all elements of periodic table"

Humanoid Robot Update

"The AI robots are coming. The world is not ready"

Personally, I think this will be an enormous boon to humanity.

Quantum Apocalypse? Or Not

Wired: "The Quantum Apocalypse Is Coming. Be Very Afraid"

AI Drug Repurposing

"Doctors Told Him He Was Going to Die. Then A.I. Saved His Life."

In labs around the world, scientists are using A.I. to search among existing medicines for treatments that work for rare diseases. Drug repurposing, as it’s called, is not new, but the use of machine learning is speeding up the process — and could expand the treatment possibilities for people with rare diseases and few options.

Babies And Bad Medical Care

Alex Tabarrok: "What Did We Learn From Torturing Babies?" (Via G.F.)

Corner Crossings Legal

Federal judge rules that diagonal "corner crossings" from one square of public land to another square does *not* constitute trespassing of the adjacent private land on the opposite corners. (Via Dave Jilk.)

Good Question

A darned good question.

It's a reasonable question .. pic.twitter.com/Q9BufTFyJ6

— Andy Burge 🌊🇬🇧🇪🇺 (@AndyGJBurge) March 20, 2025

Hansen On Drug Development

Excellent video by AbCellera CEO Carl Hansen: "Why medicines are miracles of science and technology"

Astonishingly Agile Robots

Boston Dynamics robots are amazingly agile.

Volokh On Pardons And Autopens

"Pardons and Autopen Signatures: A 2024 Appellate Decision Says Pardons Don't Have to Be Signed (or Even Written) at All".  

Professor Volokh notes:

Of course, something is required, and that something is presumably a statement by the President that he is pardoning someone. If (and this is a very big if) a President actually didn't make such a statement, and an assistant just affixed the President's signature to a document purporting to be a pardon without the President's authorization, then I don't see how that would be a valid pardon (at least unless it's somehow ratified by the relevant President). But that turns on a factual question about whether the President was actually involved in the creation of the pardons, not on a legal question about whether an autopen signature renders the pardon invalid.

Waterbending

"Wild 'Waterbending' Technique Uses Waves to Steer Floating Objects With Precision". (Via H.R.)

Introvert Jobs

"The Best 10 High-Paying Jobs for Introverts in 2025".

"Radiologist" is number 1 on the list.  (Disregard the inaccurate salary estimate.)

Bye Bye FiveThirtyEight

"ABC Shuts Down FiveThirtyEight, and Pulls the Plug on Its Website"

IBM On Quantum Computing

"Quantum computing's future is almost here, IBM chief says"

More Students Enter Defense Tech

"Stanford students used to chase jobs at Meta and Google. Now they want to work on war"

At Stanford, building tech for the U.S. government is cool again. Students are dropping out to form defense tech startups and compete for coveted internships at government security agencies or major private contractors. Undergraduates, business school students, recent alumni now working in defense tech, and faculty show a booming interest in building war machines for the United States...

Creating A Recovery USB Drive

"How to Create a Recovery USB Drive to Fix Your Computer". Includes details for both Windows and MacOS.

AI Art Auction

"Christie's AI art auction outpaces expectations, bringing in more than $728,000"

Teachers And AI

"I Used to Teach Students. Now I Catch ChatGPT Cheats". (Via A.S.)

Geomagnetic Birds

"Bird is the (Geomagnetic) Word". (Via H.R.)

Quantum Computing Update

MIT Technology Review: "Toward a code-breaking quantum computer"

Military AI Update

"Scale AI announces multimillion-dollar defense deal, a major step in U.S. military automation"

S.u.S.E. History

"The History of S.u.S.E." (Via Gus Van Horn.)

Drone Reformation

"Air Weapons: The Drone Reformation"

Browser Tab Pong

"What do you do with your unclosed browser tabs? I find that they take up a lot of screen space. So this week I figured out how to run pong inside mine.

Klein On Imminent AGI

Ezra Klein in New York Times: "The Government Knows A.G.I. Is Coming"

For the last couple of months, I have had this strange experience: Person after person -- from artificial intelligence labs, from government -- has been coming to me saying: It's really about to happen. We're about to get to artificial general intelligence. 

What they mean is that they have believed, for a long time, that we are on a path to creating transformational artificial intelligence capable of doing basically anything a human being could do behind a computer -- but better. They thought it would take somewhere from five to 15 years to develop. But now they believe it's coming in two to three years, during Donald Trump’s second term. 

They believe it because of the products they're releasing right now and what they're seeing inside the places they work. And I think they're right...

Full interview by Ezra Klein with Ben Buchanan, the former special adviser for artificial intelligence in the Biden White House here.

AI And Drug Discovery

Derek Lowe: "Claims of an AI revolution in drug discovery are missing the biggest problem"

Adcock On Humanoid Robots

Video: "Brett Adcock: Humanoid Robots, Trillions of Dollars & The Future of Humanity"

I think his company FigureAI is very exciting, and could be a household name in a few years.  

Key quote (at 12:47 minutes), "The world of the future is going to be crazy and in such a good way!"

Bye Bye Skype

"Microsoft will end Skype in May, leaving some users upset"

Hsieh Forbes Column: When Medical AI Performs Better Than Human Doctors

My latest Forbes column is now out: "When Medical AI Performs Better Than Human Doctors"

Hub Motor Update

"Donut Lab and the electric motors everyone has been talking about". (Via H.R.)