China And AI

"China dismisses AI slowdown calls and blasts 'fearmongering' from U.S. tech leaders". 

Prediction: China will have nothing to do with any proposed "AI pause". US politicians who think we will reach an international agreement on this are deluding themselves.

Damasio On Consciousness

"Does Consciousness Require a Body?"

Taxonomy of Omnicidal Futures Involving AI

Given all the recent drama about "AI will kill us all!", I thought I'd mention this 2025 paper by Critch and Tsimerman laying out a helpful conceptual framework for discussion: "A Taxonomy of Omnicidal Futures Involving Artificial Intelligence"

Potential Versus Actual Infinity

Joel Hamkins: "Potential versus Actual Infinity". Link to the transcript.

Fermat Again

Anthropic: "Formalizing Fermat's Last Theorem"

We are sharing the first complete computer-checked proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. Claude worked largely autonomously over 11 days to write the proof in the Lean programming language. Below, we describe how the formalization was done and share some thoughts about what this work could mean for research mathematics.

High Intensity Exercise Effects

"High-intensity sprints can trigger molecular changes in the bloodstream"

Not So Fast On AI Reading Chest X-rays

"Commercially available chest X-ray AI products fail to improve diagnostic accuracy, real world study shows". 

Link to original academic article, "Artificial Intelligence-Assisted Chest Radiography: A Prospective Crossover Multi-Reader Study on Diagnostic Performance and Workflow Efficiency"

Hilbert Space

"In Hilbert Space, All Things Are Quantumly Possible"

Listener-Specific Audio

"Engineers develop single-element speaker that beams audio to specific listeners". (Via H.R.)

Waymos In Denver

"Waymo will offer public rides in Denver starting Tuesday". (This refers to yesterday, Tuesday 9/1/2026.)

Counterpoint To Patel On Open AI

Gary Marcus: "Dwarkesh Patels's wildly popular but dangerously misleading account of the OpenAI Hugging Face incident"

Dwarkesh Patel On The Open AI Incident

Dwarkesh Patel: "The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations" 

Over the course of 3 months at OpenAI, 3 consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes. 

This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself. 

All this happened while humans remained more-or-less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy. 

I’ve spent the last three days reading through these reports and trying to understand exactly what happened. 

Here is my attempt to tell the whole story in plain English

Manifolds

"What Is a Manifold?" Very clear explanation.

US Infrastructure Warning

Newsweek: "Major Warning Issued About Attacks on US Water Supply"

Water systems are considered particularly attractive targets because they provide an essential public service and often rely on legacy equipment that can be difficult and expensive to secure. A successful attack on a water utility could disrupt treatment processes, affect service availability or require costly emergency responses.

Dangerous Scam

"How a Stranger Used One Text Message to Steal My Entire Digital Life". 

The key failure point was reading back the 6-digit authentication code to the scammer, due to clever social engineering. But there is much, much more food for thought.

Defending Data Centers

Noah Smith: "Banning data centers would blow up the U.S. economy"

Nvidia MultiMillionaires

"50% of Nvidia Employees Are Now Worth Over $25 Million"

Denver Waymo Update

"Waymo cars will land in Denver 'soon.' Here's what you should know before you hop in one."

Quantum Computing Timeline?

"Aram Harrow, quantum researcher: 'These computers won't take 10 years; they’ll arrive sooner'"

Ordinary Abundance

Ordinary Abundance: Great essay describing where we've been vs. where we are now.

Edward Bellamy once imagined that music on demand would be "the limit of human felicity." A modern apartment is full of things that once drew the same kind of awe...

Super Super Glue

"Engineers Create Superglue That Bonds in 10 Seconds, Holds For Years And Gets Stronger Underwater". (Via H.R.)

Case Study On Identity Theft

"How a Stranger Used One Text Message to Steal My Entire Digital Life"

When To Use AI

Bruce Schneier: "Should you use AI for a task? Here's a simple way to decide". I really like his gym/workout analogy.

Airline Bag Fees

Today's lesson in perverse incentives -- airline bag fees. Sadly, Southwest Airlines succumbed in 2025 and started charging bag fees. (Via Quartz Daily Brief.)

Domestic airfare carries a 7.5% federal excise tax that funds the FAA through the Airport and Airway Trust Fund. The IRS has ruled that checked-bag fees aren't payment for the "transportation of a person", so they escape that tax entirely. 

That single distinction is the whole game. Move a dollar from the fare column to the fee column and the airline keeps an extra 7.5 cents. Gary Leff, who writes the aviation blog View From the Wing, calculated that American Airlines alone was saving over $75 million a year in taxes by charging for bags instead of folding the cost into fares. 

Southwest, by including two free checked bags for decades, paid more tax on the same trip than rivals who unbundled. Washington was penalizing the one airline that didn't nickel-and-dime.

The Largest Tweetable Number

"The Largest Tweetable Number"

Old Guiness

"Divers find 162-year-old Guinness in shipwreck off the English coast"

SpaceX Prospects

"SpaceX at the Inflection Point: Why the CapEx Fear Trade is Mispricing a Civilizational Investment"

Best Password Managers

"The Best Password Managers to Secure Your Digital Life"

Hsieh Forbes Article: AI And Cardiac Death Detection

My latest Forbes column is now out: "How Artificial Intelligence Discovered A New Way To Detect Patients At Risk Of Cardiac Death". 

This was a pretty cool discovery by AI, with implications in both basic cardiac physiology and practical patient care.

Waymo In Denver Update

Update on upcoming Waymo robotaxi launch in Denver.

Math Nerds In Demand

WSJ: "The Million-Dollar Talent Wars for 20-Something Math Geniuses". Alternate link.

There has never been a better time to be a math nerd. 

New college graduates and Ph.D.s are now securing million-dollar pay deals from elite trading firms seeking to secure the best and brightest amid fierce competition from artificial-intelligence companies...

Radiologist Demand

"A decade after the 'Godfather of AI' said radiologists were obsolete, their salaries are up to $571K and demand is growing fast"

Neuralink Update

"Neuralink lets people with paralysis drive wheelchairs using only their thoughts". (Via H.R.)

Space Radiology

"SpaceXray: Feasibility and Diagnostic Capabilities of On-Orbit Medical Radiography"

Lawyers Vs. Robots

Alex Tabarrok: "Trial Lawyers Lobby Against Autonomous Vehicles"

Gold Is Not Inert

"Gold isn't inert, it just has bodyguards protecting it". (Via H.R.)

Autonomous Robot Update

"How AI could enable autonomous robot workers in workplaces -- and maybe homes". (Via H.R.)

Stolen French Fries Taste Better

"Stolen fries are spicier than justice: How covert larceny enhances taste". (Note: I don't condone actual theft of food.)

Neuroprosthetics Update

"A Man With Paralysis Has Regained Feeling and Movement in His Hands After an Experimental Brain Implant". 

Original article in Nature: "A neuroprosthesis for restoring hand movement and sensation in a person with complete tetraplegia".

PLA Vs. USN

"PLA scientists propose a plan to destroy US carrier groups from 3,000 km away". If accurate, this is not good news for the US.

Tap-To-Pay Fraud

"Scammers Are Tapping into Contactless Payments"

Single Problem Math Books

"23 Mathematics Books Dedicated to a Single Problem". 

 FWIW, I really liked Stan Wagon's excellent book on the mind-binding Banach-Tarski Paradox.

iPhone Security

NYT: "The 4 iPhone Security Settings You Should Turn On Right Now"

Medical Literature Reliability

Dr. F. Perry Wilson: "Can We Trust the Medical Literature?"

Catching AI Cheaters

"Brown Professor Suspects Majority of His Class Used AI to Cheat"

Pigeon Radiologists

"Pigeons excel at spotting abnormalities on CT scans"

Tough Times In SF

The New York Times reports that a salary of $180,000 is not a living wage in San Francisco.

Synthetic "Cell"

"World's first synthetic cell with a complete life cycle could revolutionize biological engineering"

AI Vs. Medieval Ciphers

"Plots, love letters and remedies: The medieval secrets being revealed by AI"

Hsieh Forbes Column: "Midjourney's Whole Body Ultrasound System—A Radiologist's Thoughts"

My latest Forbes is out: "Midjourney's Whole Body Ultrasound System -- A Radiologist's Thoughts"

Starfall

"With Starfall, SpaceX eyes an edge in global cargo delivery from orbit". (Via H.R.)

Quantum Computing Progress

"Aram Harrow, quantum researcher: 'These computers won't take 10 years; they'll arrive sooner'"

Ford's AI Flop

"Ford rehires human engineers after AI fails to match quality checks"

"Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that would produce a high-quality product." -- Charles Poon, vice president of vehicle hardware engineering

AI Recursive Self-Improvement

Anthropic: "When AI builds itself".

DNA Of Plague

"Ancient DNA is rewriting the history of plague"

AI Won't Replace Software Engineers

"Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't"

Romeo And Juliet And Kitty

That time a cat interrupted a stage performance of "Romeo and Juliet" during the pivotal death scene. (Click through to see video.)

Intelligent Bandages

"Scientists Create 'Intelligent' Bandage That Targets Harmful Bacteria". (Via H.R.)

Tao On AI

"How Terry Tao Became an Evangelist for AI in Math"

Wolfram On Rules And Games

"Games between Programs: The Ruliology of Competition"

Apple Device Charging

Lots of good info here: "The Apple Charging Situation". 

Of note, the 80% charging limit really does make a difference in battery life: "This is the math behind Optimized Battery Charging. Every 10% Apple holds back roughly doubles battery lifespan."

Functional Analysis Primer

An introduction to functional analysis for science and engineering"

This is a tutorial introduction to the functional analysis mathematics needed in many physical problems, such as in waves in continuous media. Functional analysis takes us beyond finite matrices, allowing us to work with infinite sets of continuous functions. It resolves important issues, such as whether, why and how we can practically reduce such problems to finite matrix approximations. It is, however, difficult to find a readable introduction that is efficient and comprehensible for scientists and engineers. Here, I have selected only the topics necessary for the most important results, but the argument is mathematically complete and self-contained. 

The article starts from sets and sequences of real numbers. It then develops spaces of vectors or functions, introducing the concepts of norms and metrics that allow us to consider how these can converge. Adding the inner product, it introduces Hilbert spaces, and the key forms of operators that map within or between such spaces. This leads to the concept of compact operators, which allows us to resolve many difficulties of working with infinite sets of vectors or functions. We then introduce Hilbert-Schmidt operators, which are compact operators encountered extensively in physical problems, such as those involving waves. 

Finally, it introduces the eigenfunctions for major classes of operators, and their powerful properties, and ends with singular-value decomposition of operators. This article is written in a style that is complementary to that of standard mathematical treatments; by relegating longer proofs to a separate section, 

I have attempted to retain a clear narrative flow and motivation in developing the mathematical structure. Hopefully, the result is useful to a broader readership who need to understand this mathematics, especially in physical science and engineering.

AI Bootstrapping

"SoftBank's Masayoshi Son says AI is already designing OpenAI's next model"

New Octopus

"A Tiny Bright-Blue Octopus Found in the Galápagos Is Completely New to Science". (Via H.R.)

Your Own AI Stock Trader

"Robinhood launched agentic trading and an agentic credit card today that will allow AI agents to trade equities and make credit card purchases on customers' behalf."

Costco Theory Of The Internet

"The Costco theory of the internet"

Using AI To Sell Your House

NYT: "I Tried to Sell My House With a Chatbot" 

In the end, using A.I. netted me more than $90,000. That includes the premium over the asking price, plus the roughly $36,000 in fees I didn’t pay. I'm not sure how replicable my experience would be for anyone less versed than me in technology.

Less Drag

"A Fundamental Principle of Aeronautical Engineering Has Been Overturned"

Aiko Yakino, associate professor at Tohoku University's Institute of Fluid Science, and her research group were the first in the world to demonstrate that aerodynamic drag can be reduced by up to 43.6 percent simply by applying distributed micro-roughness (DMR), a surface roughness so fine and irregular that it cannot be distinguished by the naked eye. 

This technology is fundamentally different from the rivulet (“shark skin”) process, which is a known air-drag-reduction technology. The rivulet process mimics the fine longitudinal grooves in shark skin, and by carving grooves approximately 0.1 millimeter wide along the direction of airflow, it aligns the vortices that occur near the wall surface of turbulent airflow areas. DMR, on the other hand, delays the switch from laminar to turbulent flow by means of random and minute irregularities. The flow zones it affects and the mechanisms it employs are based on completely different concepts.

Our Latest Overlords

"Scientists Build a Living AI Device Using Real Brain Cells". (Via H.R.)

Do LLMs Need Sleep?

Maybe you don't want your LLMs to work 24/7: "Do Language Models Need Sleep? Offline Recurrence for Improved Online Inference".  Abstract: 

Transformer-based large language models are increasingly used for long-horizon tasks; however, their attention mechanism scales poorly with context length. To handle this, we study a sleep-like consolidation mechanism in which a model periodically converts recent context into persistent fast weights before clearing its key-value cache. During sleep, the model performs offline recurrent passes over the accumulated context and updates the fast weights in its state-space model (SSM) blocks through a learned local rule. During inference, this shifts extra computation to sleep while preserving the latency of wake-time prediction. We test our method on controlled synthetic tasks, including cellular automata and multi-hop graph retrieval, as well as a realistic math reasoning task, on which a regular transformer as well as SSM-attention hybrid models fail. We then show that increasing sleep duration for our models improves performance, with the largest gains on examples that require deeper reasoning. 

(Via S.S.)

Fairer Chess?

I think my chess-playing friends will hate this idea: "Chess isn't fair -- so rearrange the pieces"

Encryption Update

EFF: "End-to-End Encrypted RCS Comes to Apple and Android Chats"

Now, those conversations can also benefit from the increased privacy and security that end-to-end encryption offers, making it so neither Google, Apple, nor the cellular carriers have access to the contents of messages. This feature comes courtesy of both Apple and Google supporting the GSMA RCS Universal Profile 3.0, which implements the Messaging Layer Security protocol for encryption. Metadata will likely still be collected and stored for these conversations, making alternatives like Signal still a better option for many conversations. Likewise, if you back up those conversations to the cloud, they may be stored unencrypted unless you enable Advanced Data Protection on iOS (Google Messages end-to-end encrypts the text of messages in backups, but not the media, so we’d like to see a similar offering as ADP on Android). Still, this is a significant step forward for the privacy of millions of conversations worldwide.

Rubber Band Magic

Danny Urbanus: "Penn & Teller FOOLED by a simple rubber band!" (Video, via Studio Neat.)

Two Beers And A Puppy

"2 Beers and a Puppy: A Helpful Test for Figuring Out Someone's Value in Your Life"

AI And Unit Distance Problem

"An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"

Fabricated AI Quotes in Book Perils Of AI Fabrications

Oops. Per the NYT: "Book on Truth in the Age of AI Contains Quotes Made Up by AI"

More Coffee Benefits

"Science Has Found Even More Ways Coffee Is Good for You"

Pringles Geometry

"The Geometry Behind Pringles"

A Pringle is a hyperbolic paraboloid. This is not a coincidence or a marketing flourish. It is a load-bearing geometric fact — and it explains everything: the stack, the snap, the can, and why the bottom chip doesn't crumble. 

Logarithmic Representation Of Observable Universe

"Logarithmic representation of the observable universe. Notable astronomical objects are annotated. Distance from Earth increases exponentially from center to edge. Celestial bodies were enlarged to appreciate their shapes."

Tao On Measure Theory

Terence Tao's new textbook, "An Introduction To Measure Theory"! (Full text, free PDF version.)

Psychedelic Science

"Science gets closer to understanding how a psychedelic trip changes the brain"

Things Not To Say To Patients

Mayo Clinic: "Never-Words: What Not to Say to Patients With Serious Illness"

For example: 

Who Gets CPR?

Women are less likely than men to receive bystander CPR. Here's why.

Shortcut To Mars

"Scientist accidentally finds shortcut to Mars that could slash travel time in half"

Viking Coins

"Largest Viking Age coin hoard ever found in Norway astonishes archaeologists". (Via H.R.)

Negative Time?

"Physicists have measured 'negative time' in the lab". Link to original paper.

Losing Infinity?

"What Can We Gain by Losing Infinity?"

AI And Water Use

"AI Is Not Draining the Colorado River. I Measured It." 

Summary from Beyond Euclid:

An engineer working on the Colorado River tracked every AI interaction he had over 11 weeks — 100 sessions, an iOS app, 15,000 words of text, countless policy documents. Total water footprint: about 5 gallons. One diesel drive from Tucson to his office that same period: 110 gallons. All US data centers account for 0.3% of the country’s total water use. Agriculture takes 80% of the Colorado River. The river’s problem isn’t AI. It’s a 1922 water-sharing agreement based on the wrong math, and a century of warming since. But what went viral was AI water use.

How To Read A Clinical Trial Report

Dr. Bishal Gyawali: "How I Read a Clinical Trial Report? A Primer for Busy Clinicians". 

Although the article is aimed at physicians, it has lots of useful tips for non-physicians seeking to properly interpret the latest "hot" medical article on some dramatic breakthrough.

Infrasonics

"Infrasound waves stop kitchen fires, but can they replace sprinklers?" (Via H.R.)

Ping Pong Robot

"Ping-pong robot Ace makes history by beating top-level human players". (Click through to see video.)

Iliad Fragment

"Archaeologists Unearth a Papyrus Fragment From the 'Iliad' Tucked Inside the Wrappings of a 1,600-Year-Old Egyptian Mummy"

TSA X-rays

"What Do TSA Agents See When They Scan Your Bags?"

Volcanic Lightning

"Physicists Say They've Cracked the Mystery of Volcanic Lightning". (Via H.R.)

Rebuilding Civilization

"CivOS (Civilization OS) is a fully offline, AI-powered civilization accelerator designed to be downloaded today and activated after any collapse scenario."

65 Weird Shopping Items

"65 weird things with near-perfect reviews that are truly life-changing". (Via Gus Van Horn.)

Airline Booking Tips

"Tips for booking the cheapest airfare and best days to fly"

Not A Crisis

"There is no imminent infectious disease crisis at the border"

Teaching Kids To Use Typewriters

"A college instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work and teach life lessons" 

Like a rotary phone, the manual typewriter appears simple but is not intuitive to the smartphone generation. Phelps demonstrated how to feed the paper manually, striking the keys with force but not so hard the letters would smudge. She explained that the dinging bell signifies the end of a line and the need to manually return the carriage to start the next line. (“Oh,” said one student, “that’s why it’s called ‘return.’”)

Hsieh Forbes Column: Unintended Consequences Of Government Medical Payment Policies

My latest Forbes column is now out:: "How Government Attempts To Reduce Health Spending Can Paradoxically Raise Health Costs"