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The first cars bold enough to drive themselves

Cars, Features, General Motors, self-driving car, self-driving technology, self-driving vehicle / 9u50fv / February 23, 2026

Quevedo’s telekino of 1904 was the first step on the road to autonomous Waymos.

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

No one knows exactly when the vehicles we drive will finally wrest the steering wheel from us. But the age of the autonomous automobile isn’t some sudden Big Bang. It’s more of a slow crawl, one that started during the Roosevelt administration. And that’s Theodore, not Franklin. And not in America, but in Spain, by someone you’ve probably never heard of.

His name was Leonardo Torres Quevedo, a Spanish engineer born in Santa Cruz, Spain, in 1852. Smart? In 1914, he developed a mechanical chess machine that autonomously played against humans. But more than a decade earlier, he pioneered the development of remote-control systems. What he wrought was brilliant, if crude—and certainly ahead of its time.

The first wireless control

It was called the Telekino, a name drawn from the Greek “tele,” meaning at a distance, and “kino,” meaning movement. Patented in Spain, France, and the United States, it was conceived as a way to prevent airship accidents. The Telekino transmitted wireless signals to a small receiver known as a coherer, which detected electromagnetic waves and transformed them into an electrical current. This current was amplified and sent on to electromagnets that slowly rotated a switch controlling the proper servomotor. Quevedo could issue 19 distinct commands to the systems of an airship without ever touching a control cable.

By 1904, he was using the Telekino to direct a small, three-wheeled vehicle from nearly 100 feet away. It was the earliest recorded instance of a vehicle being controlled by radio. After that, Quevedo demonstrated the system’s usefulness aboard boats and even torpedoes, but here the story slows. The Spanish Crown, cautious and reluctant to invest, withheld its support. Without funding, Quevedo couldn’t build and sell the Telekino.

But he had shown that a machine could be guided by signals. It would be more than a century before that notion would reach fruition. But that doesn’t mean others didn’t try.

Leave it to Ohio

Dayton, Ohio, August 5, 1921. The country was in the thick of the automotive age, and Dayton stood as one of its industrious nerve centers. General Motors had established a strong presence there with its Frigidaire Division, promising a future of electrified domestic bliss. Meanwhile, across town, engineers at Delco, the Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company, were refining the very heart of the automobile. This was a place where invention was not merely encouraged, but expected.

But on this particular summer afternoon, the most remarkable innovation did not come from the factory floor or the corporate drafting room. It came instead from the US Army, an outfit not usually known for whimsical experimentation. It sent a small, three-wheeled vehicle, scarcely eight feet long and fitted with radio equipment, rolling through the city’s business district. The vehicle moved without a driver. Some 50 feet behind it, Captain R. E. Vaughn of nearby McCook Field guided its movement by radio signal.

1926: A woman smiles and waves from the driver's seat of a Chandler convertible parked on a gravel road near a coastline. She wears an overcoat and a cloche hat — A 1926 Chandler. Obviously, this one is human-driven—you can tell by the human waving from the driver’s seat. Credit: American Stock/Getty Images

Four years later, the spectacle reappeared. This time it was on the streets of New York City, where a crowd along Broadway watched as a 1926 Chandler, sitting quietly at the curb, came to life. The engine turned, the gears engaged, and it pulled smoothly into the stream of traffic before making its way up Fifth Avenue without a driver. Dubbed the “American Wonder” by its creator, Francis P. Houdina, the car responded to radio commands transmitted from a chase car. Signals were received by antennas atop the Chandler, where they triggered circuit breakers and small electric motors that operated the steering, throttle, brakes, and horn.

The idea proved too tantalizing to fade. In Cincinnati, a Toledo inventor named Maurice J. Francill took up the cause in 1928. Francill, who styled himself “America’s Radio Wizard,” demonstrated how radio control could move Ford automobiles without a driver. In a series of stage-like performances, he also milked cows, baked bread, and operated a laundry, all through radio command. By 1936, newspapers from Ohio to California were still reporting his feats.

“Francill claims that he can accomplish anything the human hand can do by radio,” the Orange County News observed. “Eight pounds [3.6 kg] of delicate brain-like radio apparatus was employed to control the lights, ignition system, horn and start the motor running. Five pounds [2.3 kg] of radio apparatus is required to guide the car.”

These vehicles may seem like novelties today, but they’re early proof that the automobile can be guided by something other than humans.

Detroit buys into the dream

The dream of a self-driving automobile did not vanish when these moments passed. It lingered, an idea returned to again and again, particularly in the years when America believed that anything was possible.

At the 1939 New York World’s Fair, General Motors offered a glimpse of that future with its enormous Futurama exhibit. Seated above a raised platform, fairgoers saw a miniature city where tiny electric cars moved serenely along highways without drivers. The cars, they were told, would one day be guided by radio signals and electric currents running through cables and circuits beneath the pavement, creating an electromagnetic field that could both power the vehicles and guide their course. It was a bold, imaginative vision—and characteristic of a time when modern engineering was forecast to remake the world.

After the war, engineers did not let the idea fade. They continued to work on the idea of communication between road and machine. At General Motors’ Motorama, a traveling showcase of the car’s newest vehicles and latest ideas, one display in 1956 captured the imagination of audiences across the country. GM unveiled a sleek, gas turbine–powered automobile, sheathed in titanium and brimming with the promise of autonomous driving.

GM's Firebird II concept from 1956 — The Firebird II concept from 1956 could drive itself on special roads. Credit: General Motors

Beneath certain stretches of highway, GM proposed laying an electronic strip. When the car traveled over it, sensors would lock onto the signal, guiding the vehicle automatically along its lane. The driver would simply lean back, hands free from the wheel, and watch the miles roll by. Onboard amenities inexplicably included an orange juice dispenser.

Proof of concept

By 1958, the idea became a reality. On a plain stretch of highway outside Lincoln, Nebraska, it was put to the test. The state’s Department of Roads embedded a 400-foot (121 m) length of the roadway with electric circuits, while engineers from RCA and General Motors brought specially fitted Chevrolets to test it. Observers watched as the driverless cars steered themselves, responding to the buried signal beneath the pavement.

A few years later, across the Atlantic, the United Kingdom’s Transport and Road Research Laboratory undertook its own experiments. Using a Citroën DS, they laid magnetic cables beneath a test track and sent the car down it at speeds of up to 80 mph (129 km/h). Wind and weather made no difference; the DS held its line faithfully.

Autonomy emerges in the modern age

Fast forward to 1986, and German scientist Ernst Dickmanns, as part of his position with the German armed forces, began testing an autonomously driving Mercedes-Benz using computers, cameras, and sensors, not unlike modern-day cars. Within a year, it was travelling down the Autobahn at nearly 55 mph (89 km/h). That was enough to capture the attention of Daimler-Benz, which helped fund further research.

Several years later, in October 1994, Dickmanns gathered his research team at Charles de Gaulle Airport outside Paris, where they met a delegation of high-ranking officials. Parked at the curb were two sedans. They appeared ordinary but were fitted with cameras, sensors, and onboard computers. The guests climbed in, and the cars made their way toward the nearby thoroughfare. Then, with the traffic flowing steadily around them, the engineers switched the vehicles into self-driving mode and took their hands off the wheel. The cars held their lanes, adjusted their speed, and followed the road’s gentle curves without driver intervention.

An illustration of a 1994 driverless car — The experimental driverless car VaMP (Versuchsfahrzeug für autonome Mobilität und Rechnersehen), which was developed during the European research project PROMETHEUS: (top left) components for autonomous driving; (right) VaMP and view into passenger cabin (lower right); (lower left) bifocal camera arrangement (front) on yaw platform. Credit: CC BY-SA 3.0

A year later, Dickmanns would travel from Bavaria to Denmark, a trip of more than 1,056 miles (1,700 km), reaching speeds of nearly 110 mph (177 km/h). Unfortunately, Daimler lost interest and cut funding for the effort. Dickmann’s project came to a halt, but the modern-day technology was in place to set the stage for what came next.

The military sparks innovation–again

By the turn of the century, the federal government had created a new research arm of the Pentagon, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. Its mission was ambitious: to develop technologies that could protect American soldiers on the battlefield. Among its goals was the creation of vehicles that could drive themselves, sparing troops the dangers of roadside ambushes and explosive traps.

To accelerate progress, DARPA announced a competition to build a driverless vehicle capable of traveling 142 miles (229 km) across the Mojave Desert. The prize was $1 million, though the real prize was the knowledge gained along the way.

When race day arrived, the results were humbling. One by one, every vehicle failed to finish. But in the sun and dust of the Mojave, a community emerged, one of engineers, programmers, and dreamers who believed that the autonomous vehicle was not a fantasy but a problem to be solved. Twenty years later, their work has brought the idea closer to everyday reality than ever before.

By themselves, these efforts did not yet give the world the self-driving car. But these successful experiments demonstrate the ability to make a fantasy reality. It’s also a reminder that while the tech industry likes to position itself as a disruptor bringing self-driving cars to market, Detroit was dreaming about and demonstrating autonomous transportation long before Silicon Valley existed.

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Study shows how rocket launches pollute the atmosphere

industrial waste, Space, space pollution, spacex, syndication / 9u50fv / February 22, 2026

Atmospheric scientist Laura Revell, with the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, presented research showing that rocket exhaust in the atmosphere can erase some of the hard-won gains in mitigating ozone depletion.

In a high-growth scenario for the space industry, there could be as many as 2,000 launches per year, which her modeling shows could result in about 3 percent ozone loss, equal to the atmospheric impacts of a bad wildfire season in Australia. She said most of the damage comes from chlorine-rich solid rocket fuels and black carbon in the plumes.

The black carbon could also warm parts of the stratosphere by about half-a-degree Celsius as it absorbs sunlight. That heats the surrounding air and can shift winds that steer storms and areas of precipitation.

“This is probably not a fuel type that we want to start using in massive quantities in the future,” she added.

Researchers at the conference estimated that in the past five years, the mass of human‑made material injected into the upper atmosphere by re‑entries has doubled to nearly a kiloton a year. For some metals like lithium, the amount is already much larger than that contributed by disintegrating meteors.

In the emerging field of space sustainability science, researchers say orbital space and near-space should be considered part of the global environment. A 2022 journal article co-authored by Moriba Jah, a professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin, argued that the upper reaches of the atmosphere are experiencing increased impacts from human activities.

The expanding commercial use of what appears to be a free resource is actually shifting its real costs onto others, the article noted.

At last year’s European Geosciences Union conference, Leonard Schulz, who studies space pollution at the Technical University Braunschweig in Germany, said, “If you put large amounts of catalytic metals in the atmosphere, I immediately think about geoengineering.”

There may not be time to wait for more scientific certainty, Schulz said: “In 10 years, it might be too late to do anything about it.”

Bob Berwyn is an Austria-based reporter who has covered climate science and international climate policy for more than a decade. Previously, he reported on the environment, endangered species and public lands for several Colorado newspapers, and also worked as editor and assistant editor at community newspapers in the Colorado Rockies.

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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Major government research lab appears to be squeezing out foreign scientists

NIST, Science, syndication, trump administration, War on science / 9u50fv / February 21, 2026

One of the US government’s top scientific research labs is taking steps that could drive away foreign scientists, a shift lawmakers and sources tell WIRED could cost the country valuable expertise and damage the agency’s credibility.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) helps determine the frameworks underpinning everything from cybersecurity to semiconductor manufacturing. Some of NIST’s recent work includes establishing guidelines for securing AI systems and identifying health concerns with air purifiers and firefighting gloves. Many of the agency’s thousands of employees, postdoctoral scientists, contractors, and guest researchers are brought in from around the world for their specialized expertise.

“For weeks now, rumors of draconian new measures have been spreading like wildfire, while my staff’s inquiries to NIST have gone unanswered,” Zoe Lofgren, the top Democrat on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, wrote in a letter sent to acting NIST Director Craig Burkhardt on Thursday. April McClain Delaney, a fellow Democrat on the committee, cosigned the message.

Lofgren wrote that while her staff has heard about multiple rumored changes, what they have confirmed through unnamed sources is that the Trump administration “has begun taking steps to limit the ability of foreign-born researchers to conduct their work at NIST.”

The congressional letter follows a Boulder Reporting Lab article on February 12 that said international graduate students and postdoctoral researchers would be limited to a maximum of three years at NIST going forward, despite many of them needing five to seven years to complete their work.

A NIST employee tells WIRED that some plans to bring on foreign workers through the agency’s Professional Research and Experience Program have recently been canceled because of uncertainty about whether they would make it through the new security protocols. The staffer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media, says the agency has yet to widely communicate what the new hurdles will be or why it believes they are justified.

On Thursday, the Colorado Sun reported that “noncitizens” lost after-hours access to a NIST lab last month and could soon be banned from the facility entirely.

Jennifer Huergo, a spokesperson for NIST, tells WIRED that the proposed changes are aimed at protecting US science from theft and abuse, echoing a similar statement issued this week to other media outlets. Huergo declined to comment on who needs to approve the proposal for it to be finalized and when a decision will be made. She also didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawmakers’ letter.

Preventing foreign adversaries from stealing valuable American intellectual property has been a bipartisan priority, with NIST among the agencies in recent years to receive congressional scrutiny about the adequacy of its background checks and security policies. Just last month, Republican lawmakers renewed calls to put restrictions in place preventing Chinese nationals from working at or with national labs run by the Department of Energy.

But Lofgren’s letter contends that the rumored restrictions on non-US scientists at NIST go beyond “what is reasonable and appropriate to protect research security.” The letter demands transparency about new policies by February 26 and a pause on them “until Congress can weigh in on whether these changes are necessary at all.”

The potential loss of research talent at NIST would add to a series of other Trump administration policies that some US tech industry leaders have warned will dismantle the lives of immigrant researchers already living in the US and hamper economic growth. Hiking fees on H-1B tech visas, revoking thousands of student visas, and carrying out legally dubious mass deportations all stand to push people eager to work on science and tech research in the US to go elsewhere instead. The Trump administration has also announced plans to limit post-graduation job training for international students.

Pat Gallagher, who served as the director of NIST from 2009 to 2013 under President Barack Obama, says the changes could erode trust in the agency, which has long provided the technical foundations that industry and governments around the world rely on. “What has made NIST special is it is scientifically credible,” he tells WIRED. “Industry, universities, and the global measurement community knew they could work with NIST.”

Like much of the federal government, NIST has been in turmoil for most of the past year. Parts of it were paralyzed for months as rumors of DOGE cuts spread. Ultimately, the agency lost hundreds of its thousands of workers to budget cuts, with further funding pressure to come.

As of a couple of years ago, NIST welcomed 800 researchers on average annually from outside the US to work in its offices and collaborate directly with staff.

Lofgren expressed fear that rumors may be enough to scare away researchers and undermine US competitiveness in vital research. “Our scientific excellence depends upon attracting the best and brightest from around the world,” she wrote in the letter.

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

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MAHA moms threaten to turn this car around as RFK Jr. flips on pesticide

glyphosate, health, MAHA, Robert F Kenned Jr., roundup / 9u50fv / February 21, 2026

“We must safeguard America’s national security first, because all of our priorities depend on it. When hostile actors control critical inputs, they weaken our security. By expanding domestic production, we close that gap and protect American families,” he said.

Fallout

Dave Murphy, founder and CEO of United We Eat and former finance manager on Kennedy’s presidential campaign, told Reuters that the order was a “strategic mistake” that could serve as an election liability. “Trump would not be in the White House this second time without those followers, and we expect him to live up to his word,” Murphy said.

Fallout has continued online over the move, and MAHA organizers are scrambling.

Alex Clark, a health and wellness podcaster for the conservative group Turning Point USA, told The New York Times that “Women feel like they were lied to, that MAHA movement is a sham,” he said. “How am I supposed to rally these women to vote red in the midterms? How can we win their trust back? I am unsure if we can.”

Meanwhile, MAHA influencer Kelly Ryerson, who goes by the moniker “Glyphosate Girl” online, told Politico, “I’m witnessing the bottom falling out on MAHA. People came along on MAHA because of pesticides and foods. It wasn’t because of vaccines.”

Zen Honeycutt, executive director of the grassroots group Moms Across America, told Politico in a statement that the fallout will have real consequences.

“To put toxic farming and businesses before the health and safety of our children is a betrayal of every voter who voted for him to [Make America Healthy Again],” she said. “The repercussions are not going to just affect the midterms, but the health of millions of Americans for generations to come.”

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Microsoft deletes blog telling users to train AI on pirated Harry Potter books

AI, generative ai, harry potter, Isaac Asimov, large language models, LLMs, microsoft, Policy / 9u50fv / February 21, 2026

Wizarding world of AI slop

The now-deleted Harry Potter dataset was “mistakenly” marked public domain.

Following backlash in a Hacker News thread, Microsoft deleted a blog post that critics said encouraged developers to pirate Harry Potter books to train AI models that could then be used to create AI slop.

The blog, which is archived here, was written in November 2024 by a senior product manager, Pooja Kamath. According to her LinkedIn, Kamath has been at Microsoft for more than a decade and remains with the company. In 2024, Microsoft tapped her to promote a new feature that the blog said made it easier to “add generative AI features to your own applications with just a few lines of code using Azure SQL DB, LangChain, and LLMs.”

What better way to show “engaging and relatable examples” of Microsoft’s new feature that would “resonate with a wide audience” than to “use a well-known dataset” like Harry Potter books, the blog said.

The books are “one of the most famous and cherished series in literary history,” the blog noted, and fans could use the LLMs they trained in two fun ways: building Q&A systems providing “context-rich answers” and generating “new AI-driven Harry Potter fan fiction” that’s “sure to delight Potterheads.”

To help Microsoft customers achieve this vision, the blog linked to a Kaggle dataset that included all seven Harry Potter books, which, Ars verified, has been available online for years and incorrectly marked as “public domain.” Kaggle’s terms say that rights holders can send notices of infringing content, and repeat offenders risk suspensions, but Hacker News commenters speculated that the Harry Potter dataset flew under the radar, with only 10,000 downloads over time, not catching the attention of J.K. Rowling, who famously keeps a strong grip on the Harry Potter copyrights. The dataset was promptly deleted on Thursday after Ars reached out to the uploader, Shubham Maindola, a data scientist in India with no apparent links to Microsoft.

Maindola told Ars that “the dataset was marked as Public Domain by mistake. There was no intention to misrepresent the licensing status of the works.”

It’s unclear whether Kamath was directed to link to the Harry Potter books dataset in the blog or if it was an individual choice. Cathay Y. N. Smith, a law professor and co-director of Chicago-Kent College of Law’s Program in Intellectual Property Law, told Ars that Kamath may not have realized the books were too recent to be in the public domain.

“Someone might be really knowledgeable about books and technology, but not necessarily about copyright terms and how long they last,” Smith said. “Especially if she saw that something was marked by another reputable company as being public domain.”

Microsoft declined Ars’ request to comment. Kaggle did not respond to Ars’ request to comment.

Microsoft was “probably smart” to pull the blog

On Hacker News, commenters suggested that it’s unlikely anyone familiar with the popular franchise would believe the Harry Potter books were in the public domain. They debated whether Microsoft’s blog was “problematic copyright-wise,” since Microsoft not only encouraged customers to download the infringing materials but also used the books themselves to create Harry Potter AI models that relied on beloved characters to hype Microsoft products.

Microsoft’s blog was posted more than a year ago, at a time when AI firms began facing lawsuits over AI models, which had allegedly infringed copyrights by training on pirated materials and regurgitating works verbatim.

The blog recommended that users learn to train their own AI models by downloading the Harry Potter dataset and then uploading text files to Azure Blob Storage. It included example models based on a dataset that Microsoft seemingly uploaded to Azure Blob Storage, which only included the first book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

Training large language models (LLMs) on text files, Harry Potter fans could create Q&A systems capable of pulling up relevant excerpts of books. An example query offered was “Wizarding World snacks,” which retrieved an excerpt from The Sorcerer’s Stone where Harry marvels at strange treats like Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans and chocolate frogs. Another prompt asking “How did Harry feel when he first learnt that he was a Wizard?” generated an output pointing to various early excerpts in the book.

But perhaps an even more exciting use case, Kamath suggested, was generating fan fiction to “explore new adventures” and “even create alternate endings.” That model could quickly comb the dataset for “contextually similar” excerpts that could be used to output fresh stories that fit with existing narratives and incorporate “elements from the retrieved passages,” the blog said.

As an example, Kamath trained a model to write a Harry Potter story she could use to market the feature she was blogging about. She asked the model to write a story in which Harry meets a new friend on the Hogwarts Express train who tells him all about Microsoft’s Native Vector Support in SQL “in the Muggle world.”

Drawing on parts of The Sorcerer’s Stone where Harry learns about Quidditch and gets to know Hermione Granger, the fan fiction showed a boy selling Harry on Microsoft’s “amazing” new feature. To do this, he likened it to having a spell that helps you find exactly what you need among thousands of options, instantly, while declaring it was perfect for machine learning, AI, and recommendation systems.

Further blurring the lines between Microsoft and Harry Potter brands, Kamath also generated an image showing Harry with his new friend, stamped with a Microsoft logo.

Smith told Ars that both use cases could frustrate rights holders, depending on the content in the model outputs.

“I think that the regurgitation and the creation of fan fiction, they both could flag copyright issues, in that fan fiction often has to take from the expressive elements, a copyrighted character, a character that’s famous enough to be protected by a copyright law or plot stories or sequences,” Smith said. “If these things are copied and reproduced, then that output could be potentially infringing.”

But it’s also still a gray area. Looking at the blog, Smith said, “I would be concerned,” but “I wouldn’t say it’s automatically infringement.”

Smith told Ars that, in pulling the blog, Microsoft “was probably smart,” since courts have only generally said that training AI on copyrighted books is fair use. But courts continue to probe questions about pirated AI training materials.

On the deleted Kaggle dataset page, Maindola previously explained that to source the data, he “downloaded the ebooks and then converted them to txt files.”

Microsoft may have infringed copyrights

If Microsoft ever faced questions as to whether the company knowingly used pirated books to train the example models, fair use “could be a difficult argument,” Smith said.

Hacker News commenters suggested the blog could be considered fair use, since the training guide was for “educational purposes,” and Smith said that Microsoft could raise some “good arguments” in its defense.

However, she also suggested that Microsoft could be deemed liable for contributing to infringement on some level after leaving the blog up for a year. Before it was removed, the Kaggle dataset was downloaded more than 10,000 times.

“The ultimate result is to create something infringing by saying, ‘Hey, here you go, go grab that infringing stuff and use that in our system,’” Smith said. “They could potentially have some sort of secondary contributory liability for copyright infringement, downloading it, as well as then using it to encourage others to use it for training purposes.”

On Hacker News, commenters slammed the blog, including a self-described former Microsoft employee who claimed that Microsoft lets employees “blog without having to go through some approval or editing process.”

“It looks like somebody made a bad judgment call on what to put in a company blog post (and maybe what constitutes ethical activity) and that it was taken down as soon as someone noticed,” the former employee said.

Others suggested the blame was solely with the Kaggle uploader, Maindola, who told Ars that the dataset should never have been marked “public domain.” But Microsoft critics pushed back, noting that the Kaggle page made it clear that no special permission was granted and that Microsoft’s employee should have known better. “They don’t need to know any details to know that these properties belong to massive companies and aren’t free for the taking,” one commenter said.

The Harry Potter books weren’t the only books targeted, the thread noted, linking to a separate Azure sample containing Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, which is also not in the public domain.

“Microsoft could have used any dataset for their blog, they could have even chosen to use actual public domain novels,” another Hacker News commenter wrote. “Instead, they opted to use copywritten works that J.K. hasn’t released into the public domain (unless user ‘Shubham Maindola’ is J.K.’s alter ego).”

Smith suggested Microsoft could have avoided this week’s backlash by more carefully reviewing blogs, noting that “if a company is risk averse, this would probably be flagged.” But she also understood Kamath’s preference for Harry Potter over the many long-forgotten characters that exist in the public domain. On Hacker News, some commenters defended Kamath’s blog, urging that it should be considered fair use since nonprofits and educational institutions could do the same thing in a teaching context without issue.

“I would have been concerned if I were the one clearing this for Microsoft, but at the same time, I completely understand what this employee was doing,” Smith said. “No one wants to write fan fiction about books that are in the public domain.”

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

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Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today, starts removing 695,000 archive links

archive.today, Policy, wikipedia / 9u50fv / February 20, 2026

The English-language edition of Wikipedia is blacklisting Archive.today after the controversial archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blog.

In the course of discussing whether Archive.today should be deprecated because of the DDoS, Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS. The alterations were apparently fueled by a grudge against the blogger over a post that described how the Archive.today maintainer hid their identity behind several aliases.

“There is consensus to immediately deprecate archive.today, and, as soon as practicable, add it to the spam blacklist (or create an edit filter that blocks adding new links), and remove all links to it,” stated an update today on Wikipedia’s Archive.today discussion. “There is a strong consensus that Wikipedia should not direct its readers towards a website that hijacks users’ computers to run a DDoS attack (see WP:ELNO#3). Additionally, evidence has been presented that archive.today’s operators have altered the content of archived pages, rendering it unreliable.”

More than 695,000 links to Archive.today are distributed across 400,000 or so Wikipedia pages. The archive site is commonly used to bypass news paywalls, and the FBI has sought information on the site operator’s identity with a subpoena to domain registrar Tucows.

“Those in favor of maintaining the status quo rested their arguments primarily on the utility of archive.today for verifiability,” said today’s Wikipedia update. “However, an analysis of existing links has shown that most of its uses can be replaced. Several editors started to work out implementation details during this RfC [request for comment] and the community should figure out how to efficiently remove links to archive.today.”

Editors urged to remove links

Guidance published as a result of the decision asked editors to help remove and replace links to the following domain names used by the archive site: archive.today, archive.is, archive.ph, archive.fo, archive.li, archive.md, and archive.vn. The guidance says editors can remove Archive.today links when the original source is still online and has identical content; replace the archive link so it points to a different archive site, like the Internet Archive, Ghostarchive, or Megalodon; or “change the original source to something that doesn’t need an archive (e.g., a source that was printed on paper), or for which a link to an archive is only a matter of convenience.”

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It’s outright war for the Iron Throne in House of the Dragon S3 teaser

culture, Entertainment, George R.R. Martin, HBO, house of the dragon, streaming television, Trailers / 9u50fv / February 20, 2026

With HBO’s critically acclaimed A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms gearing up for its season finale on Sunday, it’s time to check in on that other Game of Thrones spinoff: the far darker House of the Dragon, which now has a suitably ominous teaser for its upcoming third season.

(Spoilers for the first two seasons below.)

The series is set nearly 200 years before the events of Game of Thrones, when dragons were still a fixture of Westeros, and chronicles the beginning of the end of House Targaryen’s reign. The primary source material is Fire and Blood, a fictional history of the Targaryen kings written by George R.R. Martin. As book readers know, those events culminated in a civil war and the extinction of the dragons—at least until Daenerys Targaryen came along.

The first season spanned many years and featured some pretty significant time jumps, which required replacing the younger actors as their characters aged. For those who might need a refresher: King Viserys (Paddy Considine) died, and his second wife, Alicent (Olivia Cooke), conspired with her father, Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans), to crown her eldest son, Aegon (Tom Glynn-Carney), as king instead of Viserys’ declared heir apparent, Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy).

Even though she was technically the rightful heir, Rhaenyra actually seemed to be considering House Hightower’s conditions for concession—until the arrogant Prince Aemond (Ewan Mitchell), Alicent’s younger son, went after Rhaenyra’s young son, Lucerys (Elliot Grihault). Both dragonriders failed to control their dragons, and Aemon’s much bigger dragon, Vhagar, gobbled up poor Lucerys and his little dragon, Arrax, in mid-air. The season closed with Rhaenyra and her husband/uncle Daemon (Matt Smith) receiving the devastating news, effectively dashing any hope of a peaceful resolution.

House of the Dragon has always taken a leisurely, more focused approach to its characters’ political maneuverings, interspersed with bursts of bloody violence, and S2 was no exception. But it opened with a bang: the infamous “Blood and Cheese” incident (well-known to book readers), in which assassins sent to take out Aemond as vengeance for Lucerys can’t find him and butcher Aegon’s eldest son instead. We lost a couple more dragons and several supporting characters in the ensuing chaos, and Aegon was so severely wounded that Aemond became regent—with no plan to relinquish the Iron Throne any time soon.

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Supreme Court blocks Trump’s emergency tariffs, billions in refunds may be owed

Donald Trump, Policy, reciprocal tariffs, tariffs / 9u50fv / February 20, 2026

Economists estimated more than $175 billion may need to be refunded.

The Supreme Court ruled Friday that Donald Trump was not authorized to implement emergency tariffs to ostensibly block illegal drug flows and offset trade deficits.

It’s not immediately clear what the ruling may mean for businesses that paid various “reciprocal” tariffs that Trump changed frequently, raising and lowering rates at will during tense negotiations with the United States’ biggest trade partners.

Divided 6-3, Supreme Court justices remanded the cases to lower courts, concluding that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) does not give Trump power to impose tariffs.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion and was joined by Justices Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. They concluded that Trump could not exclusively rely on IEEPA to impose tariffs “of unlimited amount and duration, on any product from any country” during peacetime.

Only Congress has the power of the purse, Roberts wrote, and the few exceptions to that are bound by “explicit terms and subject to strict limits.”

“Against that backdrop of clear and limited delegations, the Government reads IEEPA to give the President power to unilaterally impose unbounded tariffs and change them at will,” Roberts wrote. “That view would represent a transformative expansion of the President’s authority over tariff policy. It is also telling that in IEEPA’s half century of existence, no President has invoked the statute to impose any tariffs, let alone tariffs of this magnitude and scope. That ‘lack of historical precedent,’ coupled with ‘the breadth of authority’ that the President now claims, suggests that the tariffs extend beyond the President’s ‘legitimate reach.’”

Back in November, analysts suggested that the Supreme Court ruling against Trump could force the government to issue refunds of up to $1 trillion. This morning, a new estimate from economists reduced that number, Reuters reported, estimating that more than $175 billion could be “at risk of having to be refunded.”

Ruling disrupts Trump plan to collect $900 billion

Trump lost primarily because IEEPA does not explicitly reference “tariffs” or “duties,” instead only giving Trump power to “regulate” “importation”—the two words in the statute that Trump tried to argue showed that Congress clearly authorized his power to impose tariffs.

But the court did not agree that Congress intended to give the president “the independent power to impose tariffs on imports from any country, of any product, at any rate, for any amount of time,” Roberts wrote. “Those words cannot bear such weight,” particularly in peacetime. “The United States, after all, is not at war with every nation in the world.”

Specifically, Trump failed to “identify any statute in which the power to regulate includes the power to tax,” Roberts wrote. And the majority of justices remained “skeptical” that in “IEEPA alone,” Congress intended to hide “a delegation of its birth-right power to tax within the quotidian power to ‘regulate.’”

“A contrary reading would render IEEPA partly unconstitutional,” Roberts wrote.

According to the majority, siding with Trump would free the president to “issue a dizzying array of modifications” to tariffs at will, “unconstrained by the significant procedural limitations in other tariff statutes.” The only check to that unprecedented power grab, the court suggested, would be a “veto-proof majority in Congress.”

Trump has yet to comment on the ruling. Ahead of it, he claimed the tariffs were “common sense,” NBC News reported. Speaking at a steel manufacturing factory in northwest Georgia, Trump claimed that IEEPA tariffs were projected to bring in $900 billion “next year.” Not only could he now be forced to refund tariffs, but the Supreme Court ruling could also undo trade deals in which Trump used so-called reciprocal tariffs as leverage. Undoing tariffs will likely be a “mess,” Barrett said last year.

“Until now, no President has read IEEPA to confer such power,” Roberts wrote, while noting that the court claims “no special competence in matters of economics or foreign affairs.”

Gorsuch seems to troll Trump

In a concurring opinion, Gorsuch slammed Trump as trying to expand the president’s authority in a way that would make it hard for Congress to ever retrieve lost powers. He claimed that Trump was seeking to secure a path forward where any president could declare a national emergency—a decision that would be “unreviewable”—to justify imposing “tariffs on nearly any goods he wishes, in any amount he wishes, based on emergencies he himself has declared.”

“Just ask yourself: What President would willingly give up that kind of power?” Gorsuch wrote.

Gorsuch further questioned if Trump was “seeking to exploit questionable statutory language to aggrandize his own power.” And he warned that accepting the dissenting view would allow Trump to randomly impose tariffs as low as 1 percent or as high as 1,000,000 percent on any product or country he wanted at any time.

Gorsuch criticized justices with dissenting views, who disagreed that Congress’ intent in the statute was unclear and defended Trump’s claim that “IEEPA provides the clear statement needed to sustain the President’s tariffs.” Those justices argued that presidents have long been granted authority to impose tariffs and accused the majority of putting a “thumb on the scale” by requiring a strict reading of the statute. Instead, they argued for a special exception requiring a more general interpretation of statutes whenever presidents seek to regulate matters of foreign affairs.

If that view was accepted, Gorsuch warned, presidents could seize even more power from Congress. Many other legislative powers “could be passed wholesale to the executive branch in a few loose statutory terms, no matter what domestic ramifications might follow. And, as we have seen, Congress would often find these powers nearly impossible to retrieve.”

As a final note, Gorsuch took some time to sympathize with Trump supporters:

For those who think it important for the Nation to impose more tariffs, I understand that today’s decision will be disappointing. All I can offer them is that most major decisions affecting the rights and responsibilities of the American people (including the duty to pay taxes and tariffs) are funneled through the legislative process for a reason. Yes, legislating can be hard and take time. And, yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem arises. But the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design. Through that process, the Nation can tap the combined wisdom of the people’s elected representatives, not just that of one faction or man. There, deliberation tempers impulse, and compromise hammers disagreements into workable solutions. And because laws must earn such broad support to survive the legislative process, they tend to endure, allowing ordinary people to plan their lives in ways they cannot when the rules shift from day to day.

Kavanaugh questions other Trump tariff authority

Under IEEPA, the majority ruled, Trump has the power to “impose penalties, restrictions, or controls on foreign commerce,” Barrett wrote. But he does not have the power to impose emergency tariffs, unless Congress updates laws to explicitly grant such authority.

In his dissent, justice Brett Kavanaugh insisted that it should not be up to courts to settle these “policy debates.” He defended Trump’s view that IEEPA granting power to “regulate” “importation” generally included tariffs, while arguing that Trump wasn’t seeking to expand his presidential authority at all. Many feared that the more conservative Supreme Court would side with Trump, and Kavanaugh’s opinion offered a peek at what that alternate reality could have looked like.

“Importantly, IEEPA’s authorization for the President to impose tariffs did not grant the President any new substantive power,” Kavanaugh wrote. Instead, “IEEPA merely allows the President to impose tariffs somewhat more efficiently to deal with foreign threats during national emergencies.” He further claimed it was an “odd distinction” that the majority would interpret IEEPA as giving Trump authority to “block all imports from China” but not to “order even a $1 tariff on goods imported from China.”

Downplaying the ruling’s significance, Kavanaugh echoed the Trump administration’s claims that the Supreme Court ruling won’t really affect Trump’s key policy of imposing tariffs to renegotiate trade deals or address other concerns.

“The decision might not substantially constrain a President’s ability to order tariffs going forward,” Kavanugh wrote, pointing to “numerous other federal statutes” that “authorize the President to impose tariffs.”

However, a footnote in the majority’s opinion emphasized that all of the options that Kavanaugh cited “contain various combinations of procedural prerequisites, required agency determinations, and limits on the duration, amount, and scope of the tariffs they authorize.” It was precisely constraints like those that Trump’s broad reading of IEEPA lacked, the majority found.

Kavanaugh acknowledged that the ruling would stop Trump from imposing tariffs at will, writing that other statutes require “a few additional procedural steps that IEEPA, as an emergency statute, does not require.”

Winding down his arguments, Kavanaugh joined Trump administration officials in groaning that the “United States may be required to refund billions of dollars to importers who paid the IEEPA tariffs, even though some importers may have already passed on costs to consumers or others.”

Kavanaugh makes a frequently overlooked point there in this argument, which is that IEEPA tariffs may have harmed consumers without any immediate remedy. It seems unlikely that consumers will get any relief in the short-term, no matter what remedies the Supreme Court’s ruling triggers. For businesses, the primary relief will likely not be from refunds but from the small amount of certainty they will have going forward that tariffs won’t be suddenly changed or imposed overnight.

Kavanaugh conceded that Trump’s tariffs “may or may not be wise policy.” But he fretted that Trump’s trade deals “worth trillions of dollars” could be undone by the ruling, while claiming the ruling has only generated more uncertainty on a global scale, including with America’s biggest rival, China.

Interestingly, Kavanaugh also suggested that the ruling may put at legal risk the reading of another statute that Trump will likely rely on more heavily moving forward to impose tariffs.

“One might think that the Court’s opinion would also mean that tariffs cannot be imposed under Section 232, which authorizes the President to ‘adjust the imports,’” Kavanaugh suggested.

This story was updated to include views from Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

Supreme Court blocks Trump’s emergency tariffs, billions in refunds may be owed Read More »

Zero grip, maximum fun: A practical guide to getting into amateur ice racing

auto racing, Cars, Features, ice racing, racing / 9u50fv / February 19, 2026

Where we’re racing, we don’t need roads.

To drive on ice, you just need the right tires. Credit: Tim Stevens

In Formula One, grip is everything. The world’s best engineers devote their careers to designing cars that maximize downforce and grip to squeeze every bit of performance out of a set of four humble tires. These cars punish their drivers by slinging them at six Gs through corners and offer similar levels of abuse in braking.

It’s all wildly impressive, but I’ve long maintained that those drivers are not the ones having the most fun. When it comes to sheer enjoyment, grip is highly overrated, and if you want proof of that, you need to try ice racing.

Should you be lucky enough to live somewhere that gets cold enough consistently enough, all you need is a good set of tires and a car that’s willing and able. That, of course, and a desire to spend more time driving sideways than straight. I’ve been ice racing for well over 20 years now, and I’m here to tell you that there’s no greater thrill on four wheels than sliding through a corner a few inches astern of a hard-charging competitor.

Here’s how you can get started.

A blue Subaru WRX STI on the ice — For street legal classes, you don’t even need a roll cage. Just the right tires and the right attitude. Credit: Tim Stevens

Ice racing basics

There are certainly plenty of professionals out there who have dabbled in or got their start in ice racing, F1 legend Alain Prost and touring car maestro Peter Cunningham being two notable examples. And a European ice racing series called Trophée Andros formerly challenged some of the world’s top professionals to race across a series of purpose-built frozen tracks in Europe and even Quebec.

These days, however, ice racing is an almost entirely amateur pursuit, a low-temp, low-grip hobby where the biggest prize you’re likely to bring home on any given Sunday is a smile and maybe a little trophy for the mantel.

That said, there are numerous types of ice racing. The most common and accessible is time trials, basically autocrosses on ice. The Sports Car Club of Vermont ice time trial series is a reliable, well-run example, but you’ll find plenty of others, too.

Some other clubs step it up by hosting wheel-to-wheel racing on plowed ovals. Lakes Region Ice Racing Club in Moultonborough, New Hampshire, is a long-running group that has been blessed with enough ice lately to keep racing even as temperatures have increased.

At the top tier, though, you’re looking at clubs that plow full-on road courses on the ice, groups like the Adirondack Motor Enthusiast Club (AMEC), based in and around the Adirondack Park. Established in 1954, this is among the oldest ice racing clubs in the world and the one I’ve been lucky to be a member of since 2002.

Will any other discipline of motorsport teach you as much about car control? Tim Stevens

AMEC offers numerous classes, providing eligibility for everything from a bone-stock Miata to purpose-built sprint cars that look like they made a wrong turn off a dirt oval. Dedicated volunteers plow courses on lakes throughout the ADK, tirelessly searching for ice of sufficient depth and quality.

Different clubs have different requirements, but most like to see a foot of solid, clean ice. That may not sound like much, but according to the US Army Corps of Engineers, it’s plenty for eight-ton trucks. That’s enough to support not only the 60 to 100 racers that AMEC routinely sees on any frigid Sunday but also the numerous tow rigs, trailers, and plow trucks that support the action.

How do you get started? All you need is a set of tires.

Tires

Tires are the most talked-about component of any car competing on the ice, and for good reason. Clubs have different regulations for what is and is not legal for competition, but in general, you can lump ice racing tires into three categories.

The first is unstudded, street-legal tires, such as Bridgestone Blizzacks, Continental WinterContacts, and Michelin X-Ices. These tires generally have chunky, aggressive treads, generous siping, and squishy compounds. Modern snow tires like these are marvelous things, and when there’s a rough surface on the ice or some embedded snow, an unstudded tire can be extremely competitive, even keeping up with a street-legal studded tire.

These tires, like the Nokian Hakkapeliita 10 and the Pirelli Winter Ice Zero, take the chunky, aggressive tread pattern of a normal snow tire and embed some number of metallic studs. These tiny studs, which typically protrude only 1 millimeter from the tire surface, provide a massive boost in grip on smooth, polished ice.

Tim races on Nokian Hakka 10 tires, which are a street-legal studded winter tire. Credit: Tim Stevens

Finally, there is what is broadly called a “race stud” tire, which is anything not legal for road use. These tires range from hand-made bolt tires, put together by people who have a lot of patience and who don’t mind the smell of tire sealant, to purpose-built race rubber of the sort you’ll see on a World Rally car snow stage.

These tires offer massive amounts of grip—so much so that the feel they deliver is more like driving on dirt than on ice. Unless you DIY it, the cost typically increases substantially as well. For that reason, going to grippier tires doesn’t necessarily mean more fun for your dollar, but there are plenty of opinions on where you’ll find the sweet spot of smiles per mile.

Driver skills

The other major factor in finding success on the ice is driver skill. If you have some experience in low-grip, car-control-focused driving like rally or drift, you’ll have a head start over someone who’s starting fresh. But if I had a dollar for every rally maestro or drifter I’ve seen swagger their way out onto the ice and then wedge their car straight into the first snowbank, I’d have at least five or six extra dollars to my name.

Ice racing is probably the purest and most challenging form of low-grip driving. On ice, the performance envelope of a normal car on normal tires is extremely small. Driving fast on ice, then, means learning how to make your car do what you want, even when you’re far outside of that envelope.

There are many techniques involved, but it all starts with getting comfortable with entering your car into a slide and sustaining it. Learning to balance your car in a moderate drift, dancing between terminal understeer (plowing into the snowbank nose-first) and extreme oversteer (spinning into the snowbank tail-first), is key. That comfort simply takes time.

Reading the ice

Ruts in the ice made by ice racing — The condition of the track changes constantly. Credit: Tim Stevens

Once you figure out how to keep your car going in the right direction, and once you stop making sedan-shaped holes in snowbanks, the next trick is to learn how to read the ice.

The grip level of the ice constantly evolves throughout the day. The street-legal tires tend to polish it off, wearing down rougher sections into smoothly polished patches with extremely low grip. The race studs, on the other hand, chew it up again, creating a heavily textured surface.

If you’re on the less extreme sorts of tires, you’ll find the most grip on that rough, unused ice. In a race stud, you want to seek out smooth, clean ice because it will give your studs better purchase.

If you’re familiar with road racing, it’s a little like running a rain line: not necessarily driving the shortest path around, but instead taking the one that offers the most grip. Imagine a rain line that changes every lap and you start to get the picture.

How can I try it?

Intrigued? The good news is that ice racing is among the most accessible and affordable forms of motorsport on the planet, possibly second only to autocrossing. Costs vary widely, but in my club, AMEC, a full day of racing costs $70. That’s for three heat races and a practice session. Again, all you need is a set of snow tires, which will last the full season if you don’t abuse them.

The bad news, of course, is that you need to be close to an ice racing club. They’re getting harder and harder to find, and active clubs generally have shorter seasons with fewer events. If you can’t find one locally, you may need to travel, which increases the cost and commitment substantially.

If you don’t live where the lakes freeze, you’ll have to travel. Tim Stevens

If cost is no issue, you certainly have more opportunities. We’ve already reported on McLaren’s program, but it’s not alone. Exotic brands like Ferrari and Lamborghini also offer winter driving programs, where you can wheel amazing cars in glamorous places like St. Moritz and Livigno. The cost is very much in the “if you have to ask” category.

Dirtfish, one of the world’s greatest rally schools, also offers an ice-driving program in Wisconsin, starting at about $2,000 for a single day. This is a great, if expensive, way to get a feel for the skills you’ll need on ice.

And if you just want the most seat time, look for programs like Lapland Ice Driving or Ice Drive Sweden. The northern wilds of Sweden and Finland are full of frozen lakes where clubs plow out full race courses, sometimes repeating Formula One circuits. If you have the funds, you can rent any manner of sports car and run it sideways all day long on proper studded tires.

Whatever it costs and whatever you have to do to make it happen, ice racing is well worth the effort. I’ve been lucky to drive a long list of amazing cars in amazing places, but nothing comes close to the joy of wheeling my 20-year-old Subaru around a frozen lake.

Zero grip, maximum fun: A practical guide to getting into amateur ice racing Read More »

Rare gifted word-learner dogs like to share their toys

animal cognition, animals, Biology, gifted word learner dogs, Science / 9u50fv / February 19, 2026

This time around, the group recruited 10 GWL dogs and 21 non-GWL dogs, all border collies, since this is the most common breed to fall into the GWL category. They compiled a list of eight toys: two labeled, two unlabeled, and four that were new to each dog.

What’s their motivation?

There was a two-week period during which owners familiarized the dogs with the toys once a day for at least 10 minutes. Each toy was presented separately. For the labeled toys, owners moved the toy while crouched on the floor, repeatedly naming the toy (“Look at the [toy name]! Here is the [toy name]”). They did not name the unlabeled toys. Owners devoted an equal amount of time to all the toys. Novel toys were excluded from the familiarization phase.

After that period, each dog participated in two 90-second trials. The dogs were provided free access to the toys (washed with soap to control for odor cues). In the first trial, owners entered first and placed the labeled and unlabeled toys, plus two of the novel ones, on the floor and stood at a distance, passive and ignoring the dogs as the latter explored the toys. After a five-minute break, the test was repeated with the other two novel toys. All tests were recorded remotely and the footage subsequently analyzed.

Human babies are known to pay more attention to named objects, and the authors thought the GWL dogs would show a similar response, but that’s not what happened. All the dogs, whether they were GWL dogs or not, strongly preferred the new toys, and there were no significant differences between the two groups of dogs in terms of how much time they spent playing with labeled versus unlabeled. So just hearing toy names does not automatically increase a dog’s attention.

Rare gifted word-learner dogs like to share their toys Read More »

Monthly Roundup #39: February 2026

Monthly / 9u50fv / February 19, 2026

There really is a lot going on these days.

I held off posting this because I was trying to see if I could write a net helpful post about the current situation involving Anthropic and the Pentagon. Anthropic very much wants to help DoW defend our country and make us strong. It is clear there have been some large misunderstandings here about how LLMs work.

They are not ordinary tools like spreadsheets that automatically do whatever the user asks, nor would it be safe to make them so, nor do they predictably adhere to written rule sets or take instructions from their CEO in a crisis. And they are probabilistic. You do not and cannot get absolute guarantees.

The only way to know if an AI model will do what you need in a crisis is something you needed to be do regardless of potential refusals, and which is also what you must do with human soldiers, which is to run the simulations and mock battles and drills and tests that tell you if the model can do and is willing to do the job.

If there are irreconcilable differences and the military contract needs to end, that would be a shame and a lost opportunity, and hopefully both sides could help ensure a smooth transition, but that would ultimately be fine. OpenAI and Google are waiting as qualified alternative suppliers.

The far bigger issue is that we are now at risk of having the Pentagon designate Anthropic as a ‘supply chain risk,’ the primary effect of which would be to cause expensive and severe disruptions across the defense industry and at many large companies and impose nightmaring compliance requirements indefinitely. It would make us far less safe, would be a major norm violation, and would not address any actual supply chain risks. Everyone I have seen who has encountered this proposal and knew what it meant knew it would backfire on America horribly if implemented. No one wants that other than our enemies.

Alas, I am the wrong person to deliver a detailed message on this, for many reasons, so I will simply say the above for now, and then proceed to the monthly roundup.

Pete Buttigieg wants to change the constitution to strip corporations of personhood, and to say money is not speech, which are no good, very bad proposals in ways he most definitely understands. This most obviously is not going to happen, but to the extent he was still on it, this essentially takes him off the list of ‘people who won’t propose catastrophic policies.’

Hotels are getting rid of proper bathroom doors, with the new barriers often not even being fully opaque or all that soundproof. This is cost cutting gone utterly insane and it makes zero sense to me. I have never felt the urge to spend more for a four or five star hotel, but I’ll be damned if they try to say 1% of space by not having a bathroom door, seriously what the hell.

Not only should we not pass laws against ‘price gouging,’ Steven Godofsky is actually correct that we should make it mandatory to avoid empty store shelves, since stores will otherwise refuse to do it because of reputational risk. I mean, no, we shouldn’t actually force them, it’s not worth an intervention, but it’s funny to notice that the market failure actually runs the other way.

And yes, when there’s a two day storm the grocery stores will look like this:

I agree that panels tend to be low effort. On the other hand, that is a lot of the charm, you can rope me into a panel far easier than getting me to make a presentation. Mostly I agree that you want to be doing presentations and fireside chats instead, unless the panel is designed to get sponsorship money.

Somehow I need to put this here, despite my extreme aversion to doing so:

I affirm my opposition to the American government straight up murdering people, and my call that people who commit straight up murders be convicted of murder, especially if there is video of them committing what is clearly a straight up murder, and I add a call that the government not actively seek to destroy evidence relevant to potential murder investigations.

This applies on the high seas. It also applies in American cities. I also affirm my commitment to a whole slew of basic civil rights, the right to a lawyer and due process of law, the right to not be indefinitely detained for no reason, the right to walk around without ‘your papers,’ your right to not get physically attacked or tortured including while in official custody, your right to freedom of speech and to film what is happening to you, the right to bear arms, and my opposition to those who violate them, and to those who knowingly fund and enable such violations.

I also oppose the government lying to the people, or attempting to smear murder victims, or engaging in witness intimidation, or forcibly cutting off access to such crime scenes, or trying to use such actions as a form of extortion or punishment of a particular area or its government. It also extends to creating conditions likely to lead to bad shootings that kill people even if they aren’t straight up murders, or attempts to lie about what happened and the nature of the victims, and to cover it all up.

I believe that government public communications lying to the public should (with notably rare and specified exceptions) be criminally illegal, and that our laws on this are inadequate and must be updated.

I leave the fact question of ‘how much of this happened or is happening’ to others.

Alex Tabarrok asks, [when] should you resign if you are part of an institution doing harm?

Alex Tabarrok: Resignation keeps your hands and conscience clean. That’s good for you but what about society? Utilitarians sometimes call the demand for clean hands a form of moral self-indulgence. A privileging of your own purity over outcomes.

Bernard Williams’s reply is that good people are not just sterile utility-accountants, they have deep moral commitments and sometimes resignation is what fidelity to those commitments requires.

So what’s the right move? I see four considerations:

Complicity: Are you being ordered to do wrong, or, usually the lesser crime, of not doing right?

Voice: If you stay can you exercise voice? What’s your concrete theory of change—what can you actually block, document, or escalate?

Timing: Is reversal possible soon or is this structural capture? Are you the remnant?

Self-discipline: Will you name the bright lines now and keep them, or will “just this once” become the job?

I have not been put in a position to make such a choice but from a social point of view, my judgment is that at the current time, voice is needed and more effective than exit.

Often my view is that ‘don’t resign but do the right thing and take bold risks with zero regard to whether you are fired, since you almost quit on the margin anyway, and you make them either change or eventually fire you’ is usually superior to resigning if you can do it, the exception being if your resignation would send a super strong signal. It’s even reasonable to actively take a job with that intention.

But there are few who can do it, staying does tend to enable the harm that is happening, and resignation beats complicity.

One instinct is that if resignations would not be a way of exercising voice, as things are so far gone that no one would notice, then staying won’t give you voice either.

I also believe that we should not police the failure of a particular person in private life to speak up on a particular issue they are not directly involved with, basically ever, even if they are speaking up on other issues. Saying ‘you talked about bad thing [X] being bad but not about bad thing [Y]’ is a terrible anti-pattern, it goes nowhere good, and we have seen how out of control it can quickly get.

Saying you are going to cap credit card interest rates is popular. Actually doing so at a number like 10% would be terrible economics and also (once people see the results) unpopular. So yes, I do appreciate Trump’s strategy of saying he’ll do it (popular!) and then not doing it (also, relative to alternatives, popular!)

California remains in crisis over the proposed wealth tax. Mike Solana can be many things but also he talked to 21 billionaires, 20 of them are potentially impacted and all 20 have either already left or are preparing exit plans. None of them believe that this would end with billionaires, nor would it, nor does even the law as written stop there. Once the bell is rung, either you have to definitively unring the bell such that it can’t be rung again, or remaining in the state while holding substantial wealth, or running a business that could get you substantial wealth, is untenable.

The scariest part of this is that this flight is likely a victory for those proposing the tax. For many this was never about revenue. It was about hurting or driving away their enemies, and they have already accomplished this. We are all poorer for it, most of all California.

Meanwhile Paul Graham reports unions are proposing that San Francisco tax companies if their top ‘managerial’ earners get too much more money than their median worker. As he points out, there are various ways around the tax, and none of them are good for the city, nor would I add are they good for the union. Punishing companies for hiring workers does not seem like a good idea, but what do I know.

The free speech situation in Europe is even worse than you think writes Greg Lukianoff. I already mostly understood what he found, and in many cases I’ve actually seen worse, but yeah, it’s insanely bad.

Greg Lukianoff: A Norwegian lesbian artist posted that “men can’t be lesbians.” The police opened a hate-speech investigation with a possible 3-year sentence. The message is clear: disagree with state orthodoxy, risk prosecution.

As in, ‘if I lived in such places I would perhaps feel I had to flee’ levels of bad. Definitely ‘I could not do my job as a writer’ levels of bad.

I agree that the dynamic involves ‘group [X] is now in our circle of concern so we will censor statements that offend, belittle or endanger members of [X],’ but this seems like it obviously is not about that, because we didn’t used to do this for old groups [Y] that were already within our circle. Why is causing anxiety in someone else your legal problem? What’s going on is something distinct from ‘[X]s are people’ or ‘[X]s matter.’

There seem to be a lot of cases where [X]s can call for the death of all [Y]s and mean it and that’s legal, but a [Y] can’t make an [X] anxious without being arrested and get bigger penalties than for many serious violent offenders even when they’re caught. It also makes it very difficult to catch even widespread actual criminal activities if you cannot discuss them and the police won’t pursue them.

Arthur B.: Reminds me of Priti Patel proudly saying they were looking forward “to end the free movement of people once and for all”. There’s certainly a willingness from UK politicians to frame their policies the way you’d expect their staunchest opponent would describe them.

Sam Ashworth-Hayes: Shabana Mahmood, UK home secretary: her vision is a “panopticon” where “the eyes of the state can be on you at all times”

Curiously the idea of a policy approach like “jail repeat criminals” is somehow less attractive than letting them predate on the public and using their behaviour as an excuse to engage in mass surveillance.

Your rights end with serious criminal acts, like posting dissent online.

A UK judge warned jurors that if they acquit for the ‘wrong’ reasons they could face jail time themselves. If juries aren’t going to be a check on power then can we at least not waste people’s time or pretend that people still have rights?

The ‘President goes around threatening tariffs any time anyone is insufficiently accommodating’ problem continues. We do at least have Senator Lisa Murkowski calling on Congress to take back its constitutional authority on this.

Benedict: We need a term for people who reason entirely within the boundaries of the existing law, without considering that the law itself is bad.

Sam Dumitriu: “HS2’s £100m bat tunnel isn’t a waste of money” argues HS2 Ltd’s top ecologist. His argument: There was “no better solution that met species protection law and reduced cost.”

I’d argue he has completely missed the point.

The problem isn’t that this was an expensive way of complying with the law. The problem is the law forces us to spend massive amounts on environmental mitigations of dubious value.

Note: he doesn’t argue that a bat tunnel would be the best way to spend £100m on nature.

I would say the ecologist is, in a narrow way, entirely correct. Given the existence of the law and the inability to alter that law, spending the hundred million is not a waste of money, if it is the only way to get the associated project built and the project is worth spending that extra money.

Thus, I’ll allow it, so long as you acknowledge that this is about the fact that we have an insane law, and has nothing to do with protecting the bats, since the value of protecting the bats is closer to a hundred pounds, and that the law should change.

In this case, given the bill is a full hundred million pounds, I would argue that is high enough that ‘change the law’ is indeed a valid and right action.

The ‘Working Families Tax Cut’ includes $93 billion in wealth transfers from the rest of us to seniors, as a $6,000 ‘bonus exemption.’ That is the opposite of working families. You can try to make excuses for the boomers, as Scott Alexander does at that link in Against Against Boomers, but this here is very clear outright boomer theft from the rest of us, using their stranglehold on the leadership of government, under the guide of ‘working families.’

There is a risk that this is radicalizing, and also that it opens the door for a, shall we say, ‘renegotiation.’ If the Boomer politicians and retirees think they can use the law to take our private property, what is their moral account for why they keep their own, especially when it takes the form of government benefits or tax exemptions?

There is also a partisan aspect of this move, but I find that far less interesting.

Australia’s social media ban for those under 16 extends to Substack. Which is especially a problem since Substack otherwise has no idea how old its users are, and also because this ban makes absolutely zero sense. This may not have been intentional, but until it is explicitly excluded, it’s a nightmare.

Mostly I am not the right person to talk about this. I am going to leave all the details about who did what to whom, or who covered what up, to others.

There is one thing I think hasn’t been said prominently that is worth saying, which is that I think this from Nikhil Pal Singh is on the right track but importantly wrong.

Nikhil Pal Singh: translated from a Spanish paper:

“Epstein wasn’t selling girls’ bodies, he was selling the experience of impunity. The end product was not the sexual act, but the assurance that there would be no consequences.”

The less important reason this is wrong is that he was very much also selling the actual experience along with the feeling of impunity.

The more important reason this is wrong is that, as I understand these dynamics, he was often selling something more important than impunity. He sold kompromat.

That sounds backwards. Why would someone want Epstein to have the ability blackmail them? That’s the trap, that’s bad, right? You lure these rich and powerful people to the island, get them to do horrible things, and then you have power.

Because if you are now part of this conspiracy doing horrible things, and others that know about it have this leverage over you, then (as perverse and crazy as this is) that means, to types like this, that you can be trusted. You’ve proven you won’t care when others do maximally horrible things, and if you step out of line then they can ruin you, so obviously you won’t cause any trouble. You’re part of the team.

That also explains a bunch of other vile behaviors that seem to be emergently misaligned, designed to be maximally evil and vile rather than because anyone actually wants to do, see or experience a given thing. This is not an accident.

Everyone involved needs to be unmasked, investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. If that would truly be so disruptive that our civilization would collapse, then there is a term for what must then be done instead: Truth and reconciliation.

RIP Scott Adams.

Scott Alexander offers reflections and then his standard highlights from the comments. I thought it was an excellent post, and if I do die I want the writeups to similarly include both the good and the bad.

I will add that:

I too greatly enjoyed the old Dilbert cartoons and his early books.
I was reading Adams’s analysis of the Trump campaign in real time in 2016 and he absolutely figured out a bunch of central stuff everyone else missed.
It’s not clear the extent to which Adams’s overconfident and increasingly crazy predictions were ‘real’ versus he was being strategic or doing his supposed ‘hypnosis’ thing.
It became increasingly painful to read those predictions and his associated claims, and it was clear Adams was trying to copy various Trump persuasion tactics that he could spot from the outside but didn’t instinctively grok well enough or have the required secondary powers to make them consistently work.
After that things went increasingly off the rails and I agree with Scott Alexander that this was centrally genuine. There’s quite a lot of evidence for that along the way. I do think he was also engaging in various ‘persuasion’ and ‘hypnosis’ tactics, as he understood them, so he would also Say That Which He Believed Was Not.
He really did write or say a lot of things in what, to everyone but especially to someone In My Culture, is the most annoying way possible.
What Adams called ‘hypnosis’ is centrally more like NLP and sloganeering, and is only ‘hypnosis’ in the sense that everything is hypnosis. It’s mostly not full or ‘real’ hypnosis. The thing he was doing is real and can be powerful but it’s not the same, and he often botched the execution. The full thing is real.

Are media organizations falling prey to the myopic revealed preferences of their core audiences at the expense of the long term? Musa al-Gharbi thinks so. It would make sense that they would end up too focused on today’s hit counts and on the squeakiest wheels, and neglect the long term impact on reputation and ability to provide value.

Yes, you can notice that users click on negative stories more, or those that confirm their biases and the rightness of the ingroup, or provide juicy sounding gossip, and so on.

Musa al-Gharbi: With respect to brevity, simplicity, negativity, and more, evidence is building that what may be killing journalism is not that outlets don’t cater to readers enough, but that they are too focused on conforming with the apparent tastes of their most-engaged readers. Creating more friction between readers and the content being served up to them would not just be more healthy for our civic culture, it may be a good business decision too.

But most people are running some sort of tracker in their in their heads about your reputation, whether your product provides value, and how they feel after using it. Long term damage accumulates.

Gretta Duleba gives advice on hiring a team. Her advice is: Don’t.

Not unless you absolutely have to. Even then, try really hard not to hire any particular person, or more than the bare minimum number of people, and only do it when they’re a great fit and you have a clear vision and a plan to integrate and teach everyone.

Or: It was that or dip into capital.

Declaration of Memes: Who is in the right?

r/Fire: My Fire Journey – Wife called me “Loser”

I am a 41yo male and $2 million liquid, $650,000 in retirement. I receive $75,000 a year from a royalty from a business I sold. Recently, I retired. My wife is a school teacher, which is good for healthcare. I make $125,000 a year in income off my liquid assets.

Since November began, it’s cold and dark early, so a lot of what I do Monday through Friday when she’s at work is play GTA (video game) on THC edibles, because there is nothing else to do where I live this time of year.

My wife came home early today, and I was stoned in the middle of a conversation with my GTA online friends. She told me I’m becoming a “Loser,” but this is me during the day when she works. I admit it’s immature, but we don’t have kids, and I just want to chill after working a stressful job for 15 years.

I make dinner, clean the house, paid for our nice house, and make twice what she makes as a school teacher from my assets and royalty income. If I want to get high and play video games when she is working, what is the problem? We take nice trips across the world in the summer when she’s off.

She said I’m too old for this, but there’s not much else to do in the winter. I just want to chill, but I can tell she doesn’t like it. Early retirement does not fit well in this society.

PoIiMath: There are guys who look at passive financial security and say “sweet, now I don’t have to do anything” and guys who look at it and say “sweet, this frees me up to do something important.” Women prefer one of those attitudes over the other.

I understand the drive to become financially able to retire, to take all the pressure off, but yeah you can’t permanently check out of doing useful or interesting things at 41 and expect anyone to stick around, or for that to turn out well for you even in terms of hedonic enjoyment.

Loser is exactly correct here. A well deserved break is one thing. Arguing ‘there is nothing to do it is too cold’ is not going to work when the internet exists, you have a computer (and can even install Claude Code)? That’s another thing entirely, even if she wasn’t going out every day to teach.

Also, yeah, if you’re on drugs five days a week then you have a problem, period.

If she’s still working full time then no, this is not going to work. I do think you can absolutely say ‘I’ve worked hard for 15 years to get to this point and I need a few months fully off’ but it can’t be indefinite.

This is the now-famous clip of Bad Bunny with captions explaining the Jones Act.

Rep. Ed Case: Mahalo Bad Bunny for the Jones Act education break at Super Bowl … But seriously Puerto Rico like Hawai’i and the other non-48 parts of our country especially suffer from the jacked-up costs of living that result directly from the shipping monopoly stranglehold of this ancient federal law.

Colin Grabow shares the OSG talking points on how to promote the Jones Act. They recommend:

Sharing the disingenuous claim that the maritime industry ‘provides 650,000 jobs nationwide’ that comes from counting everything that touches maritime anything in any way and attributing all of it to our banning further maritime activity.
Indeed, they then expand that to the outright false claim of ‘650,000 Americans working in the maritime industry.’
Similar logic is behind their ‘economic impact of over $150 billion.’

And they say you pound these lies over and over again.

Essentially, they see you with $100, they take $99 of them, and say ‘look I am responsible for you having a dollar.’

For the first time in a while a new ship has joined the Jones Act fleet.

Dredging Contractors of America: Jones Act newbuild 🇺🇸⚓️

The Frederick Paup — largest U.S.-built self-propelled hopper dredge ever.

15,000+ cu yds | ~25,000 hp

Built in Texas. Working for America. January 23, 2026

Colin Grabow: Ordered in 2020 for a Spring 2023 delivery at a cost of $100+ million. Now being delivered in 2026 at a cost of $200+ million. Another Jones Act embarrassment.

Colin Grabow: As for this being the “largest U.S.-built self-propelled hopper dredge,” the Frederick Paup’s capacity of 15,000 cubic yards/11,500 cubic meters would make it the 31st-largest hopper dredge in the European fleet.

Colin Grabow: Here’s the CEO admitting that if the vessel had been built in South Korea it would have been 2/3 the price and constructed in half the time.

Bill Walker: They could have just bought a far superior ship from the Belgians, faster and cheaper.

Cristóbal Colón:

Length: 223 meters

Beam (width): 41 meters

Draught: 15.15 meters

Loaded capacity: Up to 78,000 tons of material

Maximum dredging depth: 155 meters

Pathetic.

The fact that they are bragging about the unusual act of building a third-class ship three years late at twice the planned already outrageous budget is all the evidence you need that the Jones Act and Dredge Act have utterly failed in their stated objectives.

It no longer surprises me when I see things like the same senator (here Ed Markey) opposing Jones Act repeal and also attacking Waymos.

Protectionism almost never works, but most of the time there is at least Something To Protect. The Jones Act is special in that it has already killed off almost all of the American shipbuilding industry and left us with almost no ships.

We are not a ‘serious nation that handles energy’ on the high seas. Quite the opposite, we are a nation that has banned the handling of energy on the high seas, on the level of ‘we ship our LNG to Europe and then import LNG back because we don’t have ships that can legally take that LNG from Houston to Boston.’

AMP Maritime: The Jones Act fleet includes modern tankers and Articulated Tug Barges purpose-built to move refined products safely between U.S. ports.

Built to move. Built to last. That’s how a serious nation handles energy.

Dominic Pino: The current number of modern LNG tankers that comply with the Jones Act: Zero.

Protecting an industry that doesn’t exist.

Sal Mercogliano (WGOW Shipping): INCORRECT: Crowley’s ‘American Energy’ Makes History as First US-Flagged LNG Carrier Serving Puerto Rico

Dominic Pino:

Even in those areas where the fleet of the United States ‘includes ships’ that can haul cargo, which really does not seem like something that we should be at risk of not having (yet here we are), it is vastly more expensive, and available in vastly smaller quantities, than it would be otherwise, or than in any comparable place anywhere in the world. It is madness.

It really is this simple:

Joe, American Avgeek + TransitJoe: Unpopular take: The Jones Act protects US Shipbuilding Capacity, which is at record AND unacceptable lows. We need shipbuilding capacity not just for warships but ferries and freighters.

That said, cutting Puerto Rico a break is also fair.

Josh Barro: If the Jones Act protects US shipbuilding capacity, why is US shipbuilding capacity at record and unacceptable lows?

Sal attempts to explain this away, and this explanation has to be seen:

Sal Mercogliano: Here you go.

1️⃣Ships Sales Act of 1946 provides Allied merchant fleets with 1113 surplus ships from the US when we could have used the opportunity to jam our shipyards with orders.

2️⃣ The US assists Liberia in the creation of a ship registry akin to Panama. The latter was used to avoid Neutrality Laws and ship aid – particularly 100 octane gas – to the UK. Liberia, as one of the few independent states in Africa needed economic support.

3️⃣Marshall Plan of 1949 provides loans to counties to rebuild critical infrastructure, including shipyards. Many of which adopt the pre-fabrication method of the US

4️⃣US set up the Military Sea Transportation Service in 1949 (now Military Sealift Command) to handle sealift for the Dept of Defense, thereby reducing its level of dependency on the US merchant marine.

5️⃣ New cargo handling technologies are introduced, but a few – LASH, SeaBee, Roll-on/Roll-off – are not commercially viable and lead to the demise of some key shipping companies.

6️⃣ Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 leads to the creation of the Interstate Highway System. This reduces the need for coastal (cabotage) shipping as cargo shifts to trucks.

7️⃣ The introduction of DC8 and 707 in 1958 shifted the movement of people from rail and ship to plane. This opened up cargo capacity on the nation’s rail system.

8️⃣Colonial Pipeline 1962 saw a massive reduction in the number of product tankers needed from the Gulf of Mexico to the US East Coast

9️⃣ Vietnam War demonstrated the utility of the containership (see The Box) but the failure to invest a new program to sponsor ship construction until the MMA 1970, allowed Europe and Japan – using some of those protectionist methods you oppose – to surpass the US.

🔟The 1980s saw the end of construction differentials under the Merchant Marine Act of 1936. This witnessed the end of ship construction for ships in the international trade as the US Navy wanted to ship construction of their 600-ship Navy exclusively into private yards, but the end of the Cold War saw US yards lose not just commercial, but also military business.

So to summarize:

We didn’t hold other countries for economic ransom in 1946. How dare we.
Liberia has a ship registry.
We helped other countries have their own shipyards. How dare we.
The military sealift command uses its own ships.
Cargo handling techniques were introduced that were not commercially viable, so key shipping companies died.
The Interstate Highway System reduced shipping demand.
Airplanes reduced shipping demand and opened up rail capacity.
The Colonial Pipeline reduced demand in 1962.
The US government did not pay for the development of container ships in time.
The US Navy stopped subsidizing the commercial shipyards.

A lot of this is trying to say, oh, we have roads and trains and pipelines and airplanes, so who even needs ships? The rest (aside from #2 which is deeply silly, given the vast number of similar alternatives and that it’s irrelevant anyway) is ‘you didn’t give us enough money and subsidies, and didn’t extort or exploit our allies enough.’

And that all explains why we have approximately zero shipbuilding and zero ships, and we should keep having approximately zero ships to protect that approximately zero shipbuilding. It keeps us strong, you see.

Coefficient giving renews its grant the GiveWell’s recommended charities, upping its commitment to $175 million for 2026. They expect a bigger growth in general grantmaking, since Good Ventures assets are up 50% in the last two years.

Scott Alexander provides various arguments against the ‘other people’s money’ argument against foreign aid, where people want all taxpayers to fit the bill rather than donating the money themselves. This is a classic free rider or coordination problem and most people are not libertarians, and also a lot of aid is about strategic national interests. Scott Alexander is very good at finding such arguments and exploring them at length and I think here he gets way too clever. There’s no mystery to explain.

I also think the large reference class of what Scott does here where he suggests labeling a box on your tax return ‘I request to cancel my participation in foreign aid this year and receive an $X tax refund. I understand this will result in Y amount of preventable death and suffering’ is rather obnoxious and toxic and if everyone in EA-related spaces stopped doing it that would help. Facts are very much not in evidence and oh boy do you piss people off when you talk like that.

Note that this graph is only from 7.0 to 8.0, the moves are not that big.

Robin Hanson: If you are happiest when you are least impressive, influential, helpful, or desirable, do you really want to be max happy?

i/o: Men are happiest when they don’t have a lot of responsibilities.

It’s not as simple as not having responsibilities, but yes there is a substantial jump upon retirement, followed by declines as aging makes your body stop working, but the declines then are remarkably small. I have a hard time believing people at 90 years old are actually happier than they were at 50. Mostly it says happiness changes little.

I recommend Bits About Money on fraud investigation. The central message is that fraud is a policy choice. We choose to stop being idiots and victims, although the optimal amount of fraud will remain not zero. We have various ‘get rid of most fraud’ switches and we choose not to press those switches. We have overwhelming amounts of Bayesian evidence we can use to identify or evaluate potential frauds, including that the same people keep committing the frauds over and over, they follow many basic patterns and use the same supply chains, and that most frauds collapse if you do basic probing for internal consistency. In contrast to our very expensive current required mechanisms like AML and KYC that do relatively little, these alternative methods would have trivial costs compared to the fraud prevented.

Peter Thiel claims all trends are overrated, which one files under the category ‘all generalizations are wrong.’ What he’s actually saying, as is often the case when Thiel says something superficially crazy, is something smarter. He’s saying that if someone claims their business is part of a trend and tries to use a bunch of buzzwords, rather than telling you what makes them unique, then nothing makes them unique, so run.

I essentially agree that it is very hard to sustain a ‘middle path’ for Jewishness, and I would extend this to other similar cultures or religions. You either go fully secular and assimilate, or you heavily invest in staying distinct, which involves a lot of time and focus. The full version is sustainable across generations, and the middle path essentially isn’t, so the kids have to pick a side.

Some are creating ‘analog rooms’ where no screens are allowed. File this under ‘things that seem cool for those who have substantially more space than I do.’

Tyler Cowen podcast with Frank Fukuyama, full of disagreement.

SpaceX pivots from saying they are focusing on a city on Mars to saying they are focusing on a city on The Moon, which is a much more realistic goal. Wise, regardless of the level of seriousness about either of them. Investors are presumably valuing it at $1.25 trillion for entirely distinct reasons.

Department of Energy proposes a categorical NEPA exclusion for advanced nuclear reactors. Let’s go.

IFP proposes the Freedom Act to create permitting certainty and prevent politicians from shutting down project types they disfavor.

Maxwell Tabarrok offers brief thoughts on Christopher Alexander’s The Timeless Way of Building. I am sad that the Architecture sequence got lost to time due to conflicts with writing about AI. I think Alexander was spectacularly right remarkably often on both details and principles, although he got a lot systematically worse when he dealt with macro questions rather than micro and tried to hang on to wrong or obsolete impressions of how to organize an economy or wider area, or lets his collectivist streak interfere. But his micro observations are scary good.

If I had to point to one key insight, it is that our lives are largely made up of repeating particular patterns, and what is around drives you towards particular action choices, so instead of thinking generically you should engineer spaces around making the patterns you want to happen happen more often, in the most positive ways.

Despite the associated tax incentives, rich people mostly don’t borrow money against unrealized gains, that is under 2% of their economic income, whereas the unrealized gains are 29%-40% depending on how you count. The loophole should still be closed, but in practice it does not matter much.

You or your accountant can say the magic words ‘first time penalty abatement’ to the IRS and probably get a penalty waived, but you have to say the words first. If you do it then you can’t do it again for three years, so you don’t want to do it if the penalty is small relative to potential future or other penalties. but in most cases you should have odds.

Patrick McKenzie: I’ve never worked for the IRS, but I have definitely been that agent. It is dramatized in a few popular works of fiction, including the Incredibles, and so here is your friendly neighborhood infrastructure nerd saying this is very real.

It was, in my recollection, literally written down that we could not *tellthe caller about the existence of the escape hatch.

Trainee: Are we allowed to hint about the existence of the escape hatch?

Trainer: The rule is you are not allowed to tell the caller about it.

Trainee: That didn’t answer my question.

Trainee: Didn’t it. Moving on.

I was nowhere near sophisticated at reading subtexts at the time in life where I took that training to understand that different people in the room understood the trainer differently.

“This is bizarre and perverse.”

Retrospective review of the written rules, which must exist, will discover that they contain a rule which the company is extremely comfortable with defending. Retrospective review of the understanding of an 18 year old trainee is not a risk.

“Can you say a few more words about ‘escape hatch’?”

The trainee will eventually work in a call center attached to a telephone and a computer program. Clicking a button in the computer program awards the caller money from the company.

The company is not willing to have its CS reps push that button for no reason whatsoever, but in its considered judgement spends ~0 management attention reviewing the decision of $10/hr 18 year olds to click that button. So it trains them on a rule, and also on what the military would call “commander’s intent” about that rule, and to the extremely limited degree it trusts its Tier One CS workers, trusts that they are the final authority on clicking.

Note that I said ~0 management attention. My line manager once asked me whether I understood the button. Although I did not understand why he asked that question, retrospectively, it must have been because I was anomalous on a weekly report circulated back to him.

The entirety of that calculation.

Me: Yes sir I understand the button.

Manager: And you always had a reason to click the button.

Me: Yes sir I always have a reason to click the button.

Manager: Carry on, Patrick.

“How costly was the button?”

I likely cost the company more by pressing it at the low-but-anomalous frequency I did than the company paid me in wages. Very within the model, right.

And this is one reason why I, when talking to CS reps, sometimes whether is there a set of facts under which they have personal authority to click a button. Very few businesses specifically anticipate that question in the rulebook.

Remember that the 5th amendment protects your passwords but not your fingerprints.

So as a good principle, if it is plausible the US Government would try to get into your phone, and you wouldn’t want them to do that, don’t enable fingerprint unlock.

Runa Sandvik: The FBI was able to access Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s Signal messages because she used Signal on her work laptop. The laptop accepted Touch ID for authentication, meaning the agents were allowed to require her to unlock it.

The Signal messages between Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson and her source were set to auto-delete after one day; but Natanson consistently published articles directly quoting his leaks just days after receiving the information.

Patrick McKenzie: I think relatively few people should have the threat model “Adversary is US government and they will have physical control of my person and laptop while also respecting rules” but if that is you, don’t use biometrics, because they do not have testimonial privilege.

My layman’s understanding of the curious protection for passwords is you can’t be compelled to divulge a password because you can’t be compelled to testify that you own a device. That’s a pretty thin reed, but extremely useful for you and annoying for them, given functional FDE.

The general rule for enthusiastically cooperating with government regulations is that you want a government lawyer to give your lawyer a list of the documents they require in a well-lighted conference room and then to deliver the documents in the same.

The alternative is a conversation with an armed agent of the state while you are mutually quite stressed. That will not tend to redound to your benefit and so, while you can’t necessarily pick whether the state takes a strong interest in you or yours, you can do some planning.

n.b. This was part of the reason Uber had a turn-off-all-access-from-orbit button for their local offices. Some people, when they heard Uber had that plan, were furious that it was trying to stymie legitimate investigations into business practices.

I felt differently.

Oh implicit context: The purpose of that button was a local office could e.g. Slack the security team “We’re being raided” and the security team would respond by remote locking ~everything.

Paul Roales: triple click on the side button on an iphone disabled face unlock and then you have to use a password

quick fast before any interaction with anyone official

Patrick McKenzie: Worth knowing that when the feds are serious about this they can start the interaction with a flying tackle or other physical contact to make it difficult with you to actuate devices.

Let’s face it. Church and synagogue and other religious services are usually boring.

Doing the same exact thing week after week (modulo the sermon) is a tough ask, and it’s a much tougher ask now that we all have options.

Based in Christ: Church attendance has tanked over the past 40 years (though no one wants to admit it or talk about it).

I think a big part of the reason for this is that people simply find church services boring (even the megachurch concert ones). But no one really wants to talk about that either.

Andrew Fleischman: The alternatives to church used to be a lot less fun

Sanjay Nadaraja: Not necessarily fun, but distracting and engrossing.

Kelsey Piper: I suspect this is usually why people do less X than in the 1960s for a wide range of X from church to sex to reading to parenting

A bunch of people point out that services are not supposed to be fun. I agree, but fun is not the opposite of boredom. If the service was actually moving you, if you cared about what you were saying, it wouldn’t be boring.

Then you miss out on all the other benefits of having a shared community and ethical system, regardless of what you think of the religious beliefs themselves.

I also saw people complaining about how church used to last an hour and now it is often ninety minutes. Can’t have that. Gotta keep it short and make it count.

Remember to reverse any advice you hear, but especially reverse the lies. Cate Hall highlights ‘the lies I used to tell myself’ and I can confirm they are indeed lies.

The full description is worthwhile, but the list is:

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
When you know, you know.
If it were a good idea, someone would be doing it already.
If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.
If you like your job, you’re doing something wrong.
“All people are insane. They will do anything at any time, and God help anybody who looks for reasons.”
Money can’t buy happiness.
Intuition is fake and rationality solves everything.

There’s some truth in all of them, and there’s a time and a place where each will be the right thing to say in the particular moment, but all eight are also importantly false.

The full negation of all eight would each also be false.

Cate also links to this ‘54 things’ list of claims by Mario Gabriele. She found herself mostly nodding along except for #33. I found it much more of a mixed bag. My instinct is that it is useful to skeptically think about such lists and ask where you do and don’t agree and why, and what the list overall says about the person and thus about the items on the list. Mario also links to several other lifehack lists: Alexey Guzey’s tells you a lot about him, Laura Deming gives us 10 mental models from 2020 that illustrates a very different focus, Nat Friedman presents a mode that you want to be able to visit, maybe quite often, but I wouldn’t want to always live there.

As others have proposed before, what about choosing movies via swiping and then listing which movies everyone agreed upon? This doesn’t optimize because degree of preference matters, but it captures 80%+ of the requirement that everyone be down. I think you want to risk making this a little more complex and having more than 2 choices (e.g. swipe up and down as well for ‘hell yes’ and ‘hell no’ and a ‘hell yes’ cancels out a soft no if someone isn’t abusing it).

Film revenue has fallen dramatically and streaming as the new DVD or VHS is not making up for that much, although we’re seeing a recovery as streaming continues to grow and perhaps the worst is over.

As I’ve seen a lot more movies both at home and in the theater, I grow increasingly confident people underestimate theaters. Use the big screen, Luke.

Matt Damon explains that Netflix movies have to reiterate the plot 3-4 times because people are on their phones and their action movies need set pieces in the first 5 minutes.

Film students have such terrible attention spans, and so little interest in actual films, that it is increasingly impossible to get them to see a film at all, and good luck getting them to stay off their phones and pay attention. I did not realize how bad things had gotten. What I find most confusing is that these are film students, who want to study film and make film, and they still can’t do it. I do sympathize with the complaint that old movies can be painfully slow, but when a film student literally can’t name a film they watched recently, have only watched Disney films, or can’t sit through a showing, maybe go do something else?

Professors are split as to whether to accept this, or try to help students fix it. I strongly endorse the later strategy.

A common theme of movies set in either authoritarian regimes, or in the past, is that living under authoritarian regimes or in the past kind of really sucked a lot. As Matthew Yglesias points out, everyone everywhere has problems but you’d much rather have liberal democracy problems of family drama and anxiety in the style of Sentimental Value, in a modern liberal democracy, than you would have the problems of Hamnet where your children can’t get medical care (and you can’t communicate with your spouse easily when you have to live apart) or in Secret Agent when you’re in an authoritarian regime.

A very strong endorsement of the memoirs of U.S. Grant, and here’s a great anecdote.

To not be left behind, I watched the first season of Plur1bus. It is intentionally extremely slow, including an entire first half hour or so that I would have cut outright. If this wasn’t by Vince Gilligan and something people talk about, I don’t think I make it out of episode one. I’m mildly glad I stuck it out.

As others have noted, it cares more about particular characters than its overarching plot. I was disappointed that they did what media often does now, which is take a potentially interesting philosophical or moral question, and then give one side an increasing set of reasons why ‘oh obviously they’re wrong.’ A recent example that isn’t much of a spoiler would be in the new Superman movie.

Indeed, not only have I ‘seen this movie before’ several times, as Carol puts it (upcoming link url itself is a potential spoiler in both directions so if you don’t want to know don’t look), I’ve seen this show before in quite some detail, including remarkably similar catches to tip the scales. Who did it better (so far) depends which aspects you care about.

Kalshi partners with Lodge Card Club to offer live betting on the outcome of streamed poker events.

They’re also running some rather vile social advertising, of the type usually reserved for scams, in ways DraftKings and FanDuel did not stoop to. Please, stop doing this.

Polymarket user creates a new account to bet on the Super Bowl halftime show, turns out to (presumably) be an insider given he won every bet.

Fond memories of Civilization I. I tried to introduce it to my son because it is very discrete and has lots of cool things in it, as an introduction, but it ended up too confusing and requiring too much investment into knowledge

RIP Kai Budde. We’ll miss you, buddy. He was an amazing friend, teammate and coworker. Always in good spirits to the end. With him, knowing he’s just better than you didn’t sting. We’ve known this one was coming for a while and it still stings. A lot.

Gaming is good for you.

Is this a 3D model?: you have posted on Twitter 78,800 times since joining in March 2024 which means you are tweeting somewhere over 100 times a day on average. you should be more concerned with that then playing video games.

0x45: – surgeons who game make 37% fewer errors

– gamers make accurate decisions 25% faster

– 10hrs of gaming slowed cognitive decline by 7 years

– action games improved reading in dyslexic kids as much as reading programs

– 3D gamers scored 12% better on memory tests

Liminal Warmth: Playing games have unambiguously improved my planning, strategy, and logistical skills and when younger, vocabulary and reflexes

But setting that aside its also been a pretty fun hobby

Jakeup: is eating chocolate a “waste of time”? is frolicking in the meadows? making love to a beautiful woman?

bitch I’m not playing video games because it’s “linked to cognitive performance”. I play them because they’re really fun and the beautiful women are all otherwise occupied

taoki: everything is a waste of time if you’re brave enough

Someone refusing to lie within a context that explicitly permits lying, such as games like Among Us or Diplomacy, is in my experience strong evidence that the person has a strong aversion to lying. The same goes for other simulated negative actions. As with many such heuristics, this would fall apart if there was reason for someone to actively fake this attribute, but you can usually rule that out and it almost never happens.

I’ve been playing through the Dragon Quest 2D-HD remakes. First up was Dragon Quest 3, now I’m on Dragon Quest 1, as this is the explicitly intended order.

My feeling on Dragon Quest 3 was that it was a fun game as a remake, but it had a few key flaws.

As with many old games, when you fix Quality of Life issues like how you save the game or what happens if you die, or you give too clear indicators of where to go, you disrupt key balancing mechanisms. The barriers, and having to figure things out, are inherent to a lot of the fun, including needing to fight your way to a boss.
The new Monster Wrangler class is basically a ‘you have to look up the info’ class, since it scales with how many monsters you catch, and it is clearly the way you are ‘supposed to’ beat the game given Wild Side. Way too many of the monsters and bosses in the late game will shut you out of casting spells, which forces you to switch over to Monster Wrangler.
It’s way too easy to randomly die in the later dungeons if you’re at levels that keep the bosses interesting, in ways that don’t feel fair.

For Dragon Quest 1, I’m not done yet, but I think it extends those mistakes and is largely a failure, because it loses the elegance of the original and tries to shoehorn in a lot of extra spells and extra story that I feel don’t add anything. I get that the original was basically one long grind, but that’s kind of the point. Also, you spend a lot of time during which healing during battles de facto doesn’t work, which means you just have to unleash and hope you don’t die.

But mostly the game destroys the key tensions in the original Dragon Quest 1, which is that if you push harder you might die and have to go back to the castle and lose half your gold, and also you need to map and figure things out. I’m still going to finish, but it’s kind of out of a sense of honor or obligation than that I’m having that much fun.

Liv Boeree is correct.

Tommy Siegel: every relationship needs one of each, i think

Liv Boeree: no the best is when you’re both green but use that shared love language to make the experience feel like yellow

Successful soccer players tend to have many exceptional cognitive skills.

Discussion of the economics of the NBA trading deadline, as teams respond to their incentives and find loopholes in the rules. They need to hire some of us gamers to design better rules, especially around preventing tanking but also in other ways.

Then there’s tanking, where we all are talking price. Everyone agrees that NBA teams that can no longer compete are under no obligation to maximize their chances of winning more games. But how far should we let them go to lose as many as possible?

What is ethical versus unethical tanking?

Andy Bailey: Ending flopping and calling travels is a more direct line to a better NBA product, but everyone’s up in arms over tanking. And I find it especially ridiculous that people are trying to make the Jazz the fall guy, as if we didn’t just watch it work for OKC and San Antonio.

David Kenah: The difference –

Ethical tanking – intentionally building a less talented team that won’t win many games even with your best players

Non-ethical tanking – benching your best players for the 4th quarter because they’re winning.

Zac Hill: I guess my issue with this construction, even if I do see what you’re saying, is: say the goal is winning not tanking. Isn’t the optimal win one where you a) risk injury for your premiere talent as little as possible while b) developing your weak talent as much as possible?

Zac Hill: “[Tanking] does not bother me. Does your conscience bother you?”

Mark Cuban has an excellent discussion of tanking and also roster design here, and an argument that the NBA should embrace tanking because it enhances rather than detracts from the fan experience.

One thing he points out is the dumb fact that you then have to lie to everyone and say you’re not tanking.

Derek Thompson points out that if landing the Next Top Player is ‘way way way more important’ than winning games today, because the players are generational, and there are tons of games that mostly only give you playoff seeding. So as long as losing sometimes gets you those players, tanking is inevitable. He contrasts with the NFL where individual players are less valuable (less than he makes it out, yes Sam Darnold won the Super Bowl convincingly but it turns out he’s actually Good At Job and the QB is like a quarter of your team, and NFL teams ‘should’ tank way more, but yes).

I see six schools of thought about ethical tanking.

Tanking is ethical, full stop, it is the league’s job to set the rules.
Tanking by the front office is ethical, tanking by the coach or players is not.
Tanking by nonplayers is acceptable, but not by the players.
Tanking by nonplayers is acceptable, but only to the point of indifference to winning or putting a competitive product on the field this year.
Tanking by nonplayers is acceptable, but only to the point of plausible deniability.
Tanking is fine if and only if your fans approve of it.
Tanking is never acceptable, how dare you, sir.

We can all agree that a player actively trying to lose the game is not acceptable, although if they decide to try a new play or be selfish with their stats, well, okay then.

I can see an argument for all six positions. I think for now the answer should basically be #6, if the fans cheer when you tank then the NBA is the one with the problem.

Ultimately the current lottery is half measure. I see a few different ways out of this, shortening the season would help a lot, but fundamentally you need to make it so that teams want to win the game. I see basically two ways to do that.

Method one is financial incentives. Put a financial value on each game. You can buy those top picks if you want, but they will not come cheap. Claude estimates that $3 million per game would mostly do the trick, and you’d have to adjust the luxury tax rate for obvious reasons. But, man, that’s good TV.

The other solution is to take away the incentive to tank entirely. Bite the bullet. All non-playoff teams pick in a fully random order, or something else drastic. You could get creative, and have a loser’s playoff or late season reversed incentive for the top pick in some fashion. Have fun with it.

You could also simply accept that tanking is fine, actually, and let it be in the open.

Zac Hill: The other thing that happens in this discourse is that people get the timelines all wrong. This is now how the eighties and nineties operated!

ELI5 question from ngomes3824: Why Living in the 80s and 90s Seemed So Much More Affordable

A family of 4 used to be able to live relatively comfortably off 1 modest income in the 80s/90s (own a house, have 1–2 cars, maybe take 1 family vacation a year, build wealth, etc).

What specific factors contributed to the change to today where many (most?) young families need 2 full-time incomes just to pay the bills; and building wealth, such as buying a home, saving for retirement, paying off debt, and simply saving money, seem more difficult to achieve than it did 30–40 years ago?

There’s plenty of answers on why the financial side of things did get harder, I discuss this in The Revolution of Rising Expectations, but a lot of it simply that people are wrong about how things used to be.

Jordan McGills argues that what is driving the middle class feeling poor is that there are too many upper middle class people. He calls this ‘the great decomposition,’ saying the gap between 50th percentile and 80th percentile in particular has risen and bites hard.

If [X] inevitably leads to [Y] in practice, then you can either choose [~X] or [Y].

Tyler Cowen: And even if you think that spyware could make those cars a security risk in Washington, D.C., due to spying possibilities, I am less worried about their proliferation in Quebec and Nova Scotia. Keep them out of Ottawa if need be.

Yeah, you can’t do that. You can’t have cars that are fine in Quebec and then not legal to drive into Ottawa. You have to pick a side.

That’s the same as you can’t say ‘oh we will build AI that can do [bad thing] we just won’t use it for [bad thing]’ whether that’s autonomous killer robots or deepfakes or whatever else you happen not to like. Doesn’t work that way, especially given open models. You mostly either build it or you don’t.

Unusual Whales has launched a tool to scour Polymarket for unusual activity and suspected insider bets. Joe Weisenthal predicts this will be a gold mine for spoofing, as in people make trades to pretend to be insiders. My guess is that there will be a lot less spoofing than the equilibrium would suggest, because people don’t do things, and no one will expect in their gut that it will work.

But yes, it will happen eventually. It is cheap to try this, and the gains can be very large, either in the form of ‘I trick people into following and then trade against them’ or ‘I trick people into trading on that basis elsewhere for orders of magnitude more money and I trade against them there’ or even ‘I convince people that [X] is going to happen, and this changes events.’

It will be very funny. The way there wouldn’t be spoofing is if there is already enough ‘natural spoofing,’ as in people who look like insiders but do stupid things for dumb reasons, to make insider bets not trustworthy. But so far we’ve seen that insider bet signals are, while not reliable, actually pretty good.

Vitalik Buterin is worried about the state of prediction markets, as they converge mostly on short term dopamine-heavy bets like sports and crypto.

He points out you need someone to lose money, which means one of three ultimate sources:

1. “Naive traders”: people with dumb opinions who bet on totally wrong things

2. “Info buyers”: people who set up money-losing automated market makers, to motivate people to trade on markets to help the info buyer learn information they do not know.

3. “Hedgers”: people who are -EV in a linear sense, but who use the market as insurance, reducing their risk.

I would add:

Manipulators: People who lose money in order to try to change the market price.
Motivators: People who bet in order to change their incentives.

These are extreme descriptions:

You merely have to be bad enough that you lose money, not ‘totally wrong.’
You can subsidize in a wide variety of ways, AMMs are only the crypto default. And there are reasons other than info to want to subsidize a market.
Hedging includes arbitrage, including statistical arbitrage.

Nut basically yes. Either you have traders who get beat, who are hedging, or who are subsidizing the market, or who are manipulating prices or themselves.

I think it is inevitable that the bulk of the volume will be where there is the best product-market fit, and it will be on places where the information is not so socially valuable, like sports and crypto, over short time horizons.

I also think this is fine, as it serves several purposes.

It draws in liquidity and eyes, which can then be directed elsewhere.
It creates an incentive to draw in eyes or improve reputation, by providing socially valuable markets.

As in, at equilibrium, Polymarket and others should be creating some markets that are money-losing but that function as brand building and advertising. Polymarket should want to be the front page of the information system, where you get the ‘real news.’

On method of subsidy, the advantage of AMMs is that they are predictable, easy to implement and come with various nice assurances. The problem with AMMs is that most of the subsidy often ends up wasted, because you get run over, and make dumb trades, and don’t get the capture much of the benefits of two-way volume. The AMM is a deeply dumb trader. You can and should do better by doing something smart, that can fall back in a pinch on something dumb.

Scott Alexander: In a recent article on “the AI apocalypse”, Gareth Watkins of New Statesman condemns me for a statement I made in a SSC post. I described Kelsey Piper’s difficulty interfacing with doctors to renew her Adderall prescription, and said it decreased her effectiveness 20% and therefore “cost approximately 54 billion lives”. He says that “this is the kind of thinking that is considered serious by rationalists [and] why Sam Bankman-Fried was able to justify security fraud.”

I’m proud of my work reminding my friends to take their medications, but this statement was a joke. For example, there are only 8 billion people in the world, and even Kelsey probably cannot save each of them more than six times. I request a correction.

Kelsey Piper: Actually, it’s kind of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer situation where the world faces an apocalypse every month or so and I personally prevent them all.

Well played.

I find it annoying to have to tell people this, and yes, you can trust BLS data.

She’s real, and she’s actual size.

The Perfect Dark Girl: Bought another copy of Perfect Dark Zero today and the dude at the register held it up and looked back and forth between me and it LOL

I do respect, as Dan McLaughlin describes it, the instant classics.

This is a case of the ‘no wife, no horse, no mustache’ principle where you actively don’t want to know what the original tweet was, the mystery will always be better.

Judianna: Just made an addition to my bucket list.

Yes, that picture is AI. No, I don’t care.

I don’t think my wife would fall into this one, but there’s one way to find out.

tom cunningham: Cadillac tasks: I believe many estimates of LLM productivity boosts are over-estimates because people are using them for cadillac tasks: things that would take you a long time unaided, but have only marginal additional value.

Jason Crawford: Isn’t this confusing two different measures of productivity? You can measure amount of code produced or economic value produced—and of course those are not the same, because of diminishing returns. Of course when the code of code is reduced, the marginal tasks will be lower value

Kelsey Piper: today I said to a friend that I was pretty sure I could identify the century that historical battles happened in from a description of the weapons/tactics with all proper nouns removed. then I had Claude design a quiz so I could test this. this made me less productive.

Zac Hill: I just gotcha’d my wife by telling her this story and having her say “omg the things men do in their spare time” and then being all ‘ha-ha’; thank you for the hit of superiority 😉

Times when the apology only makes it better:

The way things work:

Dave: I was telling my sister that I’ve been going to the gym recently and my nephew said “you should go inside when you get there”and I don’t think I’ll ever recover from that.

Discussion about this post

Monthly Roundup #39: February 2026 Read More »

5 changes to know about in Apple’s latest iOS, macOS, and iPadOS betas

Apple, ios 26, ipados 26, macos 26 tahoe, Tech / 9u50fv / February 18, 2026

The 26.3 updates were mostly invisible; these changes are more significant.

A collection of iPhones running iOS 26. Credit: Apple

This week, Apple released the first developer betas for iOS 26.4, iPadOS 26.4, macOS 26.4, and its other operating systems. On Tuesday, it followed those up with public beta versions of the same updates.

Usually released around the midpoint between one major iOS release and the next, the *.4 updates to its operating system usually include a significant batch of new features and other refinements, and if the first beta is any indication, this year’s releases uphold that tradition.

A new “Playlist Playground” feature will let Apple Music subscribers generate playlists with text prompts, and native support for video podcasts is coming to the Podcasts app. The Creator Studio version of the Freeform drawing and collaboration app is also available in the 26.4 updates, allowing subscribers to access stock images from Apple’s Content Hub and to insert AI-generated images.

But we’ve spent time digging through the betas to identify some of the more below-the-surface improvements and changes that Apple is testing. Some of these changes won’t come to the public versions of the software until a later release; others may be removed or changed between now and when the 26.4 update is made available to the general public. But generally, Apple’s betas give us a good idea of what the final release will look like.

One feature that hasn’t appeared in these betas? The new “more intelligent Siri” that Apple has been promising since the iOS 18 launch in 2024. Apple delayed the feature until sometime in 2026, citing that it wasn’t meeting the company’s standards for quality and reliability.

Reports indicated that the company had been planning to make the new Siri part of the 26.4 update, but as of earlier this month, Apple has reportedly decided to push it to the 26.5 release or later; even releasing it as part of iOS 27 in the fall would technically not run afoul of the “2026” promise.

Before we begin, the standard warning about installing beta software on hardware you rely on day to day. Although these point updates are generally more stable than the major releases Apple tests in the summer and fall, they can still contain major bugs and may cause your device to behave strangely. The first beta, in particular, tends to be the roughest—more stable versions will be released in the coming weeks, and we should see the final version of the update within the next couple months.

Charging limits for MacBooks

The macOS 26.4 update includes a slider for manually limiting your Mac’s battery charge percentage. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

In macOS 11 Big Sur, Apple added an on-by-default “Optimized Battery Charging” toggle to the operating system that would allow macOS to limit your battery’s charge percentage to 80 percent based on your usage and charging behavior. The idea is to limit the time your battery spends charging while full, something that can gradually reduce its capacity.

The macOS 26.4 update adds a new slider similar to the one in iOS, further allowing users to manually specify a maximum charge limit that is always observed, no matter what. It’s adjustable in 5 percent increments from 80 to 100 percent.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that limiting your charge percentage can lengthen the useful life of your battery and reduce wear, but there’s nothing that will fully prevent a battery from wearing out and losing capacity over time. It’s up to users to decide whether an immediately noticeable everyday hit to battery life is worth a slightly longer service life.

In the current macOS betas, enabling a charge limit manually doesn’t disable the Optimized Battery Charging feature the way it does in iOS. It’s unclear if this is an early bug or an intentional difference in how the feature is implemented in macOS.

End-to-end encryption (and other improvements) for non-Apple texting

Apple has been infamously slow to adopt support for the Rich Communication Services (RCS) messaging protocol used by most modern Android phones. Apple-to-Apple messaging was handled using iMessage, which supports end-to-end encryption among many other features. But for many years, it stuck by the aging SMS standard for “green bubble” texting between Apple’s platforms and others, to the enduring frustration of anyone with a single Android-using friend in a group chat.

Apple finally began supporting RCS messaging for major cellular carriers in iOS 18, and has slowly expanded support to other networks in subsequent releases. But Apple’s implementation still doesn’t support end-to-end encryption, which was added to the RCS standard about a year ago.

The 26.4 update is the first to begin testing encryption for RCS messages. But as with the initial RCS rollout, Apple is moving slowly and deliberately: for now, encrypted RCS messaging only works when texting between Apple devices, and not between Apple devices and Android phones. The feature also won’t be included in the final 26.4 release—it’s only included in the betas for testing purposes, and it “will be available to customers in a future software update for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS.”

Encrypted iMessage and RCS chats will be labeled with a lock icon, much like how most web browsers label HTTPS sites.

To support encrypted messaging, Apple will jump from version 2.4 of the RCS Universal Profile to version 3.0. This should also enable support for several improvements in versions 2.5, 2.6, and 2.7 of the RCS standard, including previously iMessage-exclusive things like editing and recalling messages and replying to specific messages inline.

The return of the “Compact” Safari tab bar

The Compact tab view returns to Safari 26.4 and iPadOS 26.4. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

As part of the macOS 12 Monterey/iPadOS 15 beta cycle in 2021, Apple attempted a pretty radical redesign of the Safari browser that combined your tabs and the address bar into one, with the goal of increasing the amount of viewable space on the pages you were viewing. By the time both operating systems were released to the public, Safari’s default design had more or less reverted to its previous state, but the “compact” tab view lived on as an optional view in the settings for those who liked it.

Tahoe, the Safari 26 update, and iPadOS 26 all removed that Compact view entirely, though a version of the Compact view became the default for the iPhone version of Safari. The macOS 26.4, Safari 26.4, and iPadOS 26.4 updates restore the Compact tab option to the other versions of Safari.

On-by-default Stolen Device Protection

Originally introduced in the iOS 17.3 update, Apple’s “Stolen Device Protection” toggle for iPhones added an extra layer of security for users whose phones were stolen by people who had learned their passcodes. With Stolen Device Protection enabled, an iPhone that had been removed from “familiar locations, such as home or work” would require biometric Face ID or Touch ID authentication before accessing stored passwords and credit cards, erasing your phone, or changing Apple Account passwords. Normally, users can enter their passcodes as a fallback; Stolen Device Protection removes that fallback.

The iOS 26.4 update will make Stolen Device Protection on by default. Generally, you won’t notice a difference in how your phone behaves, but if you’re traveling or away from places where you regularly use your phone and you can’t use your passcode to access certain information, this is why.

It’s possible to switch off Stolen Device protection, but doing so requires biometric authentication, an hour-long wait, and then a second biometric authentication. (This extended wait is also required for disabling Find My, changing your phone’s passcode, or changing Touch ID and Face ID settings.)

Rosetta’s end approaches

The macOS 26.4 update will add the first user-facing notifications about the end of Rosetta support, currently slated for macOS 28 in 2027. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Apple’s Rosetta 2 was a crucial support beam in the bridge from the Intel Mac era to the Apple Silicon era, enabling unmodified Intel-native apps to run on the M1 and later processors, with noticeable but manageable performance and responsiveness hits. As with the original Rosetta, it allowed Apple to execute a major CPU architecture switch while keeping it mostly invisible to Mac users, and it bought developers time to release Arm-native versions of their apps so they could take full advantage of the new chips.

But now that the transition is complete and the last Intel Macs are fading into the rearview, Apple plans to remove the translation layer from future versions of macOS, with some exceptions for games that rely on the technology.

Rosetta 2 won’t be completely removed until macOS 28, but macOS 26.4 will be the first to begin warning users about the end of Rosetta when they launch Intel-native apps. Those notifications link to an Apple support page about identifying and updating Intel-only apps to Apple Silicon-native versions (or universal binaries that support both architectures).

Apple has deployed this “adding notifications without removing functionality” approach to deprecating older apps before. Versions 10.13 and 10.14 of macOS would show users pop-ups about the end of support for 32-bit apps for a couple of years before that support was removed in macOS 10.15, for example.

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

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Author name: 9u50fv