Mike M. – Page 13

Trump administration’s blockchain plan for USAID is a real head-scratcher

Blockchain, Policy, syndication, Trump, USAID / Mike M. / March 23, 2025

Giulio Coppi, a senior humanitarian officer at the nonprofit Access Now who has researched the use of blockchain in humanitarian work, says that blockchain technologies, while sometimes effective, offer no obvious advantages over other tools organizations could use, such as an existing payments system or another database tool. “There’s no proven advantage that it’s cheaper or better,” he says. “The way it’s been presented is this tech solutionist approach that has been proven over and over again to not have any substantial impact in reality.”

There have been, however, some successful instances of using blockchain technology in the humanitarian sector. In 2022, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) ran a small pilot to give cash assistance to Ukrainians displaced by the Russia-Ukraine war in a stablecoin. Other pilots have been tested in Kenya by the Kenya Red Cross Society. The International Committee of the Red Cross, which works with the Kenya team, also helped to develop the Humanitarian Token Solution (HTS).

One representative from an NGO that uses blockchain technology, but wasn’t authorized to speak to the media with regards to issues relating to USAID, says that particularly with regards to money transfers, stablecoins can be faster and easier than other methods of reaching communities impacted by a disaster. However, “introducing new systems means you’re setting up a new burden” for the many organizations that USAID partners with, they say. “The relative cost of new systems is harder for small NGOs,” which would often include the kind of local organizations that would be at the front line of response to disasters.

The proposed adoption of blockchain technology seems related to an emphasis on exerting tight controls over aid. The memo seems, for example, to propose that funding should be contingent on outcomes, reading, “Tying payment to outcomes and results rather than inputs would ensure taxpayer dollars deliver maximum impact.” A USAID employee, who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak to the media, says that many of USAID’s contracts already function this way, with organizations being paid after performing their work. However, that’s not possible in all situations. “Those kinds of agreements are often not flexible enough for the environments we work in,” they say, noting that in conflict or disaster zones, situations can change quickly, meaning that what an organization may be able to do or need to do can fluctuate.

Raftree says this language appears to be misleading, and bolsters claims made by Musk and the administration that USAID was corrupt. “It’s not like USAID was delivering tons of cash to people who hadn’t done things,” she says.

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

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We probably inherited our joints from… a fish

Biology, developmental biology, evolution, joints, paleontology, Science, synovial joints / Mike M. / March 23, 2025

What do we have in common with fish, besides being vertebrates? The types of joints we (and most vertebrates) share most likely originated from the same common ancestor. But it’s not a feature that we share with all vertebrates.

Humans, other land vertebrates, and jawed fish have synovial joints. The lubricated cavity within these joints makes them more mobile and stable because it allows for bones or cartilage to slide against each other without friction, which facilitates movement.

The origin of these joints was uncertain. Now, biologist Neelima Sharma of the University of Chicago and her colleagues have taken a look at which fish form this type of joint. Synovial joints are known to be present in jawed but not jawless fish. This left the question of whether they are just a feature of bony skeletons in general or if they are also found in fish with cartilaginous skeletons, such as sharks and skates (there are no land animals with cartilaginous skeletons).

As Sharma and her team found, cartilaginous fish with jaws, such as the skate embryos they studied, do develop these joints, while jawless fish, such as lampreys and hagfish, lack them.

So what could this mean? If jawed fish have synovial joints in common with all jawed vertebrates, including us, it must have evolved in our shared ancestor.

Something fishy in our past

While the common ancestor of vertebrates with synovial joints is still a mystery, the oldest specimen with evidence of these joints is Bothriolepis canadensis, a fish that lived about 387 to 360 million years ago during the Middle to Late Devonian period.

When using CT scanning to study a Bothriolepis fossil, Sharma observed a joint cavity between the shoulder and pectoral fin. Whether the cavity was filled with synovial fluid or cartilage is impossible to tell, but either way, she thinks it appears to have functioned like a synovial joint would. Fossils of early jawless fish, in contrast, lack any signs of synovial joints.

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The Wheel of Time delivers on a pivotal fan-favorite moment

culture, tv recap, wheel of time, wheel of time season 3 / Mike M. / March 23, 2025

Andrew Cunningham and Lee Hutchinson have spent decades of their lives with Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson’s Wheel of Time books, and they previously brought that knowledge to bear as they recapped each first season episode and second season episode of Amazon’s WoT TV series. Now we’re back in the saddle for season 3—along with insights, jokes, and the occasional wild theory.

These recaps won’t cover every element of every episode, but they will contain major spoilers for the show and the book series. We’ll do our best to not spoil major future events from the books, but there’s always the danger that something might slip out. If you want to stay completely unspoiled and haven’t read the books, these recaps aren’t for you.

New episodes of The Wheel of Time season three will be posted for Amazon Prime subscribers every Thursday. This write-up covers episode four, “The Road to the Spear,” which was released on March 20.

Lee: Wow. That was an episode right there. Before we get into the recapping, maybe it’s a good idea to emphasize to the folks who haven’t read the books just what a big deal Rand’s visit to Rhuidean is—and why what he saw was so important.

At least for me, when I got to this point (which happens in book four and is being transposed forward a bit by the show), this felt like the first time author Robert Jordan was willing to pull the curtain back and actually show us something substantive about what’s really happening. We’ve already gotten a couple of flashbacks to ~~Coruscant~~ The Age of Legends in the show, but my recollection is that in the books, Rand’s trip through the glass columns is the first time we really get to see just how advanced things were before the Breaking of the World.

Image of a city obscured by clouds. — Our heroes approach Rhuidean, the clouded city. Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios

Andrew: Yes! If you’re a showrunner or writer or performer with any relationship with the source material—and Rafe Lee Judkins certainly knows all of these books cover to cover, because you would need to if you wanted to navigate a show through all the ripple effects emanating outward from the changes he’s making—this is probably one of the Big Scenes that you’re thinking about adapting from the start.

Because yes, it’s a big character moment for Rand, but it’s also grappling with some of the story’s big themes—the relationship between past, present, and future and how inextricably they’re all intertwined—and building a world that’s even bigger than the handful of cities and kingdoms our characters have passed through so far.

So do we think they pulled it off? Do you want to start with the Aiel stuff we get before we head into Rhuidean?

Lee: Well, let’s see—we get the sweat tents, and we get Aviendha and Lan having a dance-off over whose weapons are more awesome, and we get our first glimpse at the Shaido Aiel, who will be sticking around as long-term bad guys. We learn that at least one of the Wise Ones, Bair (played by Nukâka Coster-Waldau, real-life spouse of Game of Thrones actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) seems to be able to channel. And we also briefly meet aspiring Shaido clan chief Couladin—a name to remember, because this guy will definitely be back.

I appreciate that we’re actually spending more time with the Aiel here, allowing us to see a few of them as people rather than as tropey desert-dwellers. And I appreciate that we continue to be mercifully free of Robert Jordan’s kinks. The Shaido Wise One Sevanna, for example, is as bedecked in finery and necklaces as her book counterpart, but unlike the book character, the on-screen version of Sevanna seems to have no problem keeping her bodice from constantly falling down.

On the whole, though, the impression the show gives is that being Aiel is hard and the Three-Fold Land sucks. It’s not where I’d want to pop up if I were transported to Randland, that’s for sure.

Image of Sevanna, Shaido Wise One. — Sevanna’s hat is extremely fancy. Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios

Andrew: I’ve always liked what the story is doing with Rhuidean, though. For context, it’s a bit like the Accepted test in the White Tower that we see Nynaeve and Egwene take—a big ter’angreal located in the unfinished ruins of a holy city that all Aiel leaders must pass through to prove that they are worthy of leadership. But unlike the Accepted test, which tests your character by throwing you into emotionally fraught hypothetical situations, Rhuidean is about concrete events, what has happened and what may happen.

Playing into the series’ strict One Power-derived gender binary, men have to face the past to see that their proud and mighty warrior race are actually honorless failed pacifists. Women are made to reckon with every possible permutation of the future, no matter how painful.

It’s just an interesting thought experiment, given how many historical errors and atrocities have repeated themselves because we cannot directly transfer firsthand memories from generation to generation. How would leaders lead differently if they could see every action that led their people to this point? If they could glimpse the future implications of their current actions? And isn’t it nice to imagine some all-powerful, neutral, third-party arbiter whose sole purpose is to keep people who don’t deserve to hold power from holding it? Sigh.

Anyway, I think the show visualizes all of this effectively, even if the specifics of some of the memories differ. We can get into the specifics of what is shown, if you like, but we get a lot of Rand and Moiraine here, after a couple of episodes where those characters have been backgrounded a bit.

Lee: I agree—I was afraid that the show would misstep here, but I think they nailed it. I’ve never had a very concrete vision for what the “forest of glass columns” that Rand must traverse is supposed to look like, but I dig the presentation in the show, and the tying together of Rand’s physical steps with stepping back through time. (I also like the trick of having Josha Stradowski in varying degrees of prosthetics playing Rand’s own ancestors, going all the way back to the Age of Legends.)

Your point about leaders perhaps acting differently if forced to face their pasts before assuming leadership is solid, and as we see, some of the Aiel just cannot handle the truth: that for all the ways that honor stratifies their society, they are at their core descended from oath-breakers, offshoots of the “true” pacifist Jenn Aiel who once served the Aes Sedai. Some Aiel, like Couladin’s brother Muradin, are so incapable of accepting that truth that death—along with some self-eyeball-scooping—is the only way forward.

The thing that I appreciate is that the portrayal of the past succeeds for me in the same way that it does in the books—it viscerally drives home the magnitude of what was lost and the incomprehensible tragedy of the fall from peaceful utopia to dark-age squalor. The idea of sending out thousands of chora tree cuttings because it’s literally the last thing that can be done is heart-breaking.

Image of one of Rand's Aiel ancestors — Sometimes the make-up works, sometimes it feels a little forced. Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios

Andrew: “Putting a wig and prosthetics on Josha Stradowski so he can play all of Rand’s ancestors” is more successful in some flashbacks than it is in others. He plays an old guy like a young guy playing an old guy, and it’s hard to mistake him for anything else. I do like the idea of it a lot, though!

But yes, as Rand says to Aviendha once they have both been through the wringer of their respective tests, he now knows enough about the Aiel to know how much he doesn’t know.

We don’t see any of Aviendha’s test, though she enters Rhuidean at the same time as Rand and Moiraine. (Rand enters because he is descended from the Aiel, and they all think he’s probably the central character in a prophecy; Moiraine goes in mainly because an Aiel Wise One accidentally tells her she’ll die if she doesn’t.) At this point we have pointedly not been allowed glimpses into Aviendha or Elayne’s psyches, which makes me wonder if the show is dancing around telling us about A Certain Polycule or if it plans to downplay that relationship altogether.

I feel like the show is too respectful of the major relationships in the books to skip it, but they are playing some cards close to the chest.

Lee: Before we push on, I want to emphasize something to show-watchers that may not have been fully explicated: Yes, that was Lanfear in the deepest flashback. She was a researcher at the Collam Daan—that huge floating sphere, which was an enormous university and center for research. In an effort to find a new Power, one that could be used together by all instead of segregated by gender, she and a team of other powerful channelers create what the books call “The Bore”—a hole, drilled through the pattern of reality into the Dark One’s prison.

I loved the way this was portrayed on screen—it perfectly matched what I’ve been seeing in my head for all these years, with the sky crinkling up into screaming blackness as the Collam Daan drops to the ground and shatters.

Good stuff. Definitely my favorite moment of the episode. What was yours?

Image of the Bore. — This is not a good sign. Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios

Andrew: Oh yeah that was super cool and unsettling.

As we see from both Moiraine and Aviendha, the women’s version of the test isn’t the glass columns, but a series of rings. You jump in and spin around like you’re a kid at space camp in that zero-g spinny thing. I am sure that it has a name and that you know what the name is.

Image showing two people floating in rings. — And unlike in the books, nobody has to do this naked! Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios

Andrew: Everything we see of Moiraine’s vision is presented in a way that mirrors this spinning—each flip is another possible future, which we get to see just a glimpse of in passing before we flip over to the next thing. Most of the visions are Rand-centric, obviously. Sometimes Moiraine is killing Rand; sometimes she’s bowing to him; sometimes things get Spicy between the two of them.

But the one thing that comes back over and over again, and the most memorable bit of the episode for me, is a long string of visions where Lanfear kills Moiraine, over and over and over again.

Both Moiraine and Rand have been playing footsy with Lanfear this season, imagining that they can use her knowledge and Lews Therin lust to get one over on their enemies. But both Rand and Moiraine have now seen firsthand that Lanfear is not someone you can trust, not even a little. She’s vengeful and brutal and as close to directly responsible for the Current State Of The World as it’s possible to be (though the flashback we see her in leaves open the possibility that it was accidental, at least at first). What Rand and Moiraine choose to do with this knowledge is an open question, since the show is mostly charting its own path here.

Lee: Agreed, that was well done—and was a neat way of using the medium as a part of the storytelling, incorporating the visual metaphor of a wheel forever turning.

You’re also right that we’re kind of off the map here with what’s going to happen next. In the books, several other very important things have happened before we make it to Rhuidean, and Rand’s relationship with Moiraine is in a vastly different state, and there are, shall we say, more characters participating.

Pulling Rhuidean forward in the story must have been a difficult choice to make, since it’s one of the key events in the series, but having seen it done, I gotta commend the showrunners. It was the right call.

Andrew: We wrote about this way back in the first season, but I keep coming back to it.

The show’s most consequential change was the decision to center Rosamund Pike’s Moiraine as a more fully realized main character, where the books spent most of their time centering Rand and the Two Rivers crew and treating Moiraine as an aloof and unknowable cipher. Ultimately an ally, but one who the characters (and to some extent, the readers) usually couldn’t fully trust.

Image of Rand's dragon tattoos. — “Twice and twice shall he be marked.” Credit: Prime/Amazon MGM Studios

Lee: I feel like we should leave it here—maybe with one final word of praise from me for Rand’s dragon marks, which I thought looked fantastic. And it’s a good thing, too, because he’s going to keep them for the rest of the series. (Though I suspect the wardrobe folks will do everything they can to keep Rand in long sleeves to avoid what is likely at least an hour or two in the make-up chair.)

It’s a pensive ending, and everyone who emerges from Rhuidean emerges changed. Rand marches out from the city as the dawn breaks, fulfilling prophecy as he does so, carrying an unconscious Moiraine in his dragon-branded arms. Rand has the look of someone who’s glimpsed a hard road ahead, and we fade out to the credits with a foreboding lack of dialog. What fell things will sunrise—and the next episode—bring?!

Credit: WoT Wiki

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Sometimes, it’s the little tech annoyances that sting the most

Annoyances, culture, Mac, Mouse, Tech / Mike M. / March 22, 2025

Anyone who has suffered the indignity of splinter, a blister, or a paper cut knows that small things can sometimes be hugely annoying. You aren’t going to die from any of these conditions, but it’s still hard to focus when, say, the back of your right foot is rubbing a new blister against the inside of your not-quite-broken-in-yet hiking boots.

I found myself in the computing version of this situation yesterday, when I was trying to work on a new Mac Mini and was brought up short by the fact that my third mouse button (that is, clicking on the scroll wheel) did nothing. This was odd, because I have for many years assigned this button to “Mission Control” on macOS—a feature that tiles every open window on your machine, making it quick and easy to switch apps. When I got the new Mini, I immediately added this to my settings. Boom!

And yet there I was, a couple hours later, clicking the middle mouse button by reflex and getting no result. This seemed quite odd—had I only imagined that I made the settings change? I made the alteration again in System Settings and went back to work.

But after a reboot later that day to install an OS update, I found that my shortcut setting for Mission Control had once again been wiped away. This wasn’t happening with any other settings changes, and it was strangely vexing.

When it happened a third time, I switched into full “research and destroy the problem” mode. One of my Ars colleagues commiserated with me, writing, “This kind of powerful-annoying stuff is just so common. I swear at least once every few months, some shortcut or whatever just stops working, and sometimes, after a week or so, it starts working again. No rhyme, reason, or apparent causality except that computers are just [unprintable expletives].”

But even if computers are [unprintable expletives], their problems have often been encountered and fixed by some other poor soul. I turned to the Internet for help… and immediately stumbled upon an Apple discussion thread called “MacOS mouse shortcuts are reset upon restart or shutdown.” The poster—and most of those replying—said that the odd behavior had only appeared in macOS Sequoia. One reply claimed to have identified the source of the bug and offered a fix:

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“Infantile amnesia” occurs despite babies showing memory activity

Biology, infantile amnesia, memory, neurobiology, Science / Mike M. / March 22, 2025

For many of us, memories of our childhood have become a bit hazy, if not vanishing entirely. But nobody really remembers much before the age of 4, because nearly all humans experience what’s termed “infantile amnesia,” in which memories that might have formed before that age seemingly vanish as we move through adolescence. And it’s not just us; the phenomenon appears to occur in a number of our fellow mammals.

The simplest explanation for this would be that the systems that form long-term memories are simply immature and don’t start working effectively until children hit the age of 4. But a recent animal experiment suggests that the situation in mice is more complex: the memories are there, they’re just not normally accessible, although they can be re-activated. Now, a study that put human infants in an MRI tube suggests that memory activity starts by the age of 1, suggesting that the results in mice may apply to us.

Less than total recall

Mice are one of the species that we know experience infantile amnesia. And, thanks to over a century of research on mice, we have some sophisticated genetic tools that allow us to explore what’s actually involved in the apparent absence of the animals’ earliest memories.

A paper that came out last year describes a series of experiments that start by having very young mice learn to associate seeing a light come on with receiving a mild shock. If nothing else is done with those mice, that association will apparently be forgotten later in life due to infantile amnesia.

But in this case, the researchers could do something. Neural activity normally results in the activation of a set of genes. In these mice, the researchers engineered it so one of the genes that gets activated encodes a protein that can modify DNA. When this protein is made, it results in permanent changes to a second gene that was inserted in the animal’s DNA. Once activated through this process, the gene leads to the production of a light-activated ion channel.

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The ax has become an important part of the Space Force’s arsenal

military space, Space, space force / Mike M. / March 21, 2025

“All those traditional primes opted out of this event, every single one,” Hammett said. “We’re cultivating an A-team who’s willing to work with us, who’s hungry, who wants to bring affordability and speed, and it’s not the existing industry base.”

Hammett’s office didn’t set out to banish the big defense contractors. Simply put, he said they haven’t performed or aren’t interested in going in the direction Space RCO wants to go.

“I’ve terminated 11 major contracts in less than three years,” Hammett said. “Eighty-five percent of those were with traditional defense primes.” Most of these programs are classified, so it doesn’t become news when a contract is canceled.

“We try to fix the programs,” Hammett said. “We work with the performers, but if they can’t get right, and if we have program baselines where they’re now exceeding it by 100 percent in cost or schedule… we’re going to fire them and start again.”

At the same time, venture-backed companies seem to emerge every day from the ether of Silicon Valley or one of the nation’s other tech corridors.

“There’s a lot of opportunity to bring other performers into the portfolio, but there are lots of barriers,” Hammett said. One of those barriers is that leadership at many startups don’t have a security clearance. Many small companies don’t use the certified accounting systems the government usually requires for federal contracts.

“You have to be willing to modify your approach, your acquisition strategies, those types of things, so I have directed my team to open the aperture, to find the A-team, wherever the A-team lives, because it doesn’t seem to be in our current portfolio,” Hammett said.

The Space Force has launched three generations of GPS satellites capable of broadcasting a jam-resistant military-grade navigation signal, but ground system delays have kept US forces from fully adopting it. This image shows a GPS III satellite at Lockheed Martin. Credit: Lockheed Martin

There’s still a place for the Pentagon’s incumbent contractors, according to Hammett. Small companies like the ones at Space RCO’s pitch lack the national, or even global, footprint to execute the military’s most expensive programs.

“We’re trying to build the first of something new, different, at a price point that we can accept,” Hammett said. “That’s what these types of companies are trying to do. And we’re not having to pay the lion’s share of the cost for that because VC [venture capital] firms and others are kick-starting them.”

Executives at Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and other traditional defense companies have become warier of bidding on government programs, especially fixed-price contracts where financial risk is transferred from the government to the contractor.

The CEO of L3Harris, another established defense contractor, said in 2023 that his company has also declined to bid on fixed-price development contracts. L3Harris leads development of a software system called ATLAS to manage data from a network of sensors tracking rocket launches and objects in orbit. The program is over budget and was supposed to be ready for action in 2022, but it still isn’t operational.

RTX is in charge of another troubled military space program. The Next-Generation Operational Control System, known as OCX, is designed to allow military forces, including airplanes, ships, and ground vehicles, to access a jam-resistant GPS signal that satellites have been beaming from space since 2005. Twenty years later, the military’s weapons systems still haven’t widely adopted this M-code signal because of OCX delays.

Both programs are managed by Space Systems Command, the unit that has traditionally been responsible for buying hardware and software for military space programs. SSC, too, hasn’t shied away recently from taking the hatchet to some problem projects. Last year, SSC confirmed it kicked RTX off a program to develop three next-generation missile warning satellites because it was over budget, behind schedule, and faced “unresolved design challenges.”

The ax has become an important part of the Space Force’s arsenal Read More »

Hands-on with Frosthaven’s ambitious port from gigantic box to inviting PC game

Board games, frosthaven, gaming, gloomhaven, hands on, isaac childres, julian gollop, steam, Tabletop / Mike M. / March 21, 2025

I can say this for certain: The game’s tutorial does a lot of work in introducing you to the game’s core mechanics, which include choosing cards with sequential actions, “burning” cards for temporary boosts, positioning, teamwork, and having enough actions or options left if a fight goes longer than you think. I’m not a total newcomer to the -haven games, having played a couple rounds of the Gloomhaven board game. But none of my friends, however patient, did as good a job of showing just how important it was to consider not just attack, defend, or move, but where each choice would place you, and how it would play with your teammates.

I played as a “Banner Spear,” one of the six starting classes. Their thing is—you guessed it—having a spear, and they can throw it or lunge with it from farther away. Many of the Banner Spear’s cards are more effective with positioning, like pincer-flanking an enemy or attacking from off to the side of your more up-close melee teammate. With only two players taking on a couple of enemies, I verbally brushed off the idea of using some more advanced options. My developer partner, using a Deathwalker, interjected: “Ah, but that is what summons are for.”

Soon enough, one of the brutes was facing down two skeletons, and I was able to get a nice shot in from an adjacent hex. The next thing I wanted to do was try out being a little selfish, running for some loot left behind by a vanquished goon. I forgot that you only pick up loot if you end your turn on a hex, not just pass through it, so my Banner Spear appeared to go on a little warm-up jog, for no real reason, before re-engaging the Germinate we were facing.

The art, animations, and feel of everything I clicked on was engaging, even as the developers regularly reassured me that all of it needs working on. With many more experienced players kicking the tires in early access, I expect the systems and quality-of-life details to see even more refinement. It’s a long campaign, both for players and the developers, but there’s a good chance it will be worth it.

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Apple reportedly planning executive shake-up to address Siri delays

AI, Apple, apple intelligence, Siri / Mike M. / March 21, 2025

The Vision Pro was not exactly a smash hit for Apple, but no one expected a $3,500 VR headset to have the same impact as the iPhone. However, the Vision Pro did what it was supposed to do, and there is apparently a feeling inside the company that Rockwell knows how to leverage his technical expertise to get products out the door. The effort to release the Vision Pro involved years of work with a large team of engineers and designers, and several of the key advances required for its completion involved artificial intelligence.

Apple’s work on Siri will remain under the ultimate purview of Craig Federighi, the senior vice president of software engineering. He’s responsible for all development work on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. He was also deeply involved with the launch of Apple Intelligence alongside Giannandrea.

While one of his primary projects is being reassigned, Giannandrea will reportedly remain at the company for now. However, Apple may simply want him around for the optics. The abrupt departure of a senior AI figure during the troubled rollout of Apple Intelligence, which is now enabled by default, could further affect confidence in the company’s AI efforts.

For good or ill, generative AI features are key to the strategy at most large technology firms. Apple aggressively advertised Apple Intelligence during the iPhone 16 launch. It also cited the AI-enhanced Siri as a selling point, making the recent delay all the more awkward. Even if this shake-up gets Siri back on track, the late-to-arrive feature will be under intense scrutiny when it does finally show up.

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Cybertrucks’ faulty trim prompts biggest recall yet, stokes Tesla investor panic

Cybertruck, elon musk, NHTSA recall, Policy, recall, Tesla / Mike M. / March 21, 2025

Every Tesla Cybertruck ever sold is being recalled so Tesla can fix an exterior panel that could potentially come unglued and detach while driving.

If the “panel separates from the vehicle while in drive, it could create a road hazard for following motorists and increase their risk of injury or a collision,” Tesla explained in a safety recall report submitted Tuesday to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

Tesla initially became aware of the issue in January and launched a study of the problem as more complaints came in, the report said. By March, social media complaints were getting louder as Tesla wrapped up its probe, concluding that a voluntary recall was necessary.

The recall affects any 2024 or 2025 Cybertruck manufactured between November 13, 2023, to February 27, 2025, the report said. According to Reuters, this represents “a vast majority of the Cybertruck vehicles on the road, based on analyst estimates.” Potentially more than 46,000 vehicles could require the fix, Tesla said, while conservatively estimating that only 1 percent of cars are likely defective.

Cybertruck drivers unsure if their vehicle needs the fix can look out for warning signs, like “a detectable noise inside the cabin” or visible signs the panel is detaching, Tesla said.

Anyone whose car is covered by the recall can get the fix at no charge, Tesla said. The repair both replaces the adhesive used for the panel with one that’s more durable and reinforces the attachment “with a stud welded to the stainless panel with a nut clamping the steel panel to the vehicle structure,” Tesla said.

Starting tomorrow, all new Cybertrucks that Tesla produces will have this fix, Tesla said, while any vehicles that Tesla currently possesses will be retrofitted before delivery to any customers.

Tesla is currently notifying dealers about the recall, then plans to start reaching out to customers with recall notices on May 19. Any Cybertruck owners interested in pursuing repairs now can call NHTSA’s Vehicle Safety Hotline at 888-327-4236 (TTY 888-275-9171) or go to nhtsa.gov, the agency said.

Investors panicked by Tesla’s “brand tornado crisis moment”

Last year, Tesla had several rounds of recalls, notifying drivers of widely varied problems, from software issues to faulty accelerator pedals or inverters. As recalls have been announced, Cybertruck sales have seemingly slumped, as Tesla obscured the true figures by lumping numbers in with sales of Model X and Model S, MotorTrend reported. This new recall is the first glimpse industry analysts have had of total Cybertruck sales, MotorTrend noted, and compared to other popular trucks, Cybertruck sales overall appear remarkably stunted.

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Can NASA remain nonpartisan when basic spaceflight truths are shredded?

crew-9, NASA, Space, spacex / Mike M. / March 19, 2025

It looked like the final scene of a movie, the denouement of a long adventure in which the good guys finally prevail. Azure skies and brilliant blue seas provided a perfect backdrop on Tuesday evening as a spacecraft carrying four people neared the planet’s surface.

“Just breathtaking views of a calm, glass-like ocean off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida,” commented Sandra Jones, a NASA spokesperson, during the webcast co-hosted by the space agency and SpaceX, whose Dragon vehicle returned the four astronauts from orbit.

A drone near the landing site captured incredible images of Crew Dragon Freedom as it slowly descended beneath four parachutes. Most of NASA’s astronauts today, outside of the small community of spaceflight devotees, are relatively anonymous. But not two of the passengers inside Freedom, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. After nine months of travails, 286 days to be precise, they were finally coming home.

Dragon continued its stately descent, falling to 400 meters, then 300, and then 200 above the ocean.

Kate Tice, an engineer from SpaceX on the webcast, noted that touchdown was imminent. “We’re going to stand by for splashdown located in the Gulf of America,” she said.

Ah, yes. The Gulf of America.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

A throne of lies

For those of us who have closely followed the story of Wilmore and Williams over the last nine months—and Ars Technica has had its share of exclusive stories about this long and strange saga—the final weeks before the landing have seen it take a disturbing turn.

Can NASA remain nonpartisan when basic spaceflight truths are shredded? Read More »

“Awful”: Roku tests autoplaying ads loading before the home screen

ads, Roku, streaming, Tech, TVs / Mike M. / March 18, 2025

Owners of smart TVs and streaming sticks running Roku OS are already subject to video advertisements on the home screen. Now, Roku is testing what it might look like if it took things a step further and forced people to watch a video ad play before getting to the Roku OS home screen.

Reports of Roku customers seeing video ads automatically play before they could view the OS’ home screen started appearing online this week. A Reddit user, for example, posted yesterday: “I just turned on my Roku and got an … ad for a movie, before I got to the regular Roku home screen.” Multiple apparent users reported seeing an ad for the movie Moana 2. The ads have a close option, but some users appear to have not seen it.

When reached for comment, a Roku spokesperson shared a company statement that confirms that the autoplaying ads are expected behavior but not a permanent part of Roku OS currently. Instead, Roku claimed, it was just trying the ad capability out.

Roku’s representative said that Roku’s business “has and will always require continuous testing and innovation across design, navigation, content, and our first-rate advertising products,” adding:

Our recent test is just the latest example, as we explore new ways to showcase brands and programming while still providing a delightful and simple user experience.

Roku didn’t respond to requests for comment on whether it has plans to make autoplaying ads permanent on Roku OS, which devices are affected, why Roku decided to use autoplaying ads, or customer backlash.

“Awful”: Roku tests autoplaying ads loading before the home screen Read More »

Monthly Roundup #28: March 2025

Monthly / Mike M. / March 18, 2025

I plan to continue to leave the Trump administration out of monthly roundups – I will do my best to only cover the administration as it relates to my particular focus areas. That is ‘if I start down this road there is nowhere to stop’ and ‘other sources are left to cover that topic’ and not ‘there are not things worth mentioning.’

I also had forgotten this was originally from Napoleon rather than Bill Watterson.

Dylan O’Sullivan: Napoleon once said that the surprising thing was not that every man has his price, but how low it is, and I can’t help but see that everywhere now.

You destroyed and betrayed yourself for a handful of clicks.

Jasmeet: Dostoevsky wrote, “Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”

That seems especially appropriate lately, for mostly non-AI reasons.

Mozilla seems to ban porn on Firefox and telling users it can harvest their data?

Disney shuts down 538, Nate Silver offers a few words. You can get all their data off of GitHub. It is a shame that 538 could not be sustained, and I am sad for those who lost their jobs, but as Nate Silver notes their business model was unsustainable inside Disney. Hopefully Silver Bulletin and others can carry the torch in the future.

Restaurant productivity technically rose 15% during the pandemic and sustained that gain, but it turns out it is entirely attributable to the rise of takeout and delivery. That’s not a rise in productivity, that’s delivering a different product that is easier to produce and also in general worse. If anything this change is bad.

Zeynep Tufekci, who has been on top of this from the beginning, reminds us of the massive efforts to mislead us about the fact that Covid-19 could have come from a lab. We don’t know whether Covid-19 came from a lab, but we do know it very much could have, that there was a massive coordinated operation to suppress this fact, and most importantly that this means that we are continuing to do lab research that is likely to cause future pandemics.

Aditya Agarwal models a person’s ambition as something you can unlock and unleash, but not fundamentally change. I think I mostly agree with a soft version of this. There are plenty of people who are ambitious but haven’t been given or felt opportunity, or you can remove something blocking them, but if an adult is at core not so ambitious you should assume you can’t fix that.

Travel advice from The Technium, mostly endorsed by Tyler Cowen. Definitely some good tips in there, even for those who have little desire for the kind of experience this is striving to achieve. The core recommendation is as a baseline to take trips with about 10 days of intense travel, with 12 non-travel days total, and you start with the most challenging content first.

One pattern to notice is the need to focus on absolute marginal cost of things like renting a driver or paying for entry to a museum and what not, rather than looking at relative cost or comparing to what might seem expensive or fair. Only the absolute costs matter.

I continue to not have the desire to do this style of travel that he calls E&E, for engagement and experience, but it does appeal more than the traditional R&R style, for rest and recreation. I can do R&R at home, in many ways far better than I can travelling, at almost no marginal cost. But then, I can do my version of E&E at home too, and often do, although not as often as I should.

A perspective on what does and does not cost you precious Weirdness Points. The particular claim is that being vegan while respecting others preferences costs very little, whereas telling others what to eat costs a lot of points. I agree in relative terms, although I disagree in absolute terms. The general pattern of ‘telling others to do [weird thing] costs vastly more than doing it yourself’ definitely applies, but the [weird thing] can still be expensive.

The Dead Planet Theory, the generalization that most of life is showing up, if showing up includes attempting to Do the Thing at all. As in, yes You Can Just Do Things, and the reason you can is that you almost certainly won’t, which means little competition.

The ritual ritual.

Ashwin Sharma: Basically, Joseph Campbell taught me to ritualize almost everything I considered mundane. Like my morning coffee, my afternoon walk, and my bedtime reading. I learned over time that this is because ritualizing ordinary moments makes them sacred. And when something becomes sacred, when you give it meaning, it gives meaning back to you.

Chris Cordry: Ritualizing everyday actions also means you bring more attention to them. When we give attention to something on a deep level, we can experience it as sacred independent of cognitive meaning-making.

I wrote Bring Back the Sabbath, so I’ve long been a supporter of this, and I agree. The more rituals you can make work for you, the longer you can sustain them, the better. There are of course costs, but consider this a claim that the Ritual Effect matters more than you think it does.

Your periodic reminder that some important people need lately:

Lars Doucet: The counterpart to “move fast and break things” is “don’t be in such a hurry that you waste time.”

This is commonly misunderstood as saying, “please don’t go fast.” It means the opposite! It means, “optimizing for the *feelingof going fast will *MAKE YOU SLOWER*”

The “move fast and break things” vibes, as fun as it is, does pack in a certain tolerance for carelessness and “we’ll figure it out later.”

Sometimes being careful and figuring it out before you leave the house makes you arrive at the destination faster!

The most obvious application in software land is technical debt. You do want rapid prototypes and you do want to avoid premature optimization and over engineering.

But also nothing slows you down like an easily avoided big ball of mud.

Really you just need to very good at asking yourself “am I chasing a goal or am I chasing a vibe?” There are a lot of things that FEEL like going fast that aren’t actually going fast, just being in a hurry, which is a totally different thing.

There’s a similar phenomenon with various cargo-cult symptoms surrounding work culture. It’s very easy to signal that you are very busy, but that’s not the same thing as working hard, which in turn is not the same thing as getting stuff done efficiently and effectively.

Female economists are more persuasive than male economists to those who know the economist is female. For those who don’t know, there’s no difference. And yes economists can actually persuade the public of things, which is the hardest to believe part of the entire paper given what people believe about economics.

I didn’t like The Great Gatsby (the book) either when I was forced to read it, not great at all, do not recommend. I don’t put it in ‘least favorite book’ territory like Tracing Woods does, but I respect that take. My least favorite book, by this criteria, would probably be One Hundred Years of Solitude. Absolutely dreadful. It’s actually amazing how consistently awful were the fiction books schools forced me to read.

Who believes in astrology? Astrology is the Platonic ideal of Obvious Nonsense, so you can use belief in it as a way to measure various group differences. Intelligence is the biggest predictor of non-belief listed in the abstract, followed by education, which makes sense. Religiosity and spirituality are null effects. That speaks poorly of religiosity, since all the major religions are in agreement that astrology is bunk. Whereas it speaks well of spirituality, because it seems like it should be positively correlated to astrology, especially given that right-wing individuals believe in astrology less.

The most interesting one is no impact of ‘scientific trust’ on astrological belief. You would think that belief in science, whether it was real science or Science™, would mean you trusted the scientists who tell you astrology is Obvious Nonsense. This isn’t the case, suggesting that a lot of ‘trust in science’ is actually ‘trust’ in general.

Things we need to do way more:

Ryan Peterson: My friend’s startup uses facial recognition to identify employees entering the office and then plays the walk-out theme song of their choice as if they were a WWE superstar.

Would this even be legal in Germany? No wonder Europe is falling behind.

Arbital has been incorporated into LessWrong.

Washington Post will be writing in its op-eds every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. They’ll cover other topics too, but the arguments against personal liberties and free markets will be left to others.

As a very strong supporter of both personal liberties and free markets, I love this.

In response to this, there were a bunch of people on the left who got Big Mad and accused Bezos of some sort of betrayal of democracy. To which I say, thank you for letting us know who you are and what you think of free markets and personal liberties. Whereas I saw some on the right, who have not exactly been the biggest free market fans recently, and have a spotty record on personal liberties, cheering this on, so maybe negative polarization can work in our favor for once?

Walks are great. The best walks are aimful walks, where you have an ultimate destination in mind from which you will gain value, but ideally you can proceed there and back at a leisurely pace and wander while doing so. However your amount of physical activity is not fixed, so you can and should also go on aimless walks, which both help you stay active and can help you think better about various things, either alone or with a companion or two.

LessOnline 2 will take place at Lighthaven, from May 30 to June 1. I plan on being there. LessOnline 1 was pretty awesome and I’m excited to run it back. Last time I ran a makeshift ‘show the Zvi process’ workshop, haven’t decided what if anything I’ll run this time. Early bid pricing lasts until end of March.

The Survival and Flourishing Fund is planning another $10mm-$20mm in grants this year, and also offer a matching pledge program where you decide the terms of the match and in exchange get a (unspecified) boost in priority.

If you are a charity whose goals are compatible with Jaan’s priorities, or especially if you are a good fit for the freedom or fairness tracks, I highly recommend that you apply. The cost is low and the upside is high. And who know, perhaps you will even appear in a future version of The Big Nonprofits Post if I happen to be one of the recommenders for your round.

Foresight is doing small, fast grants (~$10k) for projects related to aging and nanotech.

Calling local Magic gamers: The NYC Invitational Series is coming, starting with the NYC Pauper Open on May 25 at the Upper West Side Hex, building towards an end-of-year invitational. Local game stores are invited to reach out to get in on the fun.

Wincent, a crypto HFT firm where I did a bit of consulting for recently and they seemed pretty cool, is looking for someone with 5+ years of quant experience in HFT willing to relocate to Bratislava, Slovakia.

While we’re on that subject, of course, my official trading experience was at Jane Street Capital, which is always hiring. It didn’t work out for me but they’re great people and if you’re going to do that kind of work it’s a pretty great place.

The Taylor Tomlinson Crowd Confessions compilations are consistently hilarious.

Suzy Weiss argues that comedians should not be hot. I strongly disagree. This is a confusion of the wonderful fact that comedians are allowed to not be hot – which is great – with saying that hotness, or more precisely actually looking good by being not only hot but also well-dressed, shouldn’t be allowed. A central example here (that Suzy uses) is Tina Fey, who is definitely hot, and was hot even when she was playing the intentionally not hot Liz Lemon. Suzy Weiss argues that being ugly, here, is an asset.

To me, that’s exactly the proof that the thesis doesn’t hold water. There’s nothing wrong with hot. The idea that people who are hot, or otherwise advantaged, don’t have problems to use for material, is Obvious Nonsense. What you don’t want is for the hot to crowd out the not hot.

Consider music. In music, the product is fully audio, and yet being hot is increasingly a huge advantage that crowds out the not hot. It’s really tough to be an ugly (or even Hollywood homely) rock star, especially as a woman. That means we’ve missed out on tons of great musicians, and the exceptions that make it anyway prove the rule (but for obvious reasons there will be no examples here).

Yes, the best music was made about when you were 13-14 years old.

Alec Stapp: Funny how most people legit believe this.

Philly Gov: Yeah that’s crazy but it also happens to be right specifically in regards to me.

Alec Stapp: Same.

That comes from this paper, but the paper says the peak is around 23.5 years old, whereas the graph here is much earlier.

I am a strange case, in that I didn’t listen to essentially any non-kids non-classical music until college, and I did only a small amount of ‘listening to what is coming out right now.’ So not a representative case, but I very much prefer older music than that, in general. But I do notice that I have a strong preference for the particular relatively new songs I did listen to about that time, including the ones that get reinvented every so often. So there’s that.

I do notice that when I sample new music from recent decades I usually hate it, to the point where I essentially have given up on playlists of hot new music. They are consistently very bad. New (to me!) older music that stood the test of time tends to work better, down to ~1965 or so, which is well before I was born.

My actual music theory is that in micro terms the public has no false positives once songs are at least a few years old. Marketing can make fetch happen for a month or two, but it fades. Your hits that last are your hits for a reason. One hit wonder songs are always bangers and almost always yes it was their best song when I investigate. Artists that break out, break out for a reason (although it can involve looks or dance moves or hard work and so on). The public does offer false negatives – there are gems they don’t appreciate – but that’s largely due to lack of exposure and opportunity.

The public’s macro preferences are of course up for debate. Their genre preferences are wrong, but they are entitled to their opinions on that.

Will Severance stick the landing? Jeff Maurer is skeptical. I agree the prior is to be skeptical, but the vibes tell me to be optimistic this time around. I very much get the sense that they know where things are going and what story they are telling. I’m also at the point where I’m mostly willing to endorse the show even if they only half stick the landing.

I am very happy that Anora won Best Picture but a modest minimum worldwide gross required for Oscar eligibility, at least for Best Picture, seems like a very good idea.

If you have a Billboard Top 40 single this year, there is about a 40% chance you will never have one again. The turnover in 1962-64, which is what the article here is looking at, was high but not crazy high.

Waymo factory in Phoenix shows about 2,000 cars.

Great to hear but also how are we celebrating such a small number of cars? Let’s go.

Unfortunately, growth has otherwise been slower than I hoped and expected.

Timothy Lee: Weekly driverless Waymo trips:

May 2023: 10,000

May 2024: 50,000

August 2024: 100,000

October 2024: 150,000

February 2025: 200,000

Pretty good but growth rate seems to be slowing a bit.

Sunder Pichai: Exciting new @Waymo milestone: Waymo One is now serving 200k+ paid trips each week across LA, Phoenix and SF – that’s 20x growth in less than two years! Up next: Austin, Atlanta and Miami.

New York is alas likely to take a while due to regulatory concerns. But it’s a real shame to see the latest +50k take a full four months. We need to be on an exponential here, people! This now looks kind of linear and I am not here for that, very literally.

Waymo expands to an initial service area on ‘the Peninsula’ near Palo Alto:

It’s so weird that this new area does not yet connect to the existing San Francisco coverage zone, but actual usage patterns are often not what you would think they are.

Kevin Kwok: Waymo is executing a textbook pincer movement against SFO.

Give me Waymo in East Bay and to SFO and I’ll be a lot more tempted to visit.

Well, you can’t have Waymos yet in New York, so can I interest you in armed guards?

Nikita Bier: Over the last few months, I’ve been advising @bookprotectors: a new app for ordering an on-demand security detail. Or more simply: Uber with guns.

Today, they’re debuting in Los Angeles and NYC at No. 3 on the App Store.

If you have a hot date this weekend, pick her up in a Protector.

5 hour minimum booking. All ex-military or ex-law enforcement.

Skynot: $100, min is 5hrs

Meanwhile, where the self-driving matters most, trucking unions attempt to fight back against the inevitable self-driving trucks.

Because our world is bonkers crazy, their top weapon are orange triangles? As in, if a truck stops, within 10 minutes you have to put out orange triangles. But a driverless truck has no way to do that, and so far Aurora has been unable to get a waiver, because they can’t show an alternative that would be at least as safe – never mind that obviously the self-driving trucks will overall be vastly safer. So now they’re in court.

If they don’t get an exception, Aurora won’t have to have a person in every truck. It does mean they have a Snow-Crash-pizza-delivery-style 10-minute countdown to ‘rescue’ any given truck that runs into trouble. So there needs to be someone 10 minutes or less away from every truck at all times. That means you need a lot of trucks to justify the humans who are constantly on call to leap into action with orange triangles.

The timeline of development of Balatro, by its creator. You love to see it.

Evidence on the Hot Hand in Jeopardy. I think the study underestimates the extent to which being hot and each correct answer inform skill differences, and also how much small differences in skill or being hot should impact wagering size. Remember that contestants have very high uncertainty about their skills in terms of knowledge and also ability to execute, and that they can actively improve their skills over the course of the game, and that confidence actually matters.

Also people think extremely poorly about this question. I asked o1-pro and got an answer that was a mix of stating obvious considerations plus complete nonsense. The impact here is only $100-$500 more per wager. That’s not as much as one might think, and the experienced players who don’t vary their wagers probably are mostly just using an established heuristic. Partly this is to keep their focus on other things.

It’s not even clear if being a stronger player should in general make you wager more – if you need variance you should probably risk everything even if you’re under 50%, if you’re sufficiently confident might as well risk it all to win more and more money, it’s in a weird in-between situation (or when you don’t like your chances in this particular category), or especially where you’re in a close 3-way race where polarizing your score is a bad idea until you can break 70%+, where you want to do anything else.

If I was going on Jeopardy for real, I would likely have AI build me a game simulator, because I have actual no idea what the right strategy is here, and it’s important.

This is part of a longstanding tradition where economists analyze people’s decisions, only take into account half the considerations involved, and declare actions irrational.

Sports have an analytics problem, in that teams and players are Solving For the Equilibrium, and that is often resulting in less appealing games. What to do?

As always, don’t hate the player, change the game. The rules have to adjust. The tricky part is that it can be extremely difficult to preserve the things that make the game great, especially while also preserving the game’s traditions and continuity.

MLB largely solved its ‘games take forever’ problem, but has a pitchers being pulled too early problem rapidly getting even worse, and a severe strikeout problem.

The pitchers being pulled issue can be solved via rules change, in particular the double hook, which helps in other ways too.

Strikeouts are trickier, but the solution there is also likely to try and limit pitching changes, combined perhaps with moving the mound back, perhaps in exchange you pull back the fences so home runs are harder and more balls end up in play. I would experiment with aggressive solutions here, even things like ‘make the ball a little bigger,’ or ‘formalize that the strike zone shrinks when you have two strikes and expands when you have three balls.’

The NBA has a 3-point shot problem. An occasional three pointer is fine, but things are very out of hand. The math on 3-point shots is too good, and the weird part is how long it took everyone to notice.

Or at least I think it’s out of hand. Many agree. Others like the current game.

The obvious place to start if you want to change things back, other than ‘move the three point line back,’ is to only award two shots rather than three if you are fouled on a three point shot except in the last two minutes of the game. Another more radical idea is to strengthen two point shots, by treating shooting fouls like a 2-point goaltending if the ball hits the rim, note you can adjust what counts as a foul to taste.

The NFL’s major shift is teams go for it more on fourth down, but that’s good. They warn that there are shifts towards pass-heavy games, but that’s the kind of change that you can fix with rules tweaks, as the NFL has lots of ‘fiddly bits’ in its rules, especially regarding penalties, that are already constantly adjusted.

US sports betting revenue grows from $11.04b in 2023 to $13.71b in 2024, with sportsbooks holding onto 9.3% of each dollar wagered (up from 9.1%). We have passed that awkward ‘every single ad is for a sportsbook’ stage but growth continues.

Small facts.