1. More kids are beating cancer. Improving the rest of their lives is next. (WaPo)

   When oncologists gave my 5-year-old daughter the all-clear from high-risk neuroblastoma in 2010, I breathed a sigh of relief.

   But her health needs were just beginning.

   Fifteen years later, the intense and often toxic treatments that saved Emily’s life have left her with a host of lifelong health challenges — hearing loss, stunted height, endocrine and kidney dysfunction, and permanent hair-thinning — issues no one talked about during her 18 months of cancer treatment.

   A good problem to have from one perspective but no less hard to deal with.

2. Questions about AI 2025:

   My working hypothesis is that human cognition improves markedly once pen is put to paper, and in some cases can continue to improve with extended writing (but note many prominent failures).

   This is correct and yet I do this less than I should. Time to commit to writing non-link posts weekly?

3. Exact Instructions Challenge (YouTube): Fun.

4. A ‘Mission: Impossible’ Fan Favorite Returns 3 Decades Later. Even He’s Surprised. (NYT)

   But according to the “Final Reckoning” director Christopher McQuarrie, Donloe made a big impact. In fact, he said in an interview, fans frequently asked him when he was going to bring the character back. For a long time, he didn’t understand why Donloe engendered such love, until he heard the question framed in a different way: “When is the team going to do right by what they did to Donloe?”

   “And I realized why William Donloe resonated,” McQuarrie said. “There was a perceived injustice, whether anybody could put their finger on it or not.”

5. The Rise of the Japanese Toilet (NYT):

   In 1982, a peculiar commercial aired on televisions across Japan.

   An actress in a pink floral dress and an updo drops paint on her hand and futilely attempts to wipe it off with toilet paper. She looks into the camera and asks: “Everyone, if your hands get dirty, you wash them, right?”

   “It’s the same for your bottom,” she continues. “Bottoms deserve to be washed, too.”

   Civilization on the march.

6. Zarna Garg Went From Stay-at-Home Mom to Stand-Up Comedian (NYT):

   After 16 years focusing on her husband, Shalabh, and her three children — Zoya, Brij and Veer — Ms. Garg re-entered the work force in 2019, but not to return to her erstwhile career as a personal injury lawyer. Instead, encouraged by her children, she started working the New York open-mic circuit and performing at Westside Comedy Club before headlining at Caroline’s on Broadway by 2020.

   In 2023, she talked her way into opening for Tina Fey and Amy Poehler on their Restless Leg Tour, and Prime Video aired her special “One in a Billion.” This spring, she made her film debut in the critically acclaimed rom-com “A Nice Indian Boy.” Her second special, “Practical People Win,” will air on Hulu in July, and she is developing a sitcom called “Zarna” with Mindy Kaling and Kevin Hart.

7. The Lightcone Podcast on Prompting (Video Podcast): I am hungry for more such reources.

8. Chattel Childhood: Trigger warning - fairly explicit start and parts.

   I don’t approve of the Simbari childrearing, not because I think the pain and disgust of what the children are forced to do is inherently bad, but because they are forced.

   To love someone skillfully is to pour fuel on their soul. It’s to see the world through their desire, to delight in it, and go “I desire you to get what you want.” It is the amplification of their will.

   The Simbari people are destroying the will of their children. My parents destroyed my will. And I think, quite seriously, that our current culture is likewise destroying the will of its children en masse. That’s what you do to property.

   Worth thinking about although largely I don't agree with this. Her will seems to be doing just fine.

   I think humans are are social animals and whether something traumatizes us or not is often (but not always) a function of the social context surrounding the event. What happens to the Simbari children (if it in fact, does happen. I have not verified or heard of this before) doesn't traumatize them because everyone around them considers it perfectly normal.

   In my mental model, the trauma happens, when you feel something shameful or otherwise different has happened to you and everyone looks at you different.

9. Artichokes: For the photos.

10. High cost of building in US:

    Zuckerburg's worth is 226 billion. The NY Subway builds tunnels at $4 bil. per mile. SF's BART builds subways at $2 bil. per mile. It's crazy that all of Zuckerberg's wealth would build just 8% of the current NYC subway network.

    Meanwhile in Paris cost $250 mil. per mile.

11. UFO?:

    The object was precognitive in behavior. The radar data from the SPY-1B system showed that the Tic Tac descended from 28,000 feet to sea level in 0.78 seconds, a feat requiring acceleration up to 5,880 Gs. But here's what no one focuses on: that data was correlated by both radar and infrared, meaning this was not a sensor glitch or hallucination...it was a multi-spectrum-confirmed, real-world event. And what’s worse? The object decelerated to a dead stop… mid-air. Bonkers!

A long list today because this week two of my top sources were on fire - MR and NYT.

1. My Parents Expected to Be Retired. Instead, They Are Raising My Sister’s Kids. (NYT): Beautiful, heartbreaking and uplifting.

2. Still booting after all these years: The people stuck using ancient Windows computers: None of the above. Well... maybe heartbreaking. No need to click the link though, the title says it all.

3. Measles cases in Europe, the Americas skyrocket: This is infuriating for two reasons. The second reason is that you wouldn't know it from reading most news that Europe has 10x the cases of USA. NYT I can understand, but I had to scroll down 3 pages on BBC website, after searching for "measles" to find a story about something other than RFK Jr. and Texas moms.

4. Your Fingers Wrinkle in the Same Pattern Every Time After Long Exposure to Water: Heh. Also apparently they wrinkle to improve underwater grip, not because the skin expands by absorbing water, which would have been hypothesis.

5. How Miami Schools Are Leading 100,000 Students Into the A.I. Future (NYT)

6. 5 weeks ago, someone buried a 22 lb chest with $10,000 of prizes (half in gold), somewhere in San Francisco. No one has found it yet. This is the only clue. It was found within a day of this post, so clearly the only thing holding back the search was the number of eyes looking. How many other problems is this true for?

7. "One of main goals in life has been to make my parents proud". 92% in Iraq, 78% in India. I remember realizing sometime in my early 30s that my parents didn't know the hierarchy of success in my field. As far as they were concerned I was already successful after college and any "actual" success wouldn't register with them. I felt the void in my movtivation for quite some time. Having your own kids helps with the transition.

8. AI & Critical Thinking:

   An interviewer just asked me what skills AI will make more important. My response? Critical thinking skills.

   This is because in the past there was value in creating large quantities of information. That is now costless. The new currency is how to generate, assimilate, interpret, and make that large amount of information actionable.

   The next question then becomes how do we teach, and improve our own, critical thinking skills? I discuss that in a recent study where I create a critical thinking skills hierarchy.

9. The Agentic Web and Original Sin: I have been wondering about this problem for a while - who puts up the content for the LLMs to train on if everyone gets their answers from the chatbots and doesn't visit websites anymore.

   The problem, as both I and Patel noted, is that this ecosystem depends on humans seeing those webpages, not impersonal agents impervious to advertising, which destroys the economics of ad-supported content sites, which, in the long run, dries up the supply of new content for AI.

   A potential solution:

   First, the protocol layer should have a mechanism for payments via digital currency, i.e. stablecoins. Second, AI providers like ChatGPT should build an auction mechanism that pays out content sources based on the frequency with which they are cited in AI answers. The result would be a new universe of creators who will be incentivized to produce high quality content that is more likely to be useful to AI, competing in a marketplace a la the open web; indeed, this would be the new open web, but one that operates at even greater scale than the current web given the fact that human attention is a scarce resource, while the number of potential agents is infinite.

10. Cargo Ship Crashed Into Man’s Yard After Crewman Fell Asleep, Police Say (NYT)

11. The 22 Best Pizza Places in New York Right Now (NYT)

12. New Studies Dismiss Signs of Life on Distant Planet (NYT): Dang.

13. SEO for AI: A look at Generative Engine Optimization

14. The best bookstore in NYC, and then some

15. They’re 15. Wait Until You Read Their Newspaper. (NYT):

    “We still haven’t done hot dogs,” Teddy said. Billy agreed: Hot dogs should be an editorial priority.

    and

“We were still very young; we had no idea what we were doing,” said Billy, a junior varsity quarterback whose hair was tousled into a cruciferous mop.

16. Know hope!

    …Use of digital technologies was associated with reduced risk of cognitive impairment (OR = 0.42, 95% CI 0.35–0.52) and reduced time-dependent rates of cognitive decline (HR = 0.74, 95% CI 0.66–0.84). Effects remained significant when accounting for demographic, socioeconomic, health and cognitive reserve proxies.

    Paper here.

17. Putting Claude 4 Opus in an open playground to chat with itself led to it diving into philosophical explorations of consciousness, self-awareness, and by 30 turns it eventually started using Sanskrit: Can't wait till nationalist politicians from my home state get their hands on this. Sanskrit!

18. Toronto burger shop called Good Fortune Burger renamed its menu items to sound like office supplies, helping remote workers potentially expense meals through work accounts. The "basic steel stapler" and "braided HDMI cord” are popular. : As a reply points out this doesn't make sense because the order is still from a place called Good Fortune Burger.

19. Who Benefits from Surge Pricing?:

    What are the welfare effects of surge pricing? Using Uber data, I develop an empirical model of spatial equilibrium composed of demand, supply, and matching. I find that surge pricing raises total welfare, benefitting riders but hurting drivers.

    Welfare effects differ substantially across sides of the market: rider surplus increases by 3.57% of gross revenue, whereas driver surplus and the platform’s current profits decrease by 0.98% and 0.50% of gross revenue, respectively.

    This doesn't make sense. If it hurts the platform or the drivers, why would they do it?

    After dropping the pearl of wisdom above, I decided to actually read the paper. In the first two pages I found this:

Uber’s current profits decrease by 0.50% of gross revenue. This probably does not mean that Uber is hurt, but rather that it is willing to forgo current profits to increase rider surplus—the right choice if it believes that long-run shareholder value is more closely tied to rider surplus and customer retention than to current profits.

Makes sense. After this my eyes glazed over and I dropped the paper in Claude and asked it why drivers would participate in this. Here's what it says: 

The paper acknowledges this is the more problematic finding. "My findings suggest that drivers might have good reason to complain. Their hourly earnings are not much higher than the minimum wage, so even the small effects I find might be a concern."

However, drivers may not have full information about the counterfactual (uniform pricing), and many drivers are part-time workers using Uber for supplemental income rather than as their primary employment.

1. How to make money betting on the new Pope: Great discussion of the betting process. Still plenty of luck involved but a reminder that there is plenty of "alpha" out there if you look in the right place. Maybe I should create a hashtag for these stories. #alpha

   A few minutes later, my jaw dropped as Prevost -- the guy I had just amasssed shares in at 200-1 like 20 minutes earlier-- walked out onto the balcony as Pope.

2. On the NBA and economic theory: Solving the problem of late season tanking to get a shot at the draft lottery in the NBA. Quite simple when you think about it.

   Optimal mechanism: get points for each loss. In game 1, a loss is worth 1 Draft Point. As season continues, loss is worth less, becoming negative late. Draft position based on Draft Points. Everyone wants to win late in season. Early season used to handicap truly bad teams.

3. Populism is not popular. Success is popular.:

   And Singapore is well run precisely because it adopts “unpopular” technocratic policies like zero tariffs, forced saving, and congestion pricing.

   And the PAP keeps getting re-elected, not despite, but because of those unpopular policies. Playing the long game, succesfully, since 1965.

4. Harvard Paid $27 for a Copy of Magna Carta. Surprise! It’s an Original.: To be fair it was $27 in 1946 dollars, but still. #alpha

   Professor Carpenter was at home in Blackheath, south east London, plowing his way through Harvard Law School’s digital images as research for a book when he opened a file named HLS MS 172 — the catalog name for Harvard Law School Manuscript 172.

   “I get down to 172 and it’s a single parchment sheet of Magna Carta,” he said. “And I think ‘Oh my god, this looks to me for all the world — because I read it — like an original.’”

   Professor Carpenter emailed Professor Vincent, who was, at the time, at work in a library in Brussels. “David sent it with a message saying, ‘What do you think that is?’” said Professor Vincent. “I wrote back within seconds, saying, ‘You and I both know what that is!’”

   I would not have answered like that.

A light week on links as it was a heavy week in life.

1. You Sent the Message. But Did You Write It?: Hilarious.

   Chatcident: When someone slips and pastes the prompt into the chat or email instead of the polished AI output – exposing the wizard behind the curtain.

2. Points for kills: How Ukraine is using video game incentives to slay more Russians:

   Ukraine's military is turning to incentive schemes used in video games to spur its soldiers to kill more Russian troops and destroy their equipment.

   The program — called Army of Drones bonus — rewards soldiers with points if they upload videos proving their drones have hit Russian targets. It will soon be integrated with a new online marketplace called Brave 1 Market, which will allow troops to convert those points into new equipment for their units.

3. How far are you from India, measured in units of India?: I really need to update the site to show Tweets inline or at least display images. Hope Claude is up to the task.

4. This Is the Moment for Mexican Indian Food to Flourish (NYT): A marriage made in heaven. Literally.

   A small, close-knit Mexican Indian American community formed outside Sacramento when a generation of Punjabi Sikh and Muslim men immigrated from India to find work as farmers and loggers beginning in the late 1800s. After the Immigration Act of 1917 made it near impossible for Indian women to immigrate, hundreds of these men married Mexican women. New kinds of cooking emerged from their idiosyncratic home kitchens and a handful of restaurants the families went on to run.

5. Lego built full-size F1 cars for the Miami GP drivers’ parade.

   “That was the most fun drivers’ parade we’ve ever had,” Ferrari’s Lewis Hamilton said. “Some dirty driving from this one here (Gasly)! That was great fun.”

   “They’ll have to sweep the track, there’s quite a bit of Lego debris on the track,” Max Verstappen said. “A bit different, that’s for sure!”

6. Tim Urban on AI. In 2015.: Really need to add the Tweet feature.

7. Unparalleled Misalignments: I think I have shared this before but some things are worth sharing twice.

   This is a list of Unparalleled Misalignments, pairs of non-synonymous phrases where the words in one phrase are each synonyms of the words in the other.

   Butt dial // Booty call

   Father figure // Dad bod

   Local girl // Near miss

8. Globalization did not hollow out the American middle class

9. Pro-Prompting: A master in action. Prompt used for GeoGuessr by Kelsey Tuoc, in the last week's link on AI playing GeoGuessr.

10. Boy Accidentally Orders 70,000 Lollipops on Amazon. Panic Ensues. (NYT) :

On Sunday morning, as Holly LaFavers was preparing to go to church, a delivery worker dropped off a 25-pound box of lollipops in front of her apartment building in Lexington, Ky.

And another. And then another. Soon, 22 boxes of 50,600 lollipops were stacked five boxes high in two walls of Dum-Dums. That was when Ms. LaFavers heard what no parent wants to hear: Her child had unwittingly placed a massive online order.

“Mom, my suckers are here!” said her son, Liam, who had gone outside to ride his scooter.

“I panicked,” Ms. LaFavers, 46, said. “I was hysterical.”

1. How to make hard choices (YouTube): A great video and especially personally relevant right now.

2. Just how good is O3 at playing GeoGuessr: Apparently very good. It still makes errors of course, but I was amazed at how close it got with very limited clues. Worth repeating this bit from last weeks link:

   It’s also deeply dystopian. Technology can identify locations from photographs now. It’s vitally important that people understand how easy this is—if you have any reason at all to be concerned about your safety, you need to know that any photo you share—even a photo as bland as my example above—could be used to identify your location.

3. Universal Antivenom May Grow Out of Man Who Let Snakes Bite Him 200 Times (NYT):

   The video is just under two and a half minutes long. A slim man with close-cropped hair walks into a room, pulls a long black mamba — whose venom can kill within an hour — from a crate and allows it to bite his left arm. Immediately after, he lets a taipan from Papua New Guinea bite his right arm. “Thanks for watching,” he calmly tells the camera, his left arm bleeding, and then exits.

   Over nearly 18 years, the man, Tim Friede, 57, injected himself with more than 650 carefully calibrated, escalating doses of venom to build his immunity to 16 deadly snake species. He also allowed the snakes — mostly one at a time, but sometimes two, as in the video — to sink their sharp fangs into him about 200 times.

4. Ken Rogoff on Conversations with Tyler: Great discussion on so many different topics - China, Pakistan, US, Chess. I found it very insightful.

5. Macro Utopia: Economics heavy list today but I have found Scott Sumner to have the most useful and probably most accurate predictions about macro.

A lot of NYT links today. For all its flaws, of which there might be many, the NYT is incomparable.

1. Good advice from Ross Douthat:

   Have the child. Practice the religion. Found the school. Support the local theater, the museum, the opera or concert hall, even if you can see it all on YouTube. Pick up the paintbrush, the ball, the instrument. Learn the language — even if there’s an app for it. Learn to drive, even if you think soon Waymo or Tesla will drive for you. Put up headstones, don’t just burn your dead. Sit with the child, open the book, and read.

2. Or play a boardgame?:

   New York can be expensive, overwhelming and intimidating, and sometimes it is hard for people to connect. A martini can cost $25 in a bar that’s too noisy for conversation, and raucous nightclubs aren’t for everyone. So a free, monthly B.Y.O.B. (bring your own board game) night in an office building food court has become a big hit.

   In addition to Werewolf, people were playing classics, like chess and mahjong, but also relatively newer games, including Catan, Splendor, Hues and Cues, Saboteur, Nertz, Wavelength, Blokus and Camel Up.

   Board game events and clubs have grown in popularity in recent years — in New York and across the country. This one is organized by Richard Ye, a 24-year-old who works in finance. He bills the event as New York City’s largest board game meet-up, and a video of Mr. Ye celebrating his March gathering — where 500 people were in attendance — was widely shared on social media.

   File another one under #youcanjustdothings.

3. What I Didn’t Know About the Egg Industry Horrified Me: As a life-long vegetarian who can't even imagine turning vegan, I try to avoid evangelizing about what people should eat. Despite the click-baity headline and not the most objective tone, the scientific brekthrough here is worth cheering.

   Called in ovo sexing, it determines the sex of the chick embryo long before it hatches, allowing the producers to get rid of the male eggs and hatch only the females.

   This is important because:

   I had no idea that while the Ladies enjoyed shelter and sunshine, fresh bugs and freedom, their newborn brothers faced a gruesome fate shared by 6.5 billion male chicks around the world each year. These male birds can’t lay eggs but also aren’t raised for meat. Because they come from egg-laying breeds, they don’t grow big or fast enough to be used for food. So they are ground up alive or gassed to death.

4. Questions about the Future of AI by Dwarkesh Patel: I haven't read most of this but what I have is great.

5. Another important question about AI by Radek Sienkiewicz : Why do AI company logos look like buttholes? Click the link. They really do.

6. In a year will this still make news?:

   Australian Radio Network (ARN), the media company behind KIIS, as well as Gold and iHeart, used an AI-generated female Asian host to broadcast 4 hours of midweek radio, without disclosing it.

   This probably still will:

   “It seems very odd that CADA hired a new ethnically-diverse woman to their youth station and then just forgot to tell anyone.”

   It’s notable because ARN is the whitest thing in media since the Night King and his throng of walkers on Game of Thrones. The network is also home of Australia’s most expensive, complained about and censured radio show, Kyle and Jackie O.

7. Penn Station’s Not-So-Secret Other Life: The People’s Dance Studio:

   “Penn Station is first and foremost a transportation hub,” said Aaron Donovan, the deputy communications director for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. “But you know, as long as folks abide by the rules and regulations that govern the use of the space and don’t block platforms or interfere with passenger flows, we generally don’t have any problem with what’s going on.”

8. Watching o3 guess a photo’s location is surreal, dystopian and wildly entertaining by Simon Willison:

   First, this is really fun. Watching the model’s thought process as it churns through the photo, pans and zooms and discusses different theories about where it could be is wildly entertaining. It’s like living in an episode of CSI.

   It’s also deeply dystopian. Technology can identify locations from photographs now. It’s vitally important that people understand how easy this is—if you have any reason at all to be concerned about your safety, you need to know that any photo you share—even a photo as bland as my example above—could be used to identify your location.

1. How "The Joker" Took Down The Texas Lottery (WSJ Paywall): What a story. There is plenty of alpha out there, if you know where and how to look. Also, brute force is underrated. Sadly behind a paywall and there's lot more to it than the gist below:

   In Texas, as in many states, most people who play the lottery go to a store with a machine, choose numbers, then walk away with a ticket. Back in 2023, Texas also allowed online lottery-ticket vendors to set up shops to print tickets for their customers.

   Marantelli’s team recruited one such seller, struggling startup Lottery.com, to help with the logistics of buying and printing the millions of tickets. Like all lotto retailers, it would collect a 5% sales commission. The Texas Lottery Commission allowed dozens of the terminals that print tickets to be delivered to the four workshops set up by the team.

   That April 19, the commission announced that there had been no winner in that day’s drawing. The next drawing, with an even larger pot, would be three days later, on a Saturday. The group sprang into action.

   The printing operation ran day and night. The team had converted each number combination into a QR code. Crew members scanned the codes into the terminals using their phones, then scrambled to organize all the tickets in boxes such that they could easily locate the winning numbers.

   The game called for picking six numbers from 1 to 54. For a pro gambler, some sets of numbers—such as 1,2,3,4,5,6—aren’t worth picking because so many other players choose them, which would split the pot. Marantelli’s operation bought 99.3% of the possibilities.

   Money moved to Lottery.com from Ranogajec’s accounts—held under the name John Wilson—in the Isle of Man, a tax haven off the U.K. coast, taking a circuitous route via an escrow account at a Detroit law firm, according to people familiar with the transfers and bank statements reviewed by the Journal.

   The crew hit the jackpot that Saturday. One of their tickets was the sole winner.

2. The Moon Should Be a Computer: Love the ambition. So much fun to read.

   There are other reasons to build a Moon computer, including to avoid the regulatory hurdles to build the energy centers needed to power centralized AI clusters and as a sovereignty play in the increasingly fraught geopolitical game on the road to developing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)—a system with the ability to solve virtually any cognitive task a human can. We of, course, don’t have to mine the Moon just to replicate a single human mind, but we might have to do so to power superintelligence, same in kind but vastly superior to our own.

   How bad are these regulations exactly?

3. Stevens: a hackable AI assistant via Simon Willison: So many cool projects, so little time.

   The assistant is called Stevens, named after the butler in the great Ishiguro novel Remains of the Day. Every morning it sends a brief to me and my wife via Telegram, including our calendar schedules for the day, a preview of the weather forecast, any postal mail or packages we’re expected to receive, and any reminders we’ve asked it to keep track of. All written up nice and formally, just like you’d expect from a proper butler.

   Beyond the daily brief, we can communicate with Stevens on-demand—we can forward an email with some important info, or just leave a reminder or ask a question via Telegram chat.

4. Every: A great site focused on AI related stories.

5. Obvious travel advice:

   Despite being only 0.3% of the world’s population, Australians seem to make up 10% of overseas visitors everywhere on the planet. Do not be disturbed by this well-known optical illusion.

1. Digital hygiene by Andrej Karpathy: I discovered this just a little late to include in the last weeks post, where it would have been the perfect companion piece along with this one on getting phished.

   I practice some of these recommendations already and wholeheartedly recommend the password manager, for example. I use Dashlane, which is about $60 a year if you want to sync across devices, but there are many free tools out there. Bitwarden offers all the essential features, including syncing across devices, for free and the paid versions are cheaper too.

   I plan to explore his solutions for credit cards (privacy.com) this weekend. Work-life separation is also great advice, which I did not follow in the past but am doing at my new(ish) job.

2. Flight to unkown destinations. Would you take one? Doesn't seem like a big deal to me. As a reply to the tweet says, unlikely they will put you in a war zone, so if it is in Schengen, how bad could it be? I am probably clueless...

   Scandinavian Airlines are running “unknown” destination flights.

   You buy a ticket and board the plane. Then you find out where you are going.

   Would you do it?

3. Kim Shin-jo, 82, Failed North Korean Assassin, Dies as Pastor in the South (NYT Paywall) : What a story and what a life! And this story is straight out of hollywood, but without the happy ending.

4. Getting the Most from Deep Research Models:

   After a fair bit of experimentation, I've built a Claude project that handles all the repeatable high-effort prompt engineering (like source selection) for you. It asks for your preferences, clarifies what you need, and produces a well-structured prompt that you can then feed into any DR model.

5. Two high-value excerpts from John Authers Bloomberg newsletters:

   Here follows a crowd-sourced literary tip. I asked yesterday for recommendations on great detective franchises for easy reading in stressful times, and you delivered. I’ve had so many suggestions that this will need to come in installments.

   To start, the name you’ve recommended most often, and with greatest enthusiasm, is Michael Connelly and his Harry Bosch series (the detective loves jazz and lives in the LA hills).

   Other entrants includes the Dave Robicheaux series by James Lee Burke (set in Louisiana and starting with The Neon Rain), Arnaldur Indridason’s “really good, bleak Icelandic stuff” (try Jar City first). Volker Kutscher’s Babylon Berlin series, set in Weimar Germany. Robert van Gulik’s Judge Dee stories (written some decades ago and set in Ancient China — try Willow Pattern). Also the Martin Beck books set in 1960-70s Sweden and written over 10 years by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo — a husband and wife team, and godparents of Scandinavian noir (Roseanna is recommended) and the Harry Hole books by Jo Nesbo, set in Norway.

   To be clear, I didn’t mention Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe books because I’ve already read all of them. If you’ve never dipped into Chandler, you have a treat in store — perhaps start with The Big Sleep. And as more than one of you said Connelly was as good as Chandler, I definitely want to read one of his. I’ll have plenty more suggestions tomorrow. Please, if you have any more to recommend, let me know.

   Herewith another installment in our crowd-sourced tour of great detective fiction franchises. You might want to try: Abir Mukherjee’s Wyndham and Banerjee series is set in India under the British Raj; the Canadian writer Eric Wright’s John Salter series, set in Toronto; Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series, set in Nazi Germany; the Whitstable Pearl mysteries by Julie Wassmer (who used to be a scriptwriter for Eastenders so there are plenty of cliffhangers); Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano series, featuring Sicily and plenty of great food; and Death of a Red Heroine, the first of the Inspector Chen series by Qiu Xiaolong in contemporary Shanghai. This comes highly recommended by Andy Rothman of Sinology, long one of my favorite guides to all things China, and by remarkable coincidence I had picked up a copy of this book from a neighborhood bookshelf earlier this week. So that’s what I’ll read next. More detectives next week.

6. Drew Breunig via Simon Willison:

   The first generation of AI-powered products (often called “AI Wrapper” apps, because they “just” are wrapped around an LLM API) were quickly brought to market by small teams of engineers, picking off the low-hanging problems. But today, I’m seeing teams of domain experts wading into the field, hiring a programmer or two to handle the implementation, while the experts themselves provide the prompts, data labeling, and evaluations.

   For these companies, the coding is commodified but the domain expertise is the differentiator.

7. S Anand: A great website from a college senior. On campus he was know as Stud Anand.

1. Myanmar Earthquake passing through Europe: I experienced the shaking in Bangkok. First, I thought I was getting dizzy before the realization struck. It was kind of disorienting walking down the stairs of the building, periodically feeling dizzy. It didn't feel real, almost as if it was just a drill or a joke.

2. AI vs. Human: Odysseus Translation: I, too, preferred the AI version. Even if you don't agree with the ranking, it is clearly good enough.

3. Tough out there for kids: Hard to understand the rejection ratio. I was originally going to link to a thread by a university professor with experience in admissions, critiquing his personal essay but she has locked her account now, I assume after it went viral. If I recall correctly, she felt his essay did not show the right attitude for various reasons. Many on twitter (and I) disagreed but even if you agree with her take, the essay highlights a very impressive person (and seems factually accurate). So I struggle to understand the rejection ratio.

4. If he can fall for a phishing attack, so can you and they are only going to get more sophisticated. Be careful out there and step up your safety protocols.

5. AI 2027: I have yet to fully read this but it is a lot more "optimistic" on AI progress than I am right now and at least somewhat scary.