Google's LLMs are cracking me up today. I fed some text into Gemini 2.5 Pro that contained a misspelling. Gemini guessed that what the writer meant by "veriority" was probably "verisimilitude". Gemini has so much faith in human intelligence. Yes Gemini, the person who can't spell "variety" definitely actually meant "verisimilitude" and also definitely knows what that means. Gemma 3 seems a little too fine-tuned to be agentic, and kept hallucinating that it was checking web results even when it had no tools available. The amount of grovelling that Google RL'd it on is really quite impressive. It was hitting every part of an apology: acknowledging its precise mistake, self-flagellating, and promising to do better in the future.

I’ve been using Aider recently for AI pair programming. It seems like the best setup I’ve seen so far for managing context and doing real programming work. It is impressive tho how insanely expensive Anthropic’s models are. Google has the same or better performance for just a fraction of the price.

BBC News

Spain will take 'all necessary measures' to prevent another blackout, says PM - live updates

Power has now been fully restored in Spain and Portugal, as officials continue to investigate what caused the outage.

Wait what? In both Spain and Portugal the entire country lost power?

https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/illegal-immigrant-incarceration-rates-2010-2023 New Cato institute report shows that both legal and illegal immigrants commit less crime than native born Americans. Even if you exclude all native born black people, immigrants *still* commit less crime. Can Americans all finally shut up about immigrant crime now?

Simon Willison’s Weblog

Watching o3 guess a photo’s location is surreal, dystopian and wildly entertaining

Watching OpenAI’s new o3 model guess where a photo was taken is one of those moments where decades of science fiction suddenly come to life. It�...

Fascinating article from Simon Willison talking about how good o3 is at guessing your location from a photograph. We’re only beginning to learn the new capabilities of reasoning models using tools during the thinking process.

https://www.startupdaily.net/topic/artificial-intelligence-machine-learning/eye-thy-with-my-ai-australian-radio-network-digitises-diversity-with-an-artificially-generated-asian-female-presenter/ Wow. The company behind Gold and iHeart radio wanted more diversity so instead of hiring someone they made an AI radio host that sounded like an Asian woman using TTS to run hours of music per week without telling anyone.

Darwin’s Children Drew All Over the On The Origin of Species Manuscript (Updated)—The Appendix

While Darwin was writing his masterpiece, his children were doodling all over it.

Onfim - Wikipedia

I love when we find kid’s drawings from centuries ago.

Trump Tower (novel) - Wikipedia

Donald Trump wrote a bad romance novel? Why did he think this was a good idea?

A Ketamine Addict's Perspective On What Elon Musk Might Be Experiencing On Ketamine

TW: Suicide

X (formerly Twitter)

Anatoly Karlin 🧲💯 (@akarlin) on X

Many are asking why Elon Musk developed a... wide range of interesting ideas since 2020. Isaacson bio. 👇 Looks like genetics. Just 5 years late...

New double prong theory for Elon’s mental decline. Perhaps it’s a combination of both ketamine and genetic predisposition. For some reason there seem to be a lot of incredibly smart people who took ketamine and fried themselves. Felix Hill is an example here.

Probably to make his bid for Pope. He already had the look.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/20/politics/hegseth-second-signal-chat-military-plans/index.html

VelvetShark

Why do AI company logos look like buttholes?

A humorous exploration of the uncanny resemblance between AI company logos and human anatomy. Discover why circular, gradient-based designs dominat...

Dear god now I can’t unsee it.

NBC News

Sweden’s hottest show? Nonstop live coverage of the epic moose migration

The show will air nonstop for 20 days, following the moose via remote cameras and drones as they journey through forests and swim across the Ånger...

New favorite livestream.

You don’t actually know the Ten Commandments. The ones you just thought of were smashed by Moses and then God replaced them with a new set of Ten Commandments. The new Ten are very different from the original Ten. Go read Exodus 34. Weird realization for the day.

Will this be the Chinese Century?

Probably yes, though that may not mean what people expect.

Bearish article on the future of America. Interesting insight that when information in the internet age spreads nearly instantaneously, being innovative doesn’t give you much of an advantage. Making incremental improvements to bring that innovation to market and actually implement it is what leads to world dominance. One point of disagreement though. I think everyone people were underestimating Trump but have swung way too far to overestimating his impact in 4 years. The Democrats and the bureaucracy may have been initially thrown off balance but they’ll recover and retard Trump’s initiative.

Molson Hart

America Underestimates the Difficulty of Bringing Manufacturing Back — Molson Hart

On April 2nd, 2025, our president announced major new taxes on imports from foreign countries (“tariffs”), ranging from 10% to 49%. The stated ...

Lots of good points here. One thing I hadn’t considered is that tariffs make it really difficult to establish manufacturing here. The cheaper option may simply be to do as little manufacturing in the US as possible and only import the finished product rather than deal with the complexity of an industrial supply chain and trying to import the intermediate products to do the manufacturing domestically.

https://www.wsj.com/politics/elon-musk-children-mothers-ashley-st-clair-grimes-dc7ba05c I guess… it’s good Musks actions match his rhetoric on repopulating the planet? Besides that this seems like super weird fetish behavior.

AI 2027

A research-backed AI scenario forecast.

https://openai.com/index/introducing-o3-and-o4-mini/ We appear to be hitting the "Reliable agent" section of the AI takeoff timeline. o4 is probably a real human level coder at this point if the Codeforces benchmarks are anything to go by.