Great overview of current best practices for agentic coding tools. Recommended reading if you write code. steipete.me/posts/just-t...

Things I find surprising about AI in Sept 2025: - lots of progress on coding agents, little on game-playing - really great writing is still beyond LLMs, no real progress since 4o - AI generated videos are really convincing now, but fake AI content is not flooding my timeline yet

Excellent thread on AI by my colleague Esteban - recommended!

Forecasts suggest current steep funding cuts to USAID funding could lead to over 14 million extra deaths (range: 8.5–20 million) by 2030 - including 4.5 million children under 5 (3.1–5.9 million). From a new paper by Daniella Medeiros Cavalcanti et al: www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Childhood leukemia used to be a death sentence for the vast majority of patients. Now, most children in rich countries are cured. Cool article from @scientificdiscovery.dev for @ourworldindata.org on crucial progress I was completely unaware of: ourworldindata.org/childhood-le...

So far we’ve been lucky that LLM economics results in almost perfectly egalitarian access to capabilities. It could’ve gone differently - where the richest enjoy far better systems or one lab holds a monopoly. Here’s hoping this stays true.

Really nice to see these features in prod! Kudos to my colleague @sophiamersmann.bsky.social for building all of this! 🔥

According to SimilarWeb, chatgpt.com had 5.1 billion visits last April (13% increase relative to March), and about 55% of the visitors were younger than 35. For comparison: Wikipedia.org had 3.7 billion visits (down 6%), with ~45% under 35

“…today’s antivirals are so effective that if taken during pregnancy, the risk of passing HIV to the infant is minimal. Without these drugs, around a quarter of babies born to HIV-positive mothers would also contract the virus – and half of them would die before the age of two.”

Leopold Aschenbrenner and Daniel Kokotajlo have both argued that China must not reach AGI first. Have either of them given any update on how they think about US labs reaching AGI while Trump is in the White House?

Something pretty strange about where we are with LLMs is how bad the spam in my email inbox still is. I would have guessed we would routinely see super convincing, personalized spam by now.

The way the other nations exports are calculated in Trumps "tariff" chart is so incredibly dumb

Tell me your team is entirely comprised of over-confident twenty-somethings without telling me your team is entirely comprised of over-confident twenty-somethings

I find many non-fiction books are more verbose than I would like. I'd often prefer a distilled version with a page count of roughly a quarter. I'd be willing to pay more for the distilled version than the verbose one. Could this be a new revenue stream for writers in the age of AI?

"Any grants, contracts, or collaborations involving mRNA vaccines be reported up the chain to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s office and the White House" - Lysenkoism at work in the new NIH.

Our latest issue of Works in Progress dropped today! - The steam networks of NYC - Prehistoric violence - Urbanism with Chinese characteristics - Extending the fertility window - The Hanseatic League's rise and fall - The pineapple: the king of fruits - The land value tax worksinprogress.co

Most OECD countries fail to allocate even 0.15% of their national income to aid the world’s poorest countries, despite a commitment to do so. That's just $1 out of every $700. Only Luxembourg, Sweden, and Norway meet this minimal UN target. New cuts will deepen this shortfall.

My latest article on Our World in Data, looking at foreign aid and the difference we can make with personal donations: ourworldindata.org/foreign-aid-...

South Korea’s under-15 population has halved in two generations. I knew the population was aging quickly, and it’s no surprise that means fewer children—but the absolute numbers are striking. It's easy to look at fertility rates and forget about absolute numbers. That's a lot fewer kids around.

I think this is right. There is another interesting dynamic that for AI labs it would be very useful if academic research were freely available and so you have a powerful new force against established, paywalled scientific publishing.

THIS IS HUGE! A cancer vaccine developed by Yale University and DFCI shows MAJOR promise. Results of an early-phase trial reveal ALL patients with ADVANCED stage kidney cancer had successful anti-cancer immune responses AND have remained CANCER-FREE approximately THREE years after treatment. 🧪🧵⬇️

OpenAI plus users now have access to the "Deep Research" feature. I just tried it for the first time and asked it for a report on a niche programming topic (comparing computation expressions in F# vs Algebraic Effects in OCaml) and the result was better than any blog post I know of on the topic.

This is quite surprising!

How could @ourworldindata.org maps be better? Do you experience any annoyances or pain points when you interact with our maps? Is there something you wish you could do that you currently can’t? What’s the next cool thing we could build on top of our maps? Any notes welcome! Thank you 🙏

StopTB has a new report estimating the impact of the foreign aid freeze. It's useful to understand the huge impact that global health efforts have everyday, and worrying. Some highlights... 🧵

AMAZING! A GROUNDBREAKING sickle cell disease treatment has been APPROVED for NHS use. Exagamglogene (exa-cel) SUCCESSFULLY edits the faulty gene in a patient’s OWN stem cells. Researchers concluded there was a functional cure in 97% of trial participants that received it! Let’s talk about that! 🧪🧵⬇️

AMFAR has published a report on how the foreign aid freeze affects PEPFAR, which actually still hasn't resumed. They estimate that hundreds of thousands of people lose access to HIV antivirals and 1500 babies are expected to contract HIV — *each day* 🧵

NEW | Solar generates more EU electricity than coal for the first time in 2024 🇪🇺☀️ Renewables made up nearly HALF of the electricity mix last year, while fossil power fell to a historic low ⚡ ember-energy.org/lat...

Since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, nearly half of all people born in the country emigrated. Most of these emigrants stayed close to home. Two-thirds now live in Turkey, Lebanon, or Saudi Arabia

Simon is one of the best voices on AI on the internet and his predictions in this post seem very reasonable. I particularly share his scepticism that general purpose AI Agents will work well soon. Interesting times ahead in any case!

Official data released today shows US data center construction hitting a new all-time high of $31.5B annualized, up 43% from this time last year and 128% since the release of ChatGPT two years ago

Nathan wrote a great post about what we know so far about o3, the recently announced new LLM by OpenAI

O3 sounds very interesting but I think the other announcement by openai deserves some discussion as well: deliberative alignment. Today, prompt injections are a huge problem for many use cases, especially agentic ones. openai.com/index/delibe...

Amazing analysis! A fast rollout of malaria vaccines would be incredible - let’s do this!

If you are using obsidian then do yourself a favour and add the web clipper extension to your browser. It makes getting content from the web into obsidian much nicer and has replaced bookmarks for many use-cases for me. Inline LLM support is a great new addition but it’s really good without as well.

The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better. All three statements are true at the same time. Understanding this is key to solving big global problems. We believe data & research can help us understand both the problems we face & the progress that’s possible. 🧵

Me when starting to read this book review: "Why would any sane person want to read a whole book about principal component analysis" Me after finishing this excellent book review: "WTF inject it right into my veins" loreley.one/2024-09-pca/

Good opportunity to point out a nice OWID feature: interactive charts have dynamic social media preview cards.

If you adjust the chart parameters (add countries, change timeframe, etc.), the URL updates automatically. Share the link, and the social card shows exactly the view you customized ✨

The vast majority of people in the world — over 96% — live in the country where they were born. Only a small minority are international migrants. Insight for @ourworldindata.org ourworldindata.org/data-insight...

Today we have a new issue of Works in Progress! Articles on: - Animals as chemical factories - How Madrid built its metro so fast & cheaply - How big data created the modern dairy cow - Where the glamour of progress went - Solving homelessness - The urbanism of cruise ships - Functionalism!

"Human Challenge Trials Aren’t Riskier than RCTs" This is not accurate. Dosing in challenge trials is often (deliberately) higher than a natural infection in an RCT. The chances of a given volunteer being infected are also much higher. I say this despite being v supportive of challenge trials.

Beautiful work by @wattenberger.com that explores what forms text on the web could take off we leave the restrictions of print behind

I liveskyed the 2024 Martial Law Declaration of Korea. This is the thread.

Good morning, please have a nice bug*. #invertebrates #BugADay *Rosy maple moth

Since I've been here for a while… here are some useful features on Bluesky that you might not have discovered yet! 🧵

Few people even know about this; when people are asked in surveys how child mortality has changed the majority says it has stagnated or increased. If you consider that many don't know about humanity's biggest achievement, then it's not surprising that many are so pessimistic about our future.

The duckdb team is single-handedly dragging the entire DB space into the 21st century ✨. Looking forward to more SQL syntax experimentation once this lands!

The city-state of #Berlin is cutting spending severely to plug a €3bn hole in its budget. Untouchable: the parking permit for residents. It stays at an actually loss-making €10.20 per year. Lost. Absolutely lost.

It’s striking that some of the most promising research on debilitating Long Covid was funded by a small patient group using the $5 million they got from @vitalik.ca — in cryptocurrency! That's why @patientled.bsky.social is my choice for this year's donation guide. Great way to make a difference.

This is a nice example of the almost invisible and sometimes quite tedious work that several of my colleagues at @ourworldindata.org are doing. Yeah data team!