Just read the report that triggered this, fantastic and much needed work on pricing transparency groundworkcollaborative.org/work/instaca...

Great reporting on how Flock is lobbying police departments to build support for their technology.

Fantastic visual exploration of the current state of model interpretability. youtu.be/D8GOeCFFby4?...

Further evidence that graph and physics modes are some of the coolest stuff happening. This is built in Google’s GraphCast GNN and generates improved results with 0.3% of compute required for existing models.

I realize folks don't want to hear this, but we really need to re-examine the conventional wisdom that we can shift the entire US market to pure EV with massive batteries and some light consumer incentives. It's a nice thing to believe but the evidence doesn't add up.

Woof, what a thread…

This is a fantastic example of tech journalism.

PSA: Sohla and Ham cookie content dropped today youtu.be/fzNRjc2g1NU?...

hard to imagine a better comment on the state of silicon valley startups than: the hot startups are just straight up naming themselves after pseudoscientific concepts now en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemuria

Just spent my lunch break with an engineer trying to sort out a neighborhood-wide stormwater problem caused by aging infrastructure and 10yr rainfall events that occurred multiple times per month last summer. It’s wild how inadequate current tools are for handling the no longer extreme.

“The operator of a vending machine gets to experience the idle fancy of exhausted shopkeepers everywhere, selling their wares without getting up early in the morning, without necessarily getting up at all. But what is behind the will to be vended to?”

Interesting framing from @blaiseaguera.bsky.social of intelligence as an organizational process.

Woof. “CPSC is aware of 31 reports of fire, including 12 reports of property damage totaling approximately $734,500. Some of these incidents occurred when the battery was not charging, the product was not in use, and the product was in storage.”

This is absolutely bonkers. If you’d have asked me even a few months ago if this was possible, I’d have said no way…

“When he told them he was born in Raleigh, the agent questioning him grew angry. They pulled off the road into the parking lot of a carpet cleaning company, where they dumped him, a half mile away from where they picked him up, throwing his wallet and cards out of the SUV window as they drove off.”

One of the more surprising takeaways from Gemini 3 is the lack of sycophancy (or “EQ” as OpenAI calls it). It just responds with the requested information. Engagement mining is a design choice. And the choices these companies are making say a lot about their product strategy/path to revenue.

Great discussion. Among the many fractures, the split between OpenAI pursuing consumer revenue (agentic shopping, p*rn, etc) and all the other model shops seems like the most consequential. It’s deeply linked to finance (why OAI is chasing the quick buck) and could define normie perception of AI.

I’ve had a running test for multimodal models over the last ~year: extract the “Crss” values for each tick mark in this chart. GPT 5 makes up numbers, Claude 4.5 refuses to try, Qwen3 VL has a plausible guess. Gemini 3 pro pretty much nails it.

For no reason at all this morning I feel the need to re-share my piece with Miranda Nazzaro from last week about how we are all overly dependent on a small handful of internet providers: cyberscoop.com/with-each-cl...

Good day to reflect on the tradeoffs between relying on monolithic platforms and protocol-driven infrastructure like BGP Anycast. Anycast is what makes these platforms possible, but it’s nearly impossible to implement on your own. (Cloudflare requires an enterprise account to enable it.)

cloudflare's on-duty IT staff bangs on the doors which I have padlocked from the inside as I calmly break open lava lamp after lava lamp and drink the contents

Bezos and co putting $6.3B into PINNs (for CFD?) is one of the more interesting AI bets out there. Will be interesting to see if they’ve timed Project Prometheus to capture declining hardware costs.

On the plus side, at least we’re finally being honest that digital enforcement for micromobility is about who has rights to space… “In certain crowded nightlife areas where teenagers congregate, all rented e-bikes are being slowed down even further.”

The transformation that the bike industry is undergoing looks a lot like what’s happening to the automotive sector due to electrification. Very messy and long overdue. The reckoning was triggered by reverberations from COVID supply shocks, but what’s happening is much larger.

“It is hard to imagine the world deploying $5 trillion of capital without at least some hiccups.” on.ft.com/43S8CiY

While Meta/OpenAI are building city-sized data centers, groundbreaking research is happening on the average gaming PC:

In concept I’m a huge fan of porting infrastructural code to Rust/memory safe languages, but shipping broken code — especially code that causes silent data loss — doesn’t help that cause.

Somebody at the body shop DIY’ed the compact pickup Detroit won’t build.

In large part, this is the difference between how China vs the US are investing in AI. Augmenting existing systems and human capacity and finding incremental value, vs betting everything on a winner takes all LLM godhead.

If the federal show of force in Washington has had a deterrent effect on crime, it appears to have deterred entirely normal aspects of city life, too. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/u...

The NYC battery fire crisis is an employment classification problem. If Uber et al were liable for the destruction caused by their use of illegal bikes this problem would go away. Instead they’ve lobbied to shift responsibility on to workers making subsistence wages.

Glad to chat with Alex Roy and Joel Johnson on Tool Or Die last week; China's car game is solid -- I can understand why some are blindsided and taken aback, but others....I don't know how they didn't see it coming. Give it a listen. www.toolordie.com/p/why-does-k...

Sinophobic petrostate fusionism

Hadn't seen this happen before: Claude dropped into Mandarin to explain that I was attempting to mix (混合) two different ideas in my request.

Just posted a first draft of something I've been working on. Geoceiver began as part of an IoT project looking at ways to improve GNSS precision in urban environments. Turned out the data infrastructure powering GNSS is mostly text files shared on FTP sites, and it's holding back lots of R&D.

This is such an important conversation and mirrors where I'm at on LLM use/value. The critique got frozen in amber a 1-2 years ago, and is fueled by (valid) structural issues like energy, copyright, deepfakes, etc. But the tech continues to evolve in ways that are unrelated to these problems.

Great piece on BYD's $8,000 EV. Also, fascinating tidbit about Shanghai banning small/inexpensive cars:

"We have entered a feedback loop in which Sinophobia is both a byproduct and a driver of strategic rivalry. It fuels the antagonism, and the antagonism legitimizes the prejudice. And in the meantime, real people — scientists, students, ordinary Asian Americans — are swept up in it..."

Big lesson from the last several years: 4a law isn't equipped to handle the harms embedded in pervasive surveillance tech like ALPR. Also, lots of people (who don't support LE dragnets) ended up on the wrong side of the right to privacy in public fight because pervasive surveillance seemed useful.

Astonishingly, the US bike lobby is attempting to get sectoral tariff relief by blaming a lack of protectionism and "cheap" foreign bike imports in the 1990s for the collapse of US manufacturing. 1) Bonkers logic. 2) US cos failure to respond to 90s trends like MTBs killed the domestic industry.

As funny as this is to watch it looks like it's at least partly caused by the poor over the hood visibility of modern mega trucks. Unfortunately it's not just rocks these trucks run over, and in most crashes, the truck wins.

Tariffs just got real: our first $36K bill with 125% + 20% + 25% markup hits hard 💸. These are upfront costs - due before selling a single unit - causing serious cash flow strain, price increases, read more! 📦 adafruit.com/tariffbill #tariffs

It's hinted at in this conversation, but the retail margins are going to take the brunt of the tariff impacts. I suspect we'll see lots of niche/low volume products go fully DTC as retailers fail and/or brands try to reclaim margins to get above water. Kinda bonkers given % of retail jobs in the US.

I spent a few days in Fly shops last year, bought a Fly 11 Pro, and did a battery teardown. The first battery I bought was broken when it left the store, the second wasn't new. Zero chance it was UL anything.

pretending that tariffs and immigration are about preventing opioid drug overdoses and then pulling narcan distribution is about as unforgivably evil as it gets

This morning in mobility

Has anyone considered the possibility that they legit think they are negotiating with China, but are actually the prank victims of a drive-time morning zoo radio program in Shanghai?