Some #filmphotography for you as I sign off for the weekend. The Bay provides, and so does #kodacolor200.

Ridiculously credulous journalism.

The set of things that apparently really happened on April Fool’s Day is a sure sign the universe has malfunctioned

Alibaba's new Qwen model, 3.6-Plus, appears NOT to be open-weights. Available by API only, exclusively from Alibaba. This is essentially the OpenAI/Anthropic "closed" model structure. Watershed moment in Chinese models moving away from open-weights release, or something specific from Ali?

Generations of photographers have aspired to use a Hasselblad, just like they had on the moon. Now everyone can enjoy an astronaut's technology experience.

new hormuz plan: shipping by rocket!

this is HILARIOUS therepublicjournal.com/essays/ai-an...

I’ll have to listen later but here’s to note that Cecillia Wang is a badass. www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/...

Mexican cuisine didn’t ask for this. how about BIGMAC: Bastard in Chief Makes Apocryphal Commitment

I guess I’ll volunteer to be shot: A tool designed to help people build custom feeds, that happens to use LLMs, is not the devil. It might be janky, but no one is forcing anything on anyone. People are reacting as if falsified content or engagement-maximizing algorithmic feeds are being imposed.

Real question: why is iOS autocomplete so much worse than it used to be. It just turned “UK” into “I’m.” Many other terrible offenses.

At EWR today, where it was 10 minutes from the curb to finished with security, I appreciated that they gave the battle-cosplay goons what I always assume is the most boring job: prevent reentry at the exit.

Faraday bags are not a terrible idea, either.

I’m going to be in NYC for a short stretch and may have some time tomorrow or Saturday, depending how things shake out. If you want to say hi, holler!

Reminder for the 02138 crowd

On my way to Cambridge, Mass., for a talk tomorrow. Come say hi! fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/events/how-u...

This is what the Internet is for

He declared liberation day, set tariffs based on nothing in particular, became quickly astonished that an economy he underestimated could match escalation, and then sued for peace and tried to convince you unilateral retreat was prelude to a deal. (Then delayed the moribund dealing for ⬇️)

Best piece I've seen yet on how yes-AI-enabled (if computer vision and a bunch of flow charts is AI) computerized target selection doesn't need to be LLM to take human discretion out of the decision to kill. I would add: It leaves the humans who do the killing with an external authority to blame.

Love how they’re abolishing DH right when the epistemology of cause and effect in large-scale representations of linguistic corpora becomes the single most consequential scientific question out there

Heh ⌚️👀

Finally a Graham headline I can embrace

Looks like there’s work for the grammar police these days after all

Reporters should turn their backs when NBC4 DC teams show up to a news event.

It is, for the record, definitionally impossible to deport a U.S. citizen. Here, I’ll do one: in exchange for billions of dollars, I hereby commit never to wax nostalgic about the future. Now pay up!

I keep seeing "Joe Kent" and thinking of the distinguished alumna of Beijing life @jolingkent.bsky.social--and that's confusing! Hang in there Jo.

China's govt has a pretty good handle on AI use. How might proliferation of autonomous AI "agents" using OpenClaw and similar tech change this? Was lucky to share some thinking with NYT. Nice story on the "build it fast" vs "don't break things" tension. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/17/b...

🧵 on likely postponement of Trump-Xi meeting: The purpose of a U.S.-China leaders’ meeting is in no small part to focus the bosses and their bureaucracies on bilateral issues. When one leader’s attention is unavailable, this won’t happen. A meeting would be a muddle at best. 1/3

🧵 on likely postponement of Trump-Xi meeting: The purpose of a U.S.-China leaders’ meeting is in no small part to focus the bosses and their bureaucracies on bilateral issues. When one leader’s attention is unavailable, this won’t happen. A meeting would be a muddle at best. 1/3

I've been getting quite a few questions from press, etc. and so wrote up something a little bit longer here: cooperativeoverlapping.substack.com/p/a-fuller-s...

WSJ: “If the meetings are delayed, it wouldn’t be delayed because the president demanded that China police the Strait of Hormuz,” Bessent told CNBC… Any postponement would be because Trump wants to stay in D.C. to coordinate the war effort, he added.’ /convenient if no “deal“ close to ready, also?

opening the strait like normal threatens to break it. Instead, lay down a rubber mat, flip the whole thing over, and while pushing down, unscrew the sea from the strait.

Apparently boneheaded security and openclaw go together around the world, see Chinese cybersecurity giant 360

For literal film nerds “Autumn Durald Arkapaw [shot] Sinners in 5-perf 65mm and 15-perf IMAX formats, including using KODAK EKTACHROME, which was specially manufactured in 65mm by Kodak for the production.” www.kodak.com/en/motion/bl...

Presumably Chinese team would like to avoid, for example, Trump directing a strike on Iran’s oil terminal from the Beijing Westin after dinner with Xi… like the time Trump bombed Syria right during Mar a Lago visit. China gov could nudge toward a delay by stalling outcomes? /total speculation

WSJ: “If the meetings are delayed, it wouldn’t be delayed because the president demanded that China police the Strait of Hormuz,” Bessent told CNBC… Any postponement would be because Trump wants to stay in D.C. to coordinate the war effort, he added.’ /convenient if no “deal“ close to ready, also?

Because it was brilliantly engineered and bright as the surface of the sun to be shooting film at night. www.instagram.com/reel/DVZzAN3...

For literal film nerds “Autumn Durald Arkapaw [shot] Sinners in 5-perf 65mm and 15-perf IMAX formats, including using KODAK EKTACHROME, which was specially manufactured in 65mm by Kodak for the production.” www.kodak.com/en/motion/bl...

Trump says they want to know if China will help open Hormuz before the summit, which is too long from now… and then contemplates delaying the summit. 🤷

Classic in the genre. Important future question with high uncertainty, on which you want to make a systematic-looking analysis? Make up some coefficients.

Hey nerds check out 94-down 🦋

China has spent years building what policymakers elsewhere are still debating, becoming the world’s largest laboratory for online child protection. Before embracing similar measures at the cost of adults’ and businesses’ rights, we should ask a basic question: do they work?

This is insane. Scientifically. But also commercially and agriculturally.

My somehow unpopular opinion is that the safeguards Anthropic sought and OpenAI may partially have are not at the right threshold for moral use of LLM products in human-killing systems. If your model happily spits out war plans, you get to deal with what happens if some humans enact them.

Here's what really matters about the OpenClaw hype in China that got grandmas queueing to install it: OpenClaw adopters are enthusiastic or desperate enough to pay for servers and API calls without hesitation. To Chinese companies, that's the best news they've ever heard, so they are going all in.

I know everyone is annoyed at how IL-09 is dominating our feeds but I get the special bespoke annoyance that 20 years ago one of the candidates decide it was a REALLY COOL idea to date his undergrad student (me) until actually wait no it isn't, which is (as you might expect) an unpleasant memory.

Went for a jog. Only other joggers were a couple of shaggy donkeys or big goats or something with a sheep in pursuit. And yes I’m sober; this is what can happen in the median of Stanford Ave in Oakland.

Fascinating, including the question of whether a model trained on existing code (as part of the whole universe of its training data) can reimplement the functionality without being a derivative work.