The number of ingredients in Indonesian cooking that are trying to kill the eater is disconcerting: cassava (cyanide), taro (calcium oxalate), keluak nuts (cyanide), candlenuts (cyanide), ... How did people ever figure out the processes that have to be followed to detoxify?

Behind the veil of perplexity

This is completely false. Here's why: The "study" being referred to was a preliminary analysis by CDC scientists of health records for ~124,000 children conducted in 1999, called the Vaccine Safety Datalink study. But this 1135% increase in the rate of autism figure did NOT

Wonder how many folks who maintain a healthy weight, but manage to do it only by expending large amounts of willpower take it to lessen the mental burden.

I sometimes wonder whether people fundamentally differ w.r.t. their ability to either just tally up the _number_ of pros and cons, or to size effects on both sides cardinally.

The most captivating thing I've listened to in a long time: ChinaTalk's overview over China's best music of 2025 (so far) pca.st/episode/bc2c7e…

Best I can tell Europe globally crushes most dessert types (cookies, cakes, laminated pastries, etc) but Asia (China?) kills them on dessert soup. It’s a whole category where Europe barely shows up.

Finally read the The Lancet article claiming US foreign assistance cuts will lead to 14mill deaths up to 2030 which has garnered much media attention. Its problematic to say the least, X-country regression with mortality on left and US spending per head on right. 1/ 🧵

METR’s analysis of this experiment is wildly misleading. The results indicate that people who have ~never used AI tools before are less productive while learning to use the tools, and say ~nothing about experienced AI tool users. Let's take a look at why. x.com/METR_Evals/sta…

"It could also power the entirety of France and Italy COMBINED"

When suddenly your terminal client requires an SSO sign-in #warp

Bird saves and reproduces data: A PNG image of a bird ( photo of a bird -> spectral synthesizer ) was reproduced by an adult Starling bird youtu.be/hCQCP-5g5bo?si…. It seems to have reproduced the sound in conjunction with some additional notes which made it not detectable

I often hear discussion of how the media should avoid reporting a criminal suspect's race or immigration status, to avoid bias against Black/Hispanic/immigrant groups. The intuition is that reporting that info in specific cases hurts the whole group. But what if that impulse gets

I'm grateful to Jeremy Lewin for appearing on Ross Douthat's podcast to talk about how he sees the future of foreign aid, and I am glad to hear that he doesn't approve of the wholesale destruction of PEPFAR. But he makes a bunch of false claims I want to address:

I thought vacationing by eschewing attractions and just watching people live their lives was a niche interest. Delighted that I'm in the good company of tylercowen and Chris Arnade 🐢🐱🚌! pca.st/episode/09bf6a…

Finding myself write more and more documents not in Google Docs but in Cursor. The auto complete model may be optimized for code but this is this a large language model that's good at... language; both writing and editing it.

New rule: Don't let real engineers write Python code.

Interesting point on AI adoption (H/T Simon Willison)