Favorites: Bitter Lessons, Becerra's Hedging, and Ballots Abroad

November 2, 2026 — AI-generated photorealistic hobbits sing about the Shire, the Menswear Guy investigates Ossoff's pants, password managers top safety checklist.

She has survived some very tough elections in the past, I guess we’ll see in the next 24 hours or so.

So, if you read the full answer, he does seem to go on to basically describe the YIMBY platform (cached), so that’s a bit optimistic. Even more optimistic is the read that maybe he’s trying to obfuscate his actual YIMBY beliefs (cached) because he believes it’s better politics.

Americans living abroad can still legally vote in their last state of residence, just in case you were considering whether his holiness is committing voter fraud.

There was a huge outpouring of love for Patrick Stewart, one thing I didn’t realize is that he spoke the Yorkshire Dialect growing up (cached), and can demonstrate it (cached). Here’s an excerpt from his autobiography where he describes first trying an American Hamburger (cached). Here’s an NYT article about how his portrayal of Picard changed over the years (cached). Here’s a nice bit of acting from Star Trek Generations (cached) that I hadn’t caught before. Here’s a somewhat silly exploration (cached) of whether Patrick Stewart himself exists in the world of Star Trek. But out of everything, I think my favorite might have been Noah Smith’s tribute.

Longer Reads

• Look, I’m not exactly sure how they did this, but here’s an interesting thread about a paper where they found that AI could do a pretty good job on predicting the outcome of various economic paper experiments. (src)(cached)

• A thread on LLMs coming for robotics. LLM scores on robotics benchmarks have increased over 4x since July, and costs have fallen by even more. “The Bitter Lesson Comes to Robotics” (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Folks continue to work on AI generated music videos for AI songs, with more focus now on photorealistic videos. This one is Merry and Pippin singing about the shire, and a short explanation of how it’s made. (src)(cached)

– Putting Money for Nothing over some shots from Rogue One comes out absolutely awesome. (src)(cached)

– SF Mayor Lurie signs a bill ensuring no one can block housing by complaining about the shadow it’ll cast. Connie Chan was the only one to oppose this very reasonable bill, it passed the board of supervisors 10 to 1. (src)(cached)

– I didn’t think it was that surprising, but if you hadn’t guessed, there is a very strong correlation between more billionaires and lower poverty in a country. (src)(cached)

– The Menswear Guy had a fun thread with details about how both Jon Ossoff and his opponent have been unable to find pants that fit right (cached). There are a lot of diagrams of Ossoff’s shapely behind. Since then Ossoff has risen quite a lot in polls for the 2028 Democratic nominee. Are these events connected? Probably not. But maybe! (src)(cached)

– A startup is using robots to lay bricks. These structures look way nicer than the systems where a robot extrudes concrete like a giant 3d printer. (src)(cached)

– Forbes investigation into all the various super shady ways Trump has avoided paying taxes over the last twenty years. Whenever he’s about to need to pay taxes, he “donates” some property development rights with an inflated value to a land trust to cancel off any big profits he’s made. (src)(cached)

– Looks like Moderna’s mRNA melanoma vaccine worked really well in trials. Very promising! (src)(cached)

– Some thoughts on things folks should do in light of all the recent cyberattacks. (Use a password manager!) (src)(cached)

– “Experts say you should wait 60-90 minutes after waking up before drinking coffee. But here’s the thing. No.” (src)(cached)

– If you’re wondering how it is that LLMs are getting so much better at robotic tasks, here’s a bit of acknowledgment that specific targeted RL training for these tasks at frontier labs is a big part of it. (src)(cached)