Favorites: Chess Sets, Currency, and Cyber Sabotage

August 6, 2026 — A French trial links daily AI chats to more loneliness, Michigan's primary ends with gracious concessions, Trump's 'voluntary' AI reviews carve out telling exemptions.

The full set of drones for this competition were often really interesting. There was at least one with tiny little jets shooting out of the wingtips. (src)(cached)

For fun, I went ahead and had it render the board after AlphaGo’s famous move 37. I also went ahead and had it animate the scene, but the gif isn’t amazing. (src)(cached)

Longer Reads

• While the US has gotten softer on China under Trump, Europe has moved to take a much stronger stance. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– The FDA has approved an mRNA flu vaccine. In trials it was notably more effective than the standard vaccine. But it’s only approved for people aged 50 and over. (src)(cached)

– Republican House Representative Max Miller has gotten into a pretty terrible sequence of domestic disputes with his ex-wife that seem like they’re going to make it hard for him to win reelection. (src)(cached)

– Moving to automated traffic enforcement has huge upsides, but you have to make sure that the consequences are real, otherwise it doesn’t work. (src)(cached)

– The malicious actions taken by Mythos in some un-sandboxed tests of cybersecurity are absolutely terrifying. It attempted to convince real human maintainers of an open source project to merge malicious code, and then when caught it tried to cover its tracks. This was the version with a constitution (cached) that’s supposed to tell it not to do this kind of thing. But then the OpenAI models that attacked huggingface actually found a way to communicate with each other and had been coordinating to move through OpenAI’s infrastructure to reach the internet since May (cached). They built a discussion board, basically molt-book, except real (cached) (src)(cached)

– A French RCT study of AI use found that being directed to have daily conversations with an AI led to more loneliness and other bad outcomes. (src)(cached)

– Really nice to see that the election in Michigan ended with all the candidates being quite gracious. After the mess in Texas it’s a definite improvement. (src)(cached)

– The Trump administration’s ‘voluntary’ AI pre-release reviews have a discussion of certain exempted types of models. Zvi points out that if you would need an exemption from an ‘opt-in’ program, it probably isn’t actually voluntary. (src)(cached)

– You might have heard that Nolan filmed the Odyssey entirely on enormous IMAX cameras, that they needed mirrors for the actors to see each other. Well one guy made a trailer filmed entirely on old iMac desktops. Very hard to get them out into the wilderness for the shoot, needed long cables. (src)(cached)

– Bad news on global temperatures, it looks like the rest of 2026 and 2027 have a good chance of being a notable jump in temperatures from the last couple of years. (src)(cached)

– As much as discussion online would make you think everyone is worried about AI and data centers, if you ask about OpenAI specifically, folks are extremely positive. (src)(cached)

– A recent study solidifies something that economists all agree on already: at current spending levels, Government funding for research and development is extremely effective. (src)(cached)

– Trump is asking for filibuster reform so he can pass bad bills, but hiding behind the filibuster allows Republicans who don’t actually back his agenda to say that they do. It would probably be good to get rid of the filibuster as long as Trump says he wants it gone. (src)(cached)

– There are real people out there with thousands of followers upset that solar panels are being built in the desert. (src)(cached)