Favorites: Minecraft Clones, Mosquito Drones

August 2, 2026 — San Francisco cuts its inclusionary housing rate to 5%, Claude maps the Iliad's Catalog of Ships and flags translation errors, Trump's Palm Beach airport logo reeks of AI slop.

The capabilities of agents to replicate existing programs in different languages has reached an insane level. A pro like this guy can get a really nice validation loop set up, and then just let the agents loose and they’ll hammer away until the thing is perfect. Another commenter (cached) mentions using the same technique to reverse engineer the Microsoft Word docx format. (src)(cached)

Air-to-air takedown of bugs with drones is impressive, but as always, the military applications are terrifying. (src)(cached)

Sorta seems like tourists are missing huge parts of New York. But it’s not like I did anything outside Manhattan when I visited. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Andrej Karpathy shows an example of a new benchmark he came up with for an AI: ask it to build a 3D render depicting the events of the opening paragraph of the Lord of the Rings. The video is nothing special, it looks like a 2010 era cg previz of a film. But it’s impressive because the AI has to place everything manually with XYZ coordinates and then check its own work by repeatedly screenshotting the resulting video. (src)(cached)

– With the recent stock market drop on sudden AI pessimism, Derek Thompson has an article taking seriously both sides of each of the arguments over whether the pessimism makes sense. (src)(cached)

– Really straightforward argument that the new Truth Social paid API for Trump posts violates insider trading laws. (src)(cached)

– Once countries reach a certain level of development, they begin replanting forests. World forest area is still falling but as economic growth continues, hopefully soon South America and Africa will begin regaining forest share as Europe, North America and Asia have. (src)(cached)

– California SB 1123 has further clarified how subdividing certain lots to build starter homes works, and appears to have made this particular route towards new home construction at least a bit more achievable. (src)(cached)

– I previously mentioned new studies that show that unfunded inclusionary housing mandates meaningfully raise rents, but SF has gone the additional step of lowering theirs all the way to 5%. Mountain View’s rate is more like 15%. The ideal unfunded rate is zero, as East Palo Alto recently approved (cached). It’s a tax on new homes, which are sorely needed. But I’ll take the progress. (src)(cached)

– Great that this can be built in SF, but what a clear example of dual staircases making it difficult to build good designs (src)(cached)

– OpenAI and Anthropic are fighting tooth and nail for market share among individual developers. They’re constantly running sales and giveaways, and the subscriptions are naturally far better deals than direct API usage. This whole price war is generating consumer surplus, and all because Dario Amodei and Sam Altman hate each other. (src)(cached)

– As he often does, Ethan Mollick was challenging Claude with an interesting task: making a website of the Catalog of Ships from the Iliad. You can see the results here: https://catalogue-of-ships.netlify.app/ but along the way, Claude found two mistakes in the Butler’s Greek translation because it checked the original as well. (src)(cached)

– The new trump airport in palm beach has a logo that’s clearly AI slop. (src)(cached)

– Placebo is super effective in sleep studies of cognitive function. If you tell subjects they slept well, they score better on tests, regardless of how they actually slept. (src)(cached)

– Firefighters’ second-highest cause of death is accidents on the way to a fire. Fire departments should be as invested in street safety as everyone else, and yet they’re the main ones calling for unsafe street designs. (src)(cached)