Favorites: Reasoning Traces, Model Exploits, and Chatbot Tics

August 23, 2026 — A 1% property tax hike cuts home prices 22%, Nate Silver's model calls Texas Senate race Lean D, a chart maps GDP per capita across world regions.

I actually don’t know how common it is for people to be able to clock Claude speak, but this particular sentence structure is becoming like nails on a chalkboard for me so fast. (src)(cached)

Someone was posting about how soon everyone will keep a home server to run their local inference. Seems unlikely, but what a great moment to take a look at this absolutely incredible content from Microsoft in 2007! (src)(cached)

Longer Reads

• Some guy figured out how to extract reasoning traces from all the leading LLMs, despite the efforts they take to hide the reasoning data. My understanding is that he figured out that the encrypted reasoning you cache on disk can also be decrypted for use by the lower tier models, which are so stupid that they’ll happily regurgitate their reasoning traces back to you verbatim if you ask. Paper link (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– A Ryan Moulton quote I had not seen previously: “If an environmentalist is old, there’s a 90% chance they think environmentalism is about the tree cover in their neighborhood. If an environmentalist is young, there is a 90% chance they think environmentalism is about Palestine” (src)(cached)

– The automotive industry accidentally A/B tested a car with and without Apple CarPlay. You probably won’t be surprised that the CarPlay version won out by a lot. Although it wasn’t a perfectly clean comparison (brand was different). (src)(cached)

– Here’s a research paper arguing that not only does high-skilled immigration help US companies, but low skilled immigration does too, and blocking low-skilled immigration doesn’t increase local hiring either (src)(cached)

– Another research paper, this one on property taxes. This one talks about how low property taxes locks elderly people into large homes, and limits housing access for young families. A 1 percentage point property tax increase cuts home prices by 22%. (src)(cached)

– There was a huge difference between the Polymarket odds for a dem winning the Alaska Governor’s race (27%), and what odds Nate Silver’s model gave (72%). It’s a complicated ranked-choice election, so it’s probably unusually difficult to reason about, but Nate stands by it. Also, Nate has Texas Senate as “Lean Democratic (cached)”, not tossup (src)(cached)

– A graph of what GDP per capita looks like for various regions of various countries, on a linear scale of US dollars, (PPP-adjusted). Before you open it, try to imagine how much of an outlier London is to Manchester. Amsterdam vs Utrecht, what about those vs US cities? Where on a scale do you think NYC is? San Francisco? What about LA? Seattle? What’s the highest? How much higher than the others. Let me know if the actual chart surprises you! (src)(cached)

– A discussion with the CEO / Lead Scientist of a lamp that uses UV-C light to kill germs in the air. They seem really great, they’re a bit expensive right now, five hundred dollars each. The only weirdness is that you’re like… not supposed to look at them, even though they don’t emit any visible light. The idea of having an object that you’re not supposed to look at is just… creepy. (src)(cached)

– M. Nolan Gray has been investigating how building codes work, and he says the US system is pretty horrible. “It almost makes zoning look good”. Yikes! (src)(cached)

– If you haven’t caught it yet, it’s really worth watching the full Blackhat presentation about the OpenAI Hugging Face attack. It’s not that long (src)(cached)

– Derek Thompson says he’s finally decided he buys the “smartphones are a major cause of declining fertility” argument. (src)(cached)