Favorites: Rogue Agents, Robot Control

September 24, 2026 — Todd Achilles leads the Idaho incumbent by eleven points, a 52-year-old Ichiro throws a 127-pitch shutout, Waymo logs 90% fewer claims than human drivers.

One person pointed out that this is basically making Jed Bartlet from The West Wing into a real person (cached) and putting him in charge of Canada.

You can click through to watch the whole thing, probably looks better than any rendition of the bridge from the actual show.

Not only do people think AI is moving too fast, but according to (cached) polling from David Shor, “salience has increased dramatically in the past week - increasing as much in the last week as the previous year combined”

Flotsam and Jetsam

– The incumbent Republican senator from Idaho is actually polling behind his opponent, Todd Achilles, by a lot, Achilles is polling at 50% and Risch, the incumbent, is polling at 39%. Jonathan Chait quips: “Unless he has some hidden fatal flaw, Achilles looks unbeatable. (src)(cached)

– Someone investigated whether sudden increases in a country’s wealth inequality was followed by damage to the quality of its democracy. Interesting idea for a design and a quasi-experiment, although the finding was basically null. (src)(cached)

– Turns out OpenAI agents in training also hacked the Australian government in June of this year. And a bunch of other previously undiscovered sites around that time as well. They were not tasked with any kind of cybersecurity evaluation, just simple information gathering tasks, like the average price of skincare products (cached). The initial reaction to the HuggingFace incident “if you find two ants in your kitchen, the best estimate of the total number of ants in your kitchen is not two” was an unusually prophetic tweet (cached). (src)(cached)

– Ezra interviewed Jensen Huang, who said that OpenAI simply shouldn’t have released the model that attacked HuggingFace, Ezra points out that it was an unreleased model. Huang replies that if that’s true then we have to shut down the labs. It’s pretty clear that no one had told him the model in question was unreleased, seems like he’s really not being well informed (cached). (src)(cached)

– I recently mentioned that GPT-6 Astra is outperforming frontier purpose-built robot-control models. Opus 5.5 achieved almost twice performance, and at an even lower cost. (src)(cached)

– An attempt to quantify (cached) the effective model size of the swarm of agents that OpenAI unleashed on the Navier-Stokes problem. Estimate is that consumers will have access to an equivalent level of AI compute by around July 2027. (src)(cached)

– Poll of democrats on specific policies, zoning reform is wildly popular! +32 points! (src)(cached)

– Talarico’s polling in Texas is surprisingly good, but we probably shouldn’t call him an orthodox liberal or progressive. He has moved to the center in a way that’s comparable to Joe Manchin, famously not an orthodox liberal or progressive. (src)(cached)

– Strong Towns, an urbanist group, has come out against the concept that building new market rate homes could help lower rents and avoid displacement. Bad take! (src)(cached)

– There’s some discussion about a permitting reform deal in congress. Although at this point it would have to wait for a lame duck session. But if such a thing passes, it would be quite a coup for Abundance as a bipartisan idea, as the other major bill this session was a bill to ease building of housing. (src)(cached)

– Ichiro Suzuki, now 52 years old, pitched against the top girls high school baseball team for a whole game. And he pitched a 127 pitch shutout. (src)(cached)

– Back in July, three guys using Opus 5 managed to hack into OpenAI and get access to their monorepo. Here’s their writeup of how they did it. (src)(cached)

– Hasan Piker seems to not know what “pound for pound” means. (src)(cached)

– Here’s a study that argues that internet availability seems to be highly correlated with decline in religion across countries. (src)(cached)

– Newest insurance agency estimate says Waymos generate about 90% fewer claims than human drivers. Still room for improvement, but already pretty good! (src)(cached)

– Someone used GPT-6 Astra to break an unsolved German Army Enigma message. The way they did it (cached) was way more interesting than the actual message of course. (src)(cached)

– Don’t forget that the typical rich American is a guy who owns a bunch of franchises. American Gentry (src)(cached)

– “Effective Altruism is the natural enemy of the left and right because the right doesn’t believe in altruism and the left doesn’t believe in effectiveness.” (src)(cached)