Favorites: Walkable Streets, Warming Deaths, and Wartime Grids
August 19, 2026 — VS Code runs inside a terminal window, Nate Silver frames Ossoff and Harris as a pincer on Newsom, San Francisco crime falls below Austin's after enforcement resumes.
July 2026
Not sure if this is obvious, but the complexity of these things, combined with how essential they are to the electrical grid, is why they’re such targets in wartime. (See: Russia/Ukraine) (src)(cached)
More deaths in Southern Belgium one week this summer than any week during the COVID-19 pandemic. (src)(cached)
There are places with new dense walkable streets being built in styles reminiscent of pre-car European neighborhoods. But such neighborhoods are entirely illegal to build (cached) in the United States, because fire departments require 20 to 26 foot wide streets. (src)(cached)
Longer Reads
• Short essay on “Ordinary Abundance” looking at the normal modern technologies around us through the eyes of the people who first invented each. (src)(cached)
Flotsam and Jetsam
– Someone built a system that runs VSCode inside a terminal window, very impressive, on the other hand why would you do this? (cached). (src)(cached)
– A look back at the people who protested Google Buses in SF over a decade ago. “Did any of this work? no. Were they at least fighting the good fight? absolutely not”. It was the height of abolish bedtime leftism (cached), completely unproductive. (src)(cached)
– Moderna’s four year trial of an mRNA vaccine to prevent recurrence of cancer after surgery and chemo seems to have been a resounding success. (src)(cached)
– Disheartening story about a UC Berkeley professor who had to lower the curriculum difficulty of her class because so many students were failing, two years ago Berkeley effectively dismantled her advanced math course by requiring any visiting lecturers to go through an onerous fingerprinting process. (src)(cached)
– Nate Silver argues that Ossoff and Harris are like a pincer movement against Newsom for the 2028 primary. (src)(cached)
– Most major types of crime are now less common per capita in San Francisco than in Austin, a significant shift over the last few years. If you look at the data, the drop basically happened at the moment when the city/SFPD decided to start enforcing (cached) laws again. (src)(cached)
– Alex Imas points out that “If you look at the last 3 years of AI progress, technologists have largely been right about the (massive) increase in capabilities, and economists have largely been right about the economic impact…. Ricardian comparative advantage”. (Comparative advantage is one reason economists believe AI won’t replace human labor, but also a play on how each profession is better at predicting in their own area). (src)(cached)
– Flock gave researchers access to data about deployment timing to various cities, which they could then use to find if it had an effect on lowering crime or improving clearance rate for stuff like vehicle theft. It does seem to lead to an improvement, but not very much and there are significant error bars. Unsatisfying, but credit to Flock for sharing the data. (src)(cached)
– Zipline wants to have a million drone deliveries per day by the end of 2029. They’re partnering with Uber and focusing on food. Seems very ambitious, but it would certainly be cool! Maybe a 10% chance they hit this target, but a tenth of this would be impressive. (src)(cached)
– As I’ve mentioned before, the California billionaire tax is extremely unworkable and will be very bad for the state while collecting very little money. (Wealth in the US is quite portable) about the only good news is that it’s also almost certainly going to be struck down by the Supreme Court. But it’ll take forever. (src)(cached)
– The idea that standardized tests are discriminatory absolutely destroyed the prestige of public universities. The sooner the UC system undoes this the better. (src)(cached)
– A researcher looking at how vote share among Latino voters changed between 2020 and 2024 finds that Trump’s gains came from persuasion, not turnout. This means that winning back those voters will also require persuasion. (src)(cached)
– Futuresearch now has enough forecasts from users that many have now resolved (the very short term predictions), this means they can score them. They did pretty well, although they’re not exactly comparable to numbers from Metaculus. Anyway, you can try it out, I certainly like it. (src)(cached)
– Twitter finally, as promised, posted the up-to-date weights of the main feed algorithm. Highest weight positive action is sharing via link. Most negative is reporting the post (obviously?). (src)(cached)
– Lynyrd Skynyrd no longer features any of the original band members. One commenter quips: “The Shyp of Thysyus” (src)(cached)
– Kate Wagner wrote an article criticizing Obama’s presidential center for not spending time talking about Trump, this seems a little ridiculous, one reply (cached): “Guy who goes to an impressionist art exhibit and seethes the entire time because the exhibit isn’t about expressionism” (src)(cached)
– A clip went viral of a woman showing off her most recent work as a university dorm room interior decorator in Mississippi. When folks can’t believe the poorest US state has a higher per-capita GDP than many western nations, this is what that looks like, the ability to manifest weirdness (cached). (src)(cached)