Reading

Thread on NYC rent control policies and their impact on housing market dynamics via marginalrevolution.com

Many fake stories are not that hard to spot, but it requires a moment of time and effort to do so.This may explain why so much misinformation seems to favour populist viewpoints.

Tim Harford on populism.

NYT on congestion pricing finds fewer cars, less traffic, more public transit, less noise, more business, and fewer car related injuries.

Using lidar, scientists discovered a 400-foot-long wall composed of “60 massive granite...

Scientists used lidar to discover a 400-foot underwater wall made of 60 granite monoliths built 7,000 years ago in France. via kottke.org

The study, published Dec. 18 in the Journal of Marketing Research, links survey data on GLP-1 receptor agonist use – a class of drugs originally developed for diabetes and now widely prescribed for weight loss – with detailed transaction records from tens of thousands of U.S. households. ...Within six months of starting a GLP-1 medication, households reduce grocery spending by an average of 5.3%. Among higher-income households, the drop is even steeper, at more than 8%. Spending at fast-food restaurants, coffee shops and other limited-service eateries falls by about 8%.

Cornell research on the proader market impact of GLP-1 drugs.

Cult Brand Behavior by Alex Tran

We're more than a quarter way through the new century and we can now ask: what is the aesthetic of the twenty-first century? Which are the important secessionist movements of today? Which will be the most important great works? Today, futuristic aesthetics often mean retrofuturistic aesthetics. So, what should the future actually look like?

A call for new aesthetic perspectives and creative approaches.

The magic of this mysterious technology is starting to lose its luster. What looked like magic is turning into work.

The current state of personal AI infrastructure. via ondiscourse.substack.com

Corporate profit margins have risen to nearly 20%, which is double the historical 10% levels seen in previous decades. via Eric Basmajian x.com

Star Trek's unproduced 'Phase II' series from the 1970s included 19 episode scripts that were never filmed via kottke.org

The trouble with these calculations is that they mire us in epistemically tricky terrain. I’m bothered by how quickly the discussions of AI become utopian or apocalyptic. ... It also forces thinking to be obsessively short term. People start losing interest in problems of the next five or ten years, because superintelligence will have already changed everything. The big political and technological questions we need to discuss are only those that matter to the speed of AI development. Furthermore, we must sprint towards a post-superintelligence world even though we have no real idea what it will bring.

Dan Wang's 2025 annual review letter.

I started my tools.simonwillison.net site last year as a single location for my growing collection of vibe-coded / AI-assisted HTML+JavaScript tools ... The new browse all by month page shows I built 110 of these in 2025!

Simon Willison's Annual review blog post examining major trends and developments in large language models (LLMs) during 2025.