The issue has even risen to the level of MAGA World. Last July, Donald Trump’s Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy, sent a letter to Congress outlining the administration’s policy priorities for the upcoming surface transportation reauthorization bill. Tucked in the letter was a new concept called “the Freedom Car,” which Duffy described as Americans’ right to “drive disconnected and non-automated” vehicles. The proposal would ban the government from requiring that vehicles be equipped with automated driving systems or have the capability to transmit data wirelessly — which, to my knowledge, no one is trying to do.
Nearly all people in history existed with some integration with their neighbours and knowledge of the broader world. It’s shocking to learn of a group that lived on their own for 50,000 years, and sealed off from everyone else for the last 10,000, nearly completely divergent from the rest of humanity.
An overview of the book First Contact which documents 1930s discovery of one million isolated highland Papua New Guineans. Definitely reading this book.
Why do I think I will be able to handle all scams in a few years, when I am already struggling to detect simple AI slop, increasingly ignore cold emails and have to write off whole swathes of social media as a source of information, and I can already see how eager all my peers are to offload all their thinking and writing to chatbot assistants unworthy of that trust, and how many projects or mailing lists have had to clamp down on unvetted contributions (eg. today as I write this, Project Ladybird)? In a few years, won’t I be the equivalent of a rich old person with declining faculties getting a call from the IRS about how I owe them fines, conveniently payable via gift cards…? And if not, why and how not—concretely?
Every dog license New York City has issued since 2014 — 819,323 license records, 34,663 distinct names. Search a name to see where it sits in the long tail, filter by ZIP code, and browse breed and name heatmaps. Counts are license records (dogs renewing across years appear more than once).
New project! NYC Dog Name Explorer shows licensed dog name popularity across the city. Inspiration for this from John Cook
Far too many diseases are still untreatable. It’s painful to imagine gradually forgetting your children’s names, forgetting how to hold a conversation, how to recognize your own home, and eventually even how to swallow food, while your family watches someone they love disappear. But that’s the reality for over thirty million people with Alzheimer’s globally, and we have almost nothing to offer them. Part of the reason may be because the brain is so complex, or because it’s lined by the blood-brain barrier, a tightly sealed layer of cells which keeps out most pathogens and toxins, as well as most drugs. That makes it challenging to design a drug that can cross the barrier, reach the right cells, and do what it’s meant to do without any unexpected side effects.
A gorgeous WIP article on medical innovation. A good reminder that intelligence is rarely the bottleneck to progress.
Maybe GDP per capita just has to hit a certain point before people even have time, attention and energy to think about new inventions that aren’t literally putting food on the table, a roof over your head, or a shirt on your back.
Jason Crawford asks why it took so long to invent the bicycle.
It is to humanity’s credit that we remain restless in the midst of all of this progress. We continue to look forward, pushing the frontier further with new treatments, new tools, and new institutions that will help future generations in ways we can’t even picture yet.
But our lives today are a gallery of past generations’ heroic efforts to do the same. It serves us, and honors them, to recapture whenever possible the old sense of awe at these wonders that have long since become commonplace.
Discussion