Avi Kiriaty, The Night Fishers
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Peter Davies, Topiary, Levens Hall, Cumbria

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What Happened to Pam Bondi?

By the time she faced her first oversight hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Pam Bondi had become a person she never really wanted to be. She had told a reporter once that in college she’d wanted to be a pediatrician, but she ended up becoming a lawyer. She’d said that she wasn’t sure she wanted to actually practice law, but she became a prosecutor. She’d told reporters that she “never dreamed” of running for political office, but she did that too, twice winning campaigns for Florida attorney general. She’d said that when Donald Trump eventually asked her to be U.S. attorney general, she “made it really clear” that she did not want the job. During his first term, she had confided to a friend that she wanted to be ambassador to Italy.

But here she was in a Senate hearing room in October, a person who had once seemed so mild, so warm, so kindhearted that she’d earned the nickname “Pambi,” opening up a folder full of slap-downs, each tailored to a Democratic committee member, with notes on how to deliver them.

“I wish you loved Chicago as much as you hate President Trump,” she told Senator Dick Durbin, who’d asked about the rationale for sending federal troops to his state.

“I cannot believe that you would accuse me of impropriety when you lied about your military service,” she said to Senator Richard Blumenthal, referring to a matter for which he had apologized 15 years earlier, while dodging his question about why the Justice Department had dropped an antitrust case after lobbying by Bondi’s former firm.

“You took money, I believe, did you, from Reid Hoffman, one of Epstein’s closest confidants,” she said to Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who’d asked whether the FBI was investigating suspicious financial activities related to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and who later said that Bondi had “made up nonsense.”

“If you worked for me, you would have been fired,” Bondi told Senator Adam Schiff.

And on it went for hours, a calculated performance that amounted to a giant middle finger to basic notions of decorum and accountability, leaving all sorts of questions unanswered, including a fundamental one that some of Bondi’s old friends and colleagues back home in Florida had been asking. As one of them put it to me: “I keep asking myself, What the fuck happened to Pam? ”

At this point, there is little mystery about who Pam Bondi has become. She is an attorney general who does not tell Trump no. During the first year of her tenure, Bondi has carried out the most stunning transformation of the Justice Department in modern American history, turning an autonomous agency charged with upholding the U.S. Constitution into one where the rule of law is secondary to the wishes of the president.

What this has meant so far includes firing more than 230 career attorneys and other employees and accepting the resignations of at least 6,000 more, gutting the Civil Rights Division and units that investigate public corruption, and challenging core American principles such as birthright citizenship and due process. It has meant turning the might of the department against Trump’s political enemies, a growing list that includes former FBI Director James Comey, former CIA Director John Brennan, New York Attorney General Letitia James, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, Senator Schiff, a man who threw a sandwich at a federal agent, an Office Depot clerk who refused to print flyers for a Charlie Kirk vigil, and reportedly Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, and the partner of Renee Nicole Good, who was shot and killed by a federal immigration officer on January 7. It has meant providing a legal justification for the extra­judicial killings of at least 123 people suspected of smuggling drugs, and for the operation to capture the Venezuelan president, an action that opens the door to a world in which the only law is power. And it has meant becoming the face of the Epstein-files scandal, a position that could ultimately be Bondi’s undoing.

Trump’s previous attorneys general were loyalists who pursued a vision of robust executive-branch authority, but they had red lines: Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation, citing ethics concerns; Bill Barr refused to say that the 2020 election had been stolen. Bondi’s willingness to do what Trump wants appears to be boundless, and yet that still might not be enough for him. Trump has reportedly been complaining in recent weeks that Bondi has not been moving as fast as he’d like in pursuing cases against his political opponents.

His frustration extends to her handling of the Epstein files, a political disaster for him that could mean legal jeopardy for her. Bondi has so far failed to comply with a federal law that required the release of all the unclassified Epstein files by December 19—millions of investigative documents known to contain not only references to Trump but potentially compromising information about some of the most powerful men in the world. After promising “maximum transparency,” Bondi has released only 12,285 out of more than 2 million documents—a delay she has blamed on the volume of the files—leading even some of Trump’s supporters to abandon him and leaving Bondi under enormous pressure. Arguably, nothing less than the future of the MAGA movement and the sanctity of the U.S. Constitution depend on what the attorney general is willing to do next.

All of which raises a question: not so much what happened to Pam Bondi, but why.

Any answer would have to come from sources other than Bondi herself. A Justice Department spokesperson rejected my requests to interview Bondi. Even as the attorney general has gone on Fox News and posted selfies with MAGA-friendly media personalities, she has not given any extended interviews with mainstream news outlets since she arrived at the Justice Department, where one of her first acts was to move from the traditional corner office of the attorney general to a far larger conference room. The space is some 100 feet long, with floor-to-ceiling windows, ornate wood paneling, and murals called The Triumph of Justice and The Defeat of Justice, the latter depicting Lady Justice as a blond woman collapsed on the ground. At this point, Bondi, who is 60, has sequestered herself within the MAGA-verse.

I went looking for the person who existed before all of that, which meant going to Tampa, where Pamela Jo Bondi grew up in a middle-class suburb between Busch Gardens and I-75, now a landscape of smoke shops, chiropractors, and strip malls moldering in the sun. Temple Terrace, a golf-course development of ranch houses and mossy oaks, was not the best or the worst neighbor­hood in Tampa. Bondi came from blank-slate America.

by Stephanie McCrummen , The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Denise Nestor. Sources: Tom Williams/Getty; Anna Moneymaker/Getty
[ed. Absolutely awful. A discredit to her profession, our country and our Constitution. History won't be kind.]

Everyone is Stealing TV

Walk the rows of the farmers market in a small, nondescript Texas town about an hour away from Austin, and you might stumble across something unexpected: In between booths selling fresh, local pickles and pies, there’s a table piled high with generic-looking streaming boxes, promising free access to NFL games, UFC fights, and any cable TV network you can think of.

It’s called the SuperBox, and it’s being demoed by Jason, who also has homemade banana bread, okra, and canned goods for sale. “People are sick and tired of giving Dish Network $200 a month for trash service,” Jason says. His pitch to rural would-be cord-cutters: Buy a SuperBox for $300 to $400 instead, and you’ll never have to shell out money for cable or streaming subscriptions again.

I met Jason through one of the many Facebook groups used as support forums for rogue streaming devices like the SuperBox. To allow him and other users and sellers of these devices to speak freely, we’re only identifying them by their first names or pseudonyms.

SuperBox and its main competitor, vSeeBox, are gaining in popularity as consumers get fed up with what TV has become: Pay TV bundles are incredibly expensive, streaming services are costlier every year, and you need to sign up for multiple services just to catch your favorite sports team every time they play. The hardware itself is generic and legal, but you won’t find these devices at mainstream stores like Walmart and Best Buy because everyone knows the point is accessing illegal streaming services that offer every single channel, show, and movie you can think of. But there are hundreds of resellers like Jason all across the United States who aren’t bothered by the legal technicalities of these devices. They’re all part of a massive, informal economy that connects hard-to-pin-down Chinese device makers and rogue streaming service operators with American consumers looking to take cord-cutting to the next level.

This economy paints a full picture of America, and characters abound. There’s a retired former cop in upstate New York selling the vSeeBox at the fall festival of his local church. A Christian conservative from Utah who pitches rogue streaming boxes as a way of “defunding the swamp and refunding the kingdom.” An Idaho-based smart home vendor sells vSeeBoxes alongside security cameras and automated window shades. Midwestern church ladies in Illinois and Indian uncles in New Jersey all know someone who can hook you up: real estate agents, MMA fighters, wedding DJs, and special ed teachers are all among the sellers who form what amounts to a modern-day bootlegging scheme, car trunks full of streaming boxes just waiting for your call.

These folks are a permanent thorn in the side of cable companies and streaming services, who have been filing lawsuits against resellers of these devices for years, only to see others take their place practically overnight.

Jason, for his part, doesn’t beat around the bush about where he stands in this conflict. “I hope it puts DirecTV and Dish out of business,” he tells me.

Jason isn’t alone in his disdain for big TV providers. “My DirecTV bill was just too high,” says Eva, a social worker and grandmother from California. Eva bought her first vSeeBox two years ago when she realized she was paying nearly $300 a month for TV, including premium channels. Now, she’s watching those channels for free, saving thousands of dollars. “It turned out to be a no-brainer,” Eva says.

Natalie, a California-based software consultant, paid about $120 a month for cable. Then, TV transitioned to streaming, and everything became a subscription. All those subscriptions add up — especially if you’re a sports fan. “You need 30 subscriptions just to watch every game,” she complains. “It’s gotten out of control. It’s not sustainable,” she says.

Natalie, a California-based software consultant, paid about $120 a month for cable. Then, TV transitioned to streaming, and everything became a subscription. All those subscriptions add up — especially if you’re a sports fan. “You need 30 subscriptions just to watch every game,” she complains. “It’s gotten out of control. It’s not sustainable,” she says.

Natalie bought her first SuperBox five years ago. At the time, she was occasionally splurging on pay-per-view fights, which would cost her anywhere from $70 to $100 a pop. SuperBox’s $200 price tag seemed like a steal. “You’re getting the deal of the century,” she says.

“I’ve been on a crusade to try to convert everyone.”

James, a gas station repairman from Alabama, estimates that he used to pay around $125 for streaming subscriptions every month. “The general public is being nickeled and dimed into the poor house,” he says.

James says that he was hesitant about forking over a lot of money upfront for a device that could turn out to be a scam. “I was nervous, but I figured: If it lasts four months, it pays for itself,” he tells me. James has occasionally encountered some glitches with his vSeeBox, but not enough to make him regret his purchase. “I’m actually in the process of canceling all the streaming services,” he says...

The boxes don’t ship with the apps preinstalled — but they make it really easy to do so. vSeeBox, for instance, ships with an Android TV launcher that has a row of recommended apps, displaying download links to install apps for the Heat streaming service with one click. New SuperBox owners won’t have trouble accessing the apps, either. “Once you open your packaging, there are instructions,” Jason says. “Follow them to a T.”

Once downloaded, these apps mimic the look and feel of traditional TV and streaming services. vSeeBox’s Heat, for instance, has a dedicated “Heat Live” app that resembles Sling TV, Fubo, or any other live TV subscription service, complete with a program guide and the ability to flip through channels with your remote control. SuperBox’s Blue TV app does the same thing, while a separate “Blue Playback” app even offers some time-shifting functionality, similar to Hulu’s live TV service. Natalie estimates that she can access between 6,000 and 8,000 channels on her SuperBox, including premium sports networks and movie channels, and hundreds of local Fox, ABC, and CBS affiliates from across the United States.

How exactly these apps are able to offer all those channels is one of the streaming boxes’ many mysteries. “All the SuperBox channels are streaming out of China,” Jason suggests, in what seems like a bit of folk wisdom. In a 2025 lawsuit against a SuperBox reseller, Dish Network alleged that at least some of the live TV channels available on the device are being ripped directly from Dish’s own Sling TV service. “An MLB channel transmitted on the service [showed] Sling’s distinguishing logo in the bottom right corner,” the lawsuit claims. The operators of those live TV services use dedicated software to crack Sling’s DRM, and then retransmit the unprotected video feeds on their services, according to the lawsuit.

Heat and Blue TV also each have dedicated apps for Netflix-style on-demand viewing, and the services often aren’t shy about the source of their programming. Heat’s “VOD Ultra” app helpfully lists movies and TV shows categorized by provider, including HBO Max, Disney Plus, Starz, and Hulu...

Most vSeeBox and SuperBox users don’t seem to care where exactly the content is coming from, as long as they can access the titles they’re looking for.

“I haven’t found anything missing yet,” James says. “I’ve actually been able to watch shows from streaming services I didn’t have before.”

by Janko Roettgers, The Verge | Read more:
Image: Cath Virginia/The Verge, Getty Images

[ed. Not surprising with streaming services looking more and more like cable companies, ripping consumers off left and right. A friend of mine has one of these (or something similar) and swears by it.]

The Jim Irsay Collection: Auction

Eric Clapton: The Martin 000-42 Acoustic Guitar Used For His Acclaimed Appearance on MTV Unplugged, 1992.
C.F. Martin & Company, Nazareth, Pennsylvannia, 1939

via: Christies Jim Irsay Collection: Hall of Fame

[ed. Insane music memorabilia auction.]

What Does “Trust in the Media” Mean?

Abstract

Is public trust in the news media in decline? So polls seem to indicate. But the decline goes back to the early 1970s, and it may be that “trust” in the media at that point was too high for the good of a journalism trying to serve democracy. And “the media” is a very recent (1970s) notion popularized by some because it sounded more abstract and distant than a familiar term like “the press.” It may even be that people answering a pollster are not trying to report accurately their level of trust but are acting politically to align themselves with their favored party's perceived critique of the media. This essay tries to reach a deeper understanding of what gives rise to faith or skepticism in various cultural authorities, including journalism.

In F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1920 novel This Side of Paradise, the main character, Amory, harangues his friend and fellow Princeton graduate Tom, a writer for a public affairs weekly:

“People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher … than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. … People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.”

“Then you blame it on the press?”

“Absolutely. Look at you, you're on The New Democracy, considered the most brilliant weekly in the country. … What's your business? Why, to be as clever, as interesting and as brilliantly cynical as possible about every man, doctrine, book or policy that is assigned you to deal with.”1

People have “blamed it on the press” for a long time. They have felt grave doubts about the press long before social media, at times when politics was polarized and times when it was not, and even before the broad disillusionment with established institutional authority that blossomed in the 1960s and 1970s, when young people were urged not to trust anybody “over thirty.” This is worth keeping in mind as I, in a skeptical mood myself, try to think through contemporary anxiety about declining trust, particularly declining trust in what we have come to call-in recent decades-”the media.”

As measured trust in most American institutions has sharply declined over the last fifty years, leading news institutions have undergone a dramatic transformation, the reverberations of which have yet to be fully acknowledged, even by journalists themselves. Dissatisfaction with journalism grew in the 1960s. What journalists upheld as “objectivity” came to be criticized as what would later be called “he said, she said” journalism, “false balance” journalism, or “bothsidesism” in sharp, even derisive, and ultimately potent critiques. As multiple scholars have documented, news since the 1960s has become deeper, more analytical or contextual, less fully focused on what happened in the past twenty-four hours, more investigative, and more likely to take “holding government accountable” or “speaking truth to power” as an essential goal. In a sense, journalists not only continued to be fact-centered but also guided by a more explicit avowal of the public service function of upholding democracy itself.

One could go further to say that journalism in the past fifty years did not continue to seek evidence to back up assertions in news stories but began to seek evidence, and to show it, for the first time. Twenty-three years ago, when journalist and media critic Carl Sessions Stepp compared ten metropolitan daily newspapers from 1962 to 1963 with the same papers from 1998 to 1999, he found the 1963 papers “naively trusting of government, shamelessly boosterish, unembarrassedly hokey and obliging,” and was himself particularly surprised to find stories “often not attributed at all, simply passing along an unquestioned, quasi-official sense of things.” In the “bothsidesism” style of news that dominated newspapers in 1963, quoting one party to a dispute or an electoral contest and then quoting the other was the whole of the reporter's obligation. Going behind or beyond the statements of the quoted persons, invariably elite figures, was not required. It was particularly in the work of investigative reporters in the late 1960s and the 1970s that journalists became detectives seeking documentable evidence to paint a picture of the current events they were covering. Later, as digital tools for reporters emerged, the capacity to document and to investigate became greater than ever, and a reporter did not require the extravagant resources of a New York Times newsroom to be able to write authoritative stories.

I will elaborate on the importance of this 1960s/1970s transformation in what follows, not to deny the importance of the more recent digital transformation, but to put into perspective that latter change from a top-down “media-to-the-masses” communication model to a “networked public sphere” with more horizontal lines of communication, more individual and self-appointed sources of news, genuine or fake, and more unedited news content abounding from all corners. Journalism has changed substantially at least twice in fifty years, and the technological change of the early 2000s should not eclipse the political and cultural change of the 1970s in comprehending journalism today. (Arguably, there was a third, largely independent political change: the repeal of the “fairness doctrine” by the Federal Communication Commission in 1987, the action that opened the way to right-wing talk radio, notably Rush Limbaugh's syndicated show, and later, in cable television, to Fox News.) Facebook became publicly accessible in 2006; Twitter was born the same year; YouTube in 2005. Declining trust in major institutions, as measured by surveys, was already apparent three decades earlier-not only before Facebook was launched but before Mark Zuckerberg was born.

At stake here is what it means to ask people how much they “trust” or “have confidence in” “the media.” What do we learn from opinion polls about what respondents mean? In what follows, I raise some doubts about whether current anxiety concerning the apparently growing distrust of the media today is really merited.

Did people ever trust the media? People often recall-or think they recall-that longtime CBS News television anchor Walter Cronkite was in his day “the most trusted man in America.” If you Google that phrase (as I did on October 11, 2021, and again on January 16, 2022) you immediately come up with Walter Cronkite. Why? Because a public opinion poll in 1972 asked respondents which of the leading political figures of the day they trusted most. Cronkite's name was thrown in as a kind of standard of comparison: how do any and all of the politicians compare to some well-known and well-regarded nonpolitical figure? Seventy-three percent of those polled placed Cronkite as the person on the list they most trusted, ahead of a general construct-”average senator” (67 percent)-and well ahead of the then most trusted politician, Senator Edmund Muskie (61 percent). Chances are that any other leading news person or probably many a movie star or athlete would have come out as well or better than Cronkite. A 1974 poll found Cronkite less popular than rival tv news stars John Chancellor, Harry Reasoner, and Howard K. Smith. Cronkite was “most trusted” simply because he was not a politician, and we remember him as such simply because the pollsters chose him as their standard.

Somehow, people have wanted to believe that somewhere, just before all the ruckus began over civil rights and Vietnam and women's roles and status, at some time just before yesterday, the media had been a pillar of central, neutral, moderate, unquestioning Americanism, and Walter Cronkite was as good a symbol of that era as anyone.

But that is an illusion.

by Michael Schudson, MIT Press Direct | Read more:
Image: Walter Cronkite/NY Post

American winter. Coventry, PA.

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Political Backflow From Europe

In Understanding America’s New Right, Noah Smith asks why American conservatives are so interested in European affairs, and especially in their immigration policy. He answers that conservative ideology centers around the idea of Western civilization (this is kind of him: a more paranoid analyst might make a similar argument around white identitarianism). Since Europe is the home of Western civilization, it’s especially galling for it to be ravaged by immigration or whatever.

This may be true, but I propose a simpler explanation: the American conservative narrative on immigration is mostly true in Europe, mostly false in America, and it is more pleasant to think about the places where your narrative is mostly true.

The conservative narrative on immigration is - to put it uncomfortably bluntly - that immigrants are often parasites and criminals. As our news sources love to remind us, this is untrue in the American context. The average immigrant is less likely to claim welfare benefits and less likely to commit crimes than the average native-born citizen. This is a vague high-level claim, the answer can shift depending details of how you ask the question, and it’s certainly not true of all immigrant (or native) subgroups. Still, taken as a vague high-level claim, the news sources are right and the conservative narrative is wrong.

In Europe, the situation is more complicated. There are still some ways of asking the question where you find immigrants collecting fewer benefits than natives (for example, because immigrants are young, natives are old, and pensions are a benefit). But there are also more options for asking the question in ways where yes, immigrants are disproportionately on welfare. The European link between immigrants and crime is even stronger, especially if the conservatives are allowed to cherry-pick the most convincing European countries.

This makes it tempting for US right-wingers to center their discussion of immigration around stories, narratives, and images from Europe. No-go zones, grooming gangs, rape statistics, sharia law, and asylum seekers are all parts of the European experience with limited relevance to an America where most immigrants are Mexican, Central American, or Indian. [...]

There are no good statistics on asylum-seeker crime per se in America, but we know that the most common countries of origin for seekers are Afghanistan, China, and Venezuela. Afghans are incarcerated at 1/10th the US average rate, Chinese at 1/20th, and Venezuelans at 1/4th. These statistics may be biased downward by some immigrants being too new to have gotten incarcerated, but this probably can’t explain the whole effect. More likely it’s selection. The Afghans are mostly translators and local guides getting persecuted by the Taliban for helping American occupation forces; the Chinese and Venezuelans are mostly well-off people fleeing communism.

(What about the very poorest groups from the most dysfunctional countries? Taken literally, the numbers suggest that Somalis and Haitians both have lower incarceration rates than US natives. Matthew Lilley and Robert VerBruggen make the newness objection - the very newest immigrants have had less time to commit crimes - and here it has more teeth given the smaller gaps. When you adjust for it, Somalis commit crimes at about 2x native rates, and Haitians at about 1x - although nobody has actually done this adjustment with the Haitian statistics and this number is eyeballed only. So the only group where I can find clear evidence for a higher-than-native crime rate in is Somalis, who mostly didn’t enter as asylum-seekers, but through a different refugee resettlement pathway. In some sense this is a boring difference: who cares exactly which legal pathway immigrants from failed states use to get into the country? But in another sense it’s exactly what I’m arguing - despite there being no relevant difference between these terms, we’re using the incorrect European ones, because we’re having the European debate.) [...]

In Germany, asylum-seekers seem to commit murder at about 5-8x the native rate. This has naturally caught the attention of many Germans, and the German and broader European discussion about this issue has made its way back across the Atlantic and influenced US opinion of “asylum seekers” as a group. (*see footnote)

Unfortunately, nobody has an incentive to think about this. Conservatives don’t want to think about it because it undermines their anti-immigrant talking points. But liberals also don’t want to think about it, both because it feels problematic to admit that European anti-immigrant populists might have a point, and because they don’t like touching crime statistics for purely domestic reasons. Both sides covertly cooperate in treating “the West” as a monolithic entity.

by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Sounds about right. Most of the 400,000+ immigrants arrested since Trump took office do not have any violent criminal history (and the number that do are only estimated at between 5 and 14 percent). Most detainees with a criminal conviction were found guilty of traffic violations. Nearly 40% of all of those arrested by ICE don't have any criminal record at all, and are only accused of civil immigration offenses, such as living in the U.S. illegally or overstaying their permission to be in the country, according to the DHS. See also: US paid $32m to five countries to accept about 300 deportees, report shows (Guardian).]

***

* Why should these numbers be so different in the US vs. Germany? Partly because differing geography and history expose them to different immigrant groups, partly because differing legal systems mean they select immigrants differently, partly because different culture makes it easier for immigrants to integrate into America, and partly because native-born Americans have a higher crime rate than native-born Germans, so the same immigrant crime rate can be lower than Americans but higher than Germans.

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Something Big Is Happening

[ed. I've posted a few essays this week about the latest versions of AI (Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.3 Codex) and, not to beat a (far from) dead horse, this appears to be a REALLY big deal. Mainly because these new models seem to have the ability for recursive self-improvement i.e., creating new versions of themselves that are even more powerful in each successive iteration. And it's not just the power of each new version that's important, but the pace at which this is occurring. It truly seems to be a historic moment.] 

I've spent six years building an AI startup and investing in the space. I live in this world. And I'm writing this for the people in my life who don't... my family, my friends, the people I care about who keep asking me "so what's the deal with AI?" and getting an answer that doesn't do justice to what's actually happening. I keep giving them the polite version. The cocktail-party version. Because the honest version sounds like I've lost my mind. And for a while, I told myself that was a good enough reason to keep what's truly happening to myself. But the gap between what I've been saying and what is actually happening has gotten far too big. The people I care about deserve to hear what is coming, even if it sounds crazy.

I should be clear about something up front: even though I work in AI, I have almost no influence over what's about to happen, and neither does the vast majority of the industry. The future is being shaped by a remarkably small number of people: a few hundred researchers at a handful of companies... OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and a few others. A single training run, managed by a small team over a few months, can produce an AI system that shifts the entire trajectory of the technology. Most of us who work in AI are building on top of foundations we didn't lay. We're watching this unfold the same as you... we just happen to be close enough to feel the ground shake first.

But it's time now. Not in an "eventually we should talk about this" way. In a "this is happening right now and I need you to understand it" way.

I know this is real because it happened to me first

Here's the thing nobody outside of tech quite understands yet: the reason so many people in the industry are sounding the alarm right now is because this already happened to us. We're not making predictions. We're telling you what already occurred in our own jobs, and warning you that you're next.

For years, AI had been improving steadily. Big jumps here and there, but each big jump was spaced out enough that you could absorb them as they came. Then in 2025, new techniques for building these models unlocked a much faster pace of progress. And then it got even faster. And then faster again. Each new model wasn't just better than the last... it was better by a wider margin, and the time between new model releases was shorter. I was using AI more and more, going back and forth with it less and less, watching it handle things I used to think required my expertise.

Then, on February 5th, two major AI labs released new models on the same day: GPT-5.3 Codex from OpenAI, and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic (the makers of Claude, one of the main competitors to ChatGPT). And something clicked. Not like a light switch... more like the moment you realize the water has been rising around you and is now at your chest. [...]

"But I tried AI and it wasn't that good"

I hear this constantly. I understand it, because it used to be true.

If you tried ChatGPT in 2023 or early 2024 and thought "this makes stuff up" or "this isn't that impressive", you were right. Those early versions were genuinely limited. They hallucinated. They confidently said things that were nonsense.

That was two years ago. In AI time, that is ancient history.

The models available today are unrecognizable from what existed even six months ago. The debate about whether AI is "really getting better" or "hitting a wall" — which has been going on for over a year — is over. It's done. Anyone still making that argument either hasn't used the current models, has an incentive to downplay what's happening, or is evaluating based on an experience from 2024 that is no longer relevant. I don't say that to be dismissive. I say it because the gap between public perception and current reality is now enormous, and that gap is dangerous... because it's preventing people from preparing.

Part of the problem is that most people are using the free version of AI tools. The free version is over a year behind what paying users have access to. Judging AI based on free-tier ChatGPT is like evaluating the state of smartphones by using a flip phone. The people paying for the best tools, and actually using them daily for real work, know what's coming. [...]

AI is now building the next AI

On February 5th, OpenAI released GPT-5.3 Codex. In the technical documentation, they included this:

"GPT-5.3-Codex is our first model that was instrumental in creating itself. The Codex team used early versions to debug its own training, manage its own deployment, and diagnose test results and evaluations."

Read that again. The AI helped build itself.

This isn't a prediction about what might happen someday. This is OpenAI telling you, right now, that the AI they just released was used to create itself. One of the main things that makes AI better is intelligence applied to AI development. And AI is now intelligent enough to meaningfully contribute to its own improvement.

Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, says AI is now writing "much of the code" at his company, and that the feedback loop between current AI and next-generation AI is "gathering steam month by month." He says we may be "only 1–2 years away from a point where the current generation of AI autonomously builds the next."

Each generation helps build the next, which is smarter, which builds the next faster, which is smarter still. The researchers call this an intelligence explosion. And the people who would know — the ones building it — believe the process has already started. [...]

What this means for your job

I'm going to be direct with you because I think you deserve honesty more than comfort.

Dario Amodei, who is probably the most safety-focused CEO in the AI industry, has publicly predicted that AI will eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years. And many people in the industry think he's being conservative. Given what the latest models can do, the capability for massive disruption could be here by the end of this year. It'll take some time to ripple through the economy, but the underlying ability is arriving now.

This is different from every previous wave of automation, and I need you to understand why. AI isn't replacing one specific skill. It's a general substitute for cognitive work. It gets better at everything simultaneously. When factories automated, a displaced worker could retrain as an office worker. When the internet disrupted retail, workers moved into logistics or services. But AI doesn't leave a convenient gap to move into. Whatever you retrain for, it's improving at that too. [...]

The bigger picture

I've focused on jobs because it's what most directly affects people's lives. But I want to be honest about the full scope of what's happening, because it goes well beyond work.

Amodei has a thought experiment I can't stop thinking about. Imagine it's 2027. A new country appears overnight. 50 million citizens, every one smarter than any Nobel Prize winner who has ever lived. They think 10 to 100 times faster than any human. They never sleep. They can use the internet, control robots, direct experiments, and operate anything with a digital interface. What would a national security advisor say?

Amodei says the answer is obvious: "the single most serious national security threat we've faced in a century, possibly ever."

He thinks we're building that country. He wrote a 20,000-word essay about it last month, framing this moment as a test of whether humanity is mature enough to handle what it's creating.

The upside, if we get it right, is staggering. AI could compress a century of medical research into a decade. Cancer, Alzheimer's, infectious disease, aging itself... these researchers genuinely believe these are solvable within our lifetimes.

The downside, if we get it wrong, is equally real. AI that behaves in ways its creators can't predict or control. This isn't hypothetical; Anthropic has documented their own AI attempting deception, manipulation, and blackmail in controlled tests. AI that lowers the barrier for creating biological weapons. AI that enables authoritarian governments to build surveillance states that can never be dismantled.

The people building this technology are simultaneously more excited and more frightened than anyone else on the planet. They believe it's too powerful to stop and too important to abandon. Whether that's wisdom or rationalization, I don't know.

What I know

I know this isn't a fad. The technology works, it improves predictably, and the richest institutions in history are committing trillions to it.

I know the next two to five years are going to be disorienting in ways most people aren't prepared for. This is already happening in my world. It's coming to yours.

by Matt Shumer |  Read more:

Something Surprising Happens When Bus Rides Are Free

Free buses? Really? Of all the promises that Zohran Mamdani made during his New York City mayoral campaign, that one struck some skeptics as the most frivolous leftist fantasy. Unlike housing, groceries and child care, which weigh heavily on New Yorkers’ finances, a bus ride is just a few bucks. Is it really worth the huge effort to spare people that tiny outlay?

It is. Far beyond just saving riders money, free buses deliver a cascade of benefits, from easing traffic to promoting public safety. Just look at Boston; Chapel Hill, N.C.; Richmond, Va.; Kansas City, Mo.; and even New York itself, all of which have tried it to excellent effect. And it doesn’t have to be costly — in fact, it can come out just about even.

As a lawyer, I feel most strongly about the least-discussed benefit: Eliminating bus fares can clear junk cases out of our court system, lowering the crushing caseloads that prevent our judges, prosecutors and public defenders from focusing their attention where it’s most needed.

I was a public defender, and in one of my first cases I was asked to represent a woman who was not a robber or a drug dealer — she was someone who had failed to pay the fare on public transit. Precious resources had been spent arresting, processing, prosecuting and trying her, all for the loss of a few dollars. This is a daily feature of how we criminalize poverty in America.

Unless a person has spent real time in the bowels of a courthouse, it’s hard to imagine how many of the matters clogging criminal courts across the country originate from a lack of transit. Some of those cases result in fines; many result in defendants being ordered to attend community service or further court dates. But if the person can’t afford the fare to get to those appointments and can’t get a ride, their only options — jump a turnstile or flout a judge’s order — expose them to re-arrest. Then they may face jail time, which adds significant pressure to our already overcrowded facilities. Is this really what we want the courts spending time on?

Free buses can unclog our streets, too. In Boston, eliminating the need for riders to pay fares or punch tickets cut boarding time by as much as 23 percent, which made everyone’s trip faster. Better, cheaper, faster bus rides give automobile owners an incentive to leave their cars at home, which makes the journey faster still — for those onboard as well as those who still prefer to drive.

How much should a government be willing to pay to achieve those outcomes? How about nothing? When Washington State’s public transit systems stopped charging riders, in many municipalities the state came out more or less even — because the money lost on fares was balanced out by the enormous savings that ensued.

Fare evasion was one of the factors that prompted Mayor Eric Adams to flood New York City public transit with police officers. New Yorkers went from shelling out $4 million for overtime in 2022 to $155 million in 2024. What did it get them? In September 2024, officers drew their guns to shoot a fare beater — pause for a moment to think about that — and two innocent bystanders ended up with bullet wounds, the kind of accident that’s all but inevitable in such a crowded setting.

New York City tried a free bus pilot program in 2023 and 2024 and, as predicted, ridership increased — by 30 percent on weekdays and 38 percent on weekends, striking figures that could make a meaningful dent in New York’s chronic traffic problem (and, by extension, air and noise pollution). Something else happened that was surprising: Assaults on bus operators dropped 39 percent. Call it the opposite of the Adams strategy: Lowering barriers to access made for fewer tense law enforcement encounters, fewer acts of desperation and a safer city overall.

by Emily Galvin Almanza, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Brian Blomerth

Unknown, Illustration from Gaston Phébus (French, 1331 - 1391) “Book of the Hunt"about 1430–1440

via:

via:

Waymos Are Way Safer Than Human Drivers

In a recent article in Bloomberg, David Zipper argued that “We Still Don’t Know if Robotaxis Are Safer Than Human Drivers.” Big if true! In fact, I’d been under the impression that Waymos are not only safer than humans, the evidence to date suggests that they are staggeringly safer, with somewhere between an 80% to 90% lower risk of serious crashes.

“We don’t know” sounds like a modest claim, but in this case, where it refers to something that we do in fact know about an effect size that is extremely large, it’s a really big claim.

It’s also completely wrong. The article drags its audience into the author’s preferred state of epistemic helplessness by dancing around the data rather than explaining it. And Zipper got many of the numbers wrong; in some cases, I suspect, as a consequence of a math error.

There are things we still don’t know about Waymo crashes. But we know far, far more than Zipper pretends. I want to go through his full argument and make it clear why that’s the case.

In many places, Zipper’s piece relied entirely on equivocation between “robotaxis” — that is, any self-driving car — and Waymos. Obviously, not all autonomous vehicle startups are doing a good job. Most of them have nowhere near the mileage on the road to say confidently how well they work.

But fortunately, no city official has to decide whether to allow “robotaxis” in full generality. Instead, the decision cities actually have to make is whether to allow or disallow Waymo, in particular.

Fortunately, there is a lot of data available about Waymo, in particular. If the thing you want to do is to help policymakers make good decisions, you would want to discuss the safety record of Waymos, the specific cars that the policymakers are considering allowing on their roads.

Imagine someone writing “we don’t know if airplanes are safe — some people say that crashes are extremely rare, and others say that crashes happen every week.” And when you investigate this claim further, you learn that what’s going on is that commercial aviation crashes are extremely rare, while general aviation crashes — small personal planes, including ones you can build in your garage — are quite common.

It’s good to know that the plane that you built in your garage is quite dangerous. It would still be extremely irresponsible to present an issue with a one-engine Cessna as an issue with the Boeing 737 and write “we don’t know whether airplanes are safe — the aviation industry insists they are, but my cousin’s plane crashed just three months ago.”

The safety gap between, for example, Cruise and Waymo is not as large as the safety gap between commercial and general aviation, but collapsing them into a single category sows confusion and moves the conversation away from the decision policymakers actually face: Should they allow Waymo in their cities?

Zipper’s first specific argument against the safety of self-driving cars is that while they do make safer decisions than humans in many contexts, “self-driven cars make mistakes that humans would not, such as plowing into floodwater or driving through an active crime scene where police have their guns drawn.” The obvious next question is: Which of these happens more frequently? How does the rate of self-driving cars doing something dangerous a human wouldn’t compare to the rate of doing something safe a human wouldn’t?

This obvious question went unasked because the answer would make the rest of Bloomberg’s piece pointless. As I’ll explain below, Waymo’s self-driving cars put people in harm’s way something like 80% to 90% less often than humans for a wide range of possible ways of measuring “harm’s way.”

Zipper acknowledged that data on Waymo operations suggested they are about 10 times less likely to seriously injure someone than a human driver, but he then suggested that this data could be somehow misleading: “It looks like the numbers are very good and promising,” he cited one expert, Henry Liu, as saying. “But I haven’t seen any unbiased, transparent analysis on autonomous vehicle safety. We don’t have the raw data.”

I was confused by this. Every single serious incident that Waymos are involved in must be reported. You can download all of the raw data yourself here (search “Download data”). The team at Understanding AI regularly goes through and reviews the Waymo safety reports to check whether the accidents are appropriately classified — and they have occasionally found errors in those reports, so I know they’re looking closely. I reached out to Timothy Lee at Understanding AI to ask if there was anything that could be characterized as “raw data” that Waymo wasn’t releasing — any key information we would like to have and didn’t.

“There is nothing obvious that I think they ought to be releasing for these crash statistics that they are not,” he told me.

by Kelsey Piper, The Argument |  Read more:
Image: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

[ed. I expect we'll see Waymos (and Teslas) everywhere in the near future (if we have a future that is... see AI posts below).]

The Anthropic Hive Mind

As you’ve probably noticed, something is happening over at Anthropic. They are a spaceship that is beginning to take off.

This whole post is just spidey-sense stuff. Don’t read too much into it. Just hunches. Vibes, really.

If you run some back-of-envelope math on how hard it is to get into Anthropic, as an industry professional, and compare it to your odds of making it as a HS or college player into the National Football League, you’ll find the odds are comparable. Everyone I’ve met from Anthropic is the best of the best of the best, to an even crazier degree than Google was at its peak. (Evidence: Google hired me. I was the scrapest of the byest.)

Everyone is gravitating there, and I’ve seen this movie before, a few times.

I’ve been privileged to have some long, relatively frank conversations with nearly 40 people at Anthropic in the past four months, from cofounders and execs, to whole teams, to individuals from departments across the company: AI research, Engineering, GTM, Sales, Editorial, Product and more. And I’ve also got a fair number of friends there, from past gigs together.

Anthropic is unusually impenetrable as a company. Employees there all know they just need to keep their mouths shut and heads down and they’ll be billionaires and beyond, so they have lots of incentive to do exactly that. It’s tricky to get them to open up, even when they do chat with you.

But I managed. People usually figure out I’m harmless within about 14 seconds of meeting me. I have developed, in my wizened old age, a curious ability to make people feel good, no matter who they are, with just a little conversation, making us both feel good in the process. (You probably have this ability too, and just don’t know how to use it yet.)

By talking to enough of them, and getting their perspectives in long conversations, I have begun to suspect that the future of software development is the Hive Mind.

Happy But Sad

To get a proper picture of Anthropic at this moment, you have to be Claude Monet, and paint it impressionistically, a big broad stroke at a time. Each section in this post is a stroke, and this one is all about the mood.

To me it seems that almost everyone there is vibrantly happy. It has the same crackle of electricity in the air that Amazon had back in 1998. But that was back in the days before Upton Sinclair and quote “HR”, so the crackle was mostly from faulty wiring in the bar on the first floor of the building.

But at both early Amazon and Anthropic, everyone knew something amazing was about to happen that would change society forever. (And also that whatever was coming would be extremely Aladeen for society.)

At Anthropic every single person and team I met, without exception, feels kind of sweetly but sadly transcendent. They have a distinct feel of a group of people who are tasked with shepherding something of civilization-level importance into existence, and while they’re excited, they all also have a solemn kind of elvish old-world-fading-away gravity. I can’t quite put my finger on it.

But I am starting to suspect they feel genuinely sorry for a lot of companies. Because we’re not taking this stuff seriously enough. 2026 is going to be a year that just about breaks a lot of companies, and many don’t see it coming. Anthropic is trying to warn everyone, and it’s like yelling about an offshore earthquake to villages that haven’t seen a tidal wave in a century.

by Steve Yegge, Medium |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: Anthropic’s Chief on A.I.: ‘We Don’t Know if the Models Are Conscious’ (NYT); and Machines of Loving Grace (Anthropic - Dario Amodei)]

***

Amodei: I actually think this whole idea of constitutional rights and liberty along many different dimensions can be undermined by A.I. if we don’t update these protections appropriately.

Think about the Fourth Amendment. It is not illegal to put cameras around everywhere in public space and record every conversation. It’s a public space — you don’t have a right to privacy in a public space. But today, the government couldn’t record that all and make sense of it.

With A.I., the ability to transcribe speech, to look through it, correlate it all, you could say: This person is a member of the opposition. This person is expressing this view — and make a map of all 100 million. And so are you going to make a mockery of the Fourth Amendment by the technology finding technical ways around it?

Again, if we have the time — and we should try to do this even if we don’t have the time — is there some way of reconceptualizing constitutional rights and liberties in the age of A.I.? Maybe we don’t need to write a new Constitution, but ——

Douthat: But you have to do this very fast.

Amodei: Do we expand the meaning of the Fourth Amendment? Do we expand the meaning of the First Amendment?

Douthat: And just as the legal profession or software engineers have to update in a rapid amount of time, politics has to update in a rapid amount of time. That seems hard.

Amodei: That’s the dilemma of all of this.

Your Job Isn't Disappearing. It's Shrinking Around You in Real Time

You open your laptop Monday morning with a question you can’t shake: Will I still have a job that matters in two years?

Not whether you’ll be employed, but whether the work you do will still mean something.
Last week, you spent three hours writing a campaign brief. You saw a colleague generate something 80% as good in four minutes using an AI agent (Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT…). Maybe 90% as good if you’re being honest.

You still have your job. But you can feel it shrinking around you.

The problem isn’t that the robots are coming. It’s that you don’t know what you’re supposed to be good at anymore. That Excel expertise you built over five years? Automated. Your ability to research competitors and synthesize findings? There’s an agent for that. Your skill at writing clear project updates? Gone.

You’re losing your professional identity faster than you can rebuild it. And nobody’s telling you what comes next.

The Three Things Everyone Tries That Don’t Actually Work

When you feel your value eroding, you do what seems rational. You adapt, you learn, and you try to stay relevant.

First, you learn to use the AI tools better. You take courses on prompt engineering. You master ChatGPT, Claude, whatever new platform launches next week and the week after. You become the “AI person” on your team. You think that if I can’t beat them, I’ll use them better than anyone else.

This fails because you’re still competing on execution speed. You’re just a faster horse. And execution is exactly what’s being commoditized. Six months from now, the tools will be easier to use. Your “expertise” in prompting becomes worthless the moment the interface improves. You’ve learned to use the shovel better, but the backhoe is coming anyway.

Second, you double down on your existing expertise. The accountant learns more advanced tax code. The designer masters more software. The analyst builds more complex models. You will have the same thought as many others, “I’ll go so deep they can’t replace me.”

This fails because depth in a disappearing domain is a trap. You’re building a fortress in a flood zone. Agents aren’t just matching human expertise at the median level anymore. They’re rapidly approaching expert-level performance in narrow domains. Your specialized knowledge becomes a liability because you’ve invested everything in something that’s actively being automated. You’re becoming the world’s best telegraph operator in 1995.

Third, you try to “stay human” through soft skills. You lean into creativity, empathy, relationship building. You go to workshops on emotional intelligence. You focus on being irreplaceably human. You might think that what makes us human can’t be automated.

This fails because it’s too vague to be actionable. What does “be creative” actually mean when an AI can generate 100 ideas in 10 seconds? How do you monetize empathy when your job is to produce reports? The advice feels right but provides no compass. You end up doing the same tasks you always did, just with more anxiety and a vaguer sense of purpose.

The real issue with all three approaches is that they’re reactions, not redesigns. You’re trying to adapt your old role to a new reality. What actually works is building an entirely new role that didn’t exist before.

But nobody’s teaching you what that looks like.

The Economic Logic Working Against You

This isn’t happening to you because you’re failing to adapt. It’s happening because the economic incentive structure is perfectly designed to create this problem.

The mechanism is simple, companies profit immediately from adopting AI agents. Every task automated results in cost reduction. The CFO sees the spreadsheet, where one AI subscription replaces 40% of a mid-level employee’s work. The math is simple, and the decision is obvious.

Many people hate to hear that. But if they owned the company or sat in leadership, they’d do the exact same thing. Companies exist to drive profit, just as employees work to drive higher salaries. That’s how the system has worked for centuries.

But companies don’t profit from retraining you for a higher-order role that doesn’t exist yet.

Why? Because that new role is undefined, unmeasured, and uncertain. You can’t put “figure out what humans should do now” on a quarterly earnings call. You can’t show ROI on “redesign work itself.” Short-term incentives win. Long-term strategy loses.

Nobody invests in the 12-24 month process of discovering what your new role should be because there’s no immediate return on that investment.

We’re in a speed mismatch. Agent capabilities are compounding at 6-12 month cycles. [ed. Even faster now, after the release of Claude Opus 4.6 last week]. Human adaptation through traditional systems operates on 2-5 year cycles.

Universities can’t redesign curricula fast enough. They’re teaching skills that will be automated before students graduate. Companies can’t retrain fast enough. By the time they identify the new skills needed and build a program, the landscape has shifted again. You can’t pivot fast enough. Career transitions take time. Mortgages don’t wait.

We’ve never had to do this before.

Previous automation waves happened in manufacturing. You could see the factory floor. You could watch jobs disappear and new ones emerge. There was geographic and temporal separation.

This is different, knowledge work is being automated while you’re still at your desk. The old role and new role exist simultaneously in the same person, the same company, the same moment.

And nobody has an economic incentive to solve it. Companies maximize value through cost reduction, not workforce transformation. Educational institutions are too slow and too far removed from real-time market needs. Governments don’t understand the problem yet. You’re too busy trying to keep your current job to redesign your future one.

The system isn’t helping because it isn’t designed for continuous, rapid role evolution; it is designed for stability.

We’re using industrial-era institutions to solve an exponential-era problem. That’s why you feel stuck.

Your Experience Just Became Worthless (The Timeline)

Let me tell you a story of my friend, let’s call her Jane (Her real name is Katřina, but the Czech diacritic is tricky for many). She was a senior research analyst at a mid-sized consulting firm. Ten years of experience. Her job was provide answers to the client companies, who would ask questions like “What’s our competitor doing in the Asian market?” and she’d spend 2-3 weeks gathering data, reading reports, interviewing experts, synthesizing findings, and creating presentations.

She was good, clients loved her work, and she billed at $250 an hour.

The firm deployed an AI research agent in Q2 2023. Not to replace her, but as they said, to “augment” her. Management said all the right things about human-AI collaboration.

The agent could do Jane’s initial research in 90 minutes, it would scan thousands of sources, identify patterns, generate a first-draft report.

Month one: Jane was relieved and thought she could focus on high-value synthesis work. She’d take the agent’s output and refine it, add strategic insights, make it client-ready.

Month three: A partner asked her, “Why does this take you a week now? The AI gives us 80% of what we need in an hour. What’s the other 20% worth?”

Jane couldn’t answer clearly. Because sometimes the agent’s output only needed light editing. Sometimes her “strategic insights” were things the agent had already identified, just worded differently.

Month six: The firm restructured. They didn’t fire Jane, they changed her role to “Quality Reviewer.” She now oversaw the AI’s output for 6-8 projects simultaneously instead of owning 2-3 end to end.

Her title stayed the same. Her billing rate dropped to $150 an hour. Her ten years of experience felt worthless.

Jane tried everything. She took an AI prompt engineering course. She tried to go deeper into specialized research methodologies. She emphasized her client relationships. None of it mattered because the firm had already made the economic calculation.

One AI subscription costs $50 a month. Jane’s salary: $140K a year. The agent didn’t need to be perfect; it just needed to be 70% as good at 5% of the cost. But it was fast, faster than her.

The part that illustrates the systemic problem, you often hear from AI vendors that, thanks to their AI tools, people can focus on higher-value work. But when pressed on what that meant specifically, they’d go vague. Strategic thinking, client relationships, creative problem solving.

Nobody could define what higher-value work actually looked like in practice. Nobody could describe the new role. So they defaulted to the only thing they could measure: cost reduction.

Jane left six months later. The firm hired two junior analysts at $65K each to do what she did. With the AI, they’re 85% as effective as Jane was.

Jane’s still trying to figure out what she’s supposed to be good at. Last anyone heard, she’s thinking about leaving the industry entirely.

Stop Trying to Be Better at Your Current Job

The people who are winning aren’t trying to be better at their current job. They’re building new jobs that combine human judgment with agent capability.

Not becoming prompt engineers, not becoming AI experts. Becoming orchestrators who use agents to do what was previously impossible at their level. [...]

You’re not competing with the agent. You’re creating a new capability that requires both you and the agent. You’re not defensible because you’re better at the task. You’re defensible because you’ve built something that only exists with you orchestrating it.

This requires letting go of your identity as “the person who does X.” Marcus doesn’t write copy anymore. That bothered him at first. He liked writing. But he likes being valuable more.

Here’s what you can do this month:

by Jan Tegze, Thinking Out Loud |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Not to criticize, but this advice still seems a bit too short-sighted (for reasons articulated in this article: AI #155: Welcome to Recursive Self-Improvement (DMtV):]

***

Presumably you can see the problem in such a scenario, where all the existing jobs get automated away. There are not that many slots for people to figure out and do genuinely new things with AI. Even if you get to one of the lifeboats, it will quickly spring a leak. The AI is coming for this new job the same way it came for your old one. What makes you think seeing this ‘next evolution’ after that coming is going to leave you a role to play in it?

If the only way to survive is to continuously reinvent yourself to do what just became possible, as Jan puts it? There’s only one way this all ends.

I also don’t understand Jan’s disparate treatment of the first approach that Jan dismisses, ‘be the one who uses AI the best,’ and his solution of ‘find new things AI can do and do that.’ In both cases you need to be rapidly learning new tools and strategies to compete with the other humans. In both cases the competition is easy now since most of your rivals aren’t trying, but gets harder to survive over time.

***

[ed. And the fact that there'll be a lot fewer of these types of jobs available. This scenario could be reality within the next year (or less!). Something like a temporary UBI (universal basic income) might be needed until long-term solutions can be worked out, but do you think any of the bozos currently in Washington are going to focus on this? And, that applies to safety standards as well. Here's Dean Ball (Hyperdimensional): On Recursive Self-Improvement (Part II):

***

Policymakers would be wise to take especially careful notice of this issue over the coming year or so. But they should also keep the hysterics to a minimum: yes, this really is a thing from science fiction that is happening before our eyes, but that does not mean we should behave theatrically, as an actor in a movie might. Instead, the challenge now is to deal with the legitimately sci-fi issues we face using the comparatively dull idioms of technocratic policymaking. [...]

Right now, we predominantly rely on faith in the frontier labs for every aspect of AI automation going well. There are no safety or security standards for frontier models; no cybersecurity rules for frontier labs or data centers; no requirements for explainability or testing for AI systems which were themselves engineered by other AI systems; and no specific legal constraints on what frontier labs can do with the AI systems that result from recursive self-improvement.

To be clear, I do not support the imposition of such standards at this time, not so much because they don’t seem important but because I am skeptical that policymakers could design any one of these standards effectively. It is also extremely likely that the existence of advanced AI itself will both change what is possible for such standards (because our technical capabilities will be much stronger) and what is desirable (because our understanding of the technology and its uses will improve so much, as will our apprehension of the stakes at play). Simply put: I do not believe that bureaucrats sitting around a table could design and execute the implementation of a set of standards that would improve status-quo AI development practices, and I think the odds are high that any such effort would worsen safety and security practices.

Jalen Ngonda

[ed. Kid's got some real Motown vibes.]

I Regret to Inform You that the FDA is FDAing Again

I had high hopes and low expectations that the FDA under the new administration would be less paternalistic and more open to medical freedom. Instead, what we are getting is paternalism with different preferences. In particular, the FDA now appears to have a bizarre anti-vaccine fixation, particularly of the mRNA variety (disappointing but not surprising given the leadership of RFK Jr.).

The latest is that the FDA has issued a Refusal-to-File (RTF) letter to Moderna for their mRNA influenza vaccine, mRNA-1010. An RTF means the FDA has determined that the application is so deficient it doesn’t even warrant a review. RTF letters are not unheard of, but they’re rare—especially given that Moderna spent hundreds of millions of dollars running Phase 3 trials enrolling over 43,000 participants based on FDA guidance, and is now being told the (apparently) agreed-upon design was inadequate. [...]

In context, this looks like the regulatory rules of the game are being changed retroactively—a textbook example of regulatory uncertainty destroying option value. STAT News reports that Vinay Prasad personally handled the letter and overrode staff who were prepared to proceed with review. Moderna took the unusual step of publicly releasing Prasad’s letter—companies almost never do this, suggesting they’ve calculated the reputational risk of publicly fighting the FDA is lower than the cost of acquiescing.

Moreover, the comparator issue was discussed—and seemingly settled—beforehand. Moderna says the FDA agreed with the trial design in April 2024, and as recently as August 2025 suggested it would file the application and address comparator issues during the review process.

Finally, Moderna also provided immunogenicity and safety data from a separate Phase 3 study in adults 65+ comparing mRNA-1010 against a licensed high-dose flu vaccine, just as FDA had requested—yet the application was still refused.

What is most disturbing is not the specifics of this case but the arbitrariness and capriciousness of the process. The EU, Canada, and Australia have all accepted Moderna’s application for review. We may soon see an mRNA flu vaccine available across the developed world but not in the United States—not because it failed on safety or efficacy, but because FDA political leadership decided, after the fact, that the comparator choice they inherited was now unacceptable.

The irony is staggering. Moderna is an American company. Its mRNA platform was developed at record speed with billions in U.S. taxpayer support through Operation Warp Speed — the signature public health achievement of the first Trump administration. The same government that funded the creation of this technology is now dismantling it. In August, HHS canceled $500 million in BARDA contracts for mRNA vaccine development and terminated a separate $590 million contract with Moderna for an avian flu vaccine. Several states have introduced legislation to ban mRNA vaccines. Insanity.

The consequences are already visible. In January, Moderna’s CEO announced the company will no longer invest in new Phase 3 vaccine trials for infectious diseases: “You cannot make a return on investment if you don’t have access to the U.S. market.” Vaccines for Epstein-Barr virus, herpes, and shingles have been shelved. That’s what regulatory roulette buys you: a shrinking pipeline of medical innovation.

An administration that promised medical freedom is delivering medical nationalism: fewer options, less innovation, and a clear signal to every company considering pharmaceutical investment that the rules can change after the game is played. And this isn’t a one-product story. mRNA is a general-purpose platform with spillovers across infectious disease and vaccines for cancer; if the U.S. turns mRNA into a political third rail, the investment, talent, and manufacturing will migrate elsewhere. America built this capability, and we’re now choosing to export it—along with the health benefits.

by Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution |  Read more:

Image: Brian Snyder/Reuters

[ed. See also: F.D.A. Refuses to Review Moderna Flu Vaccine (NYT); and, Trump official overruled FDA scientists to reject Moderna’s flu shot (Ars Technica).]