Alan Edgett

Elon Musk is threatening the American people. At some point, we just have to take these public assets away from his control. SpaceX is not his, it exists at the pleasure of the American people.

Average US family health insurance premium... 1999: $6k 2002: $8k 2005: $11k 2008: $13k 2011: $15k 2014: $17k 2017: $19k 2020: $21k 2023: $24k 2026: $28k That's a 387% increase since 1999 (6.0% per year). (Note: US CPI inflation has increased 2.6%/year)

One could say that Cornell is infantilizing its female students. President Michael Kotlikoff, following up on his maudlin video performance of Oct. 3, has just banned all fraternity social events for the remainder of the 2026-2027 academic year. Doing so is necessary, Kotlikoff said, to strengthen campus safety. This measure is wildly overinclusive. The number of “sexual assaults” (we will merely bracket the term for the moment) that would have come out of the dozens of future frat gatherings is minute to non-existent. The more efficient measure would have been to let females evaluate the risk of attending, and if they decide the risk is too high, boycott the parties. Or don’t show up roaring drunk. Or don’t get into bed with a guy whom you have no deep relationship with. Or don’t get into bed with a guy at all, unless you are engaged or, god forbid, married. But Kotlikoff is implicitly right about one thing: He is presiding over a bunch of helpless, nauseatingly self-pitying co-eds who eschew all personal agency and who thus appear to need Cornell’s intercession. Cornell’s females expect everyone other than themselves to safeguard them.

Dusting off this tweet from April because this gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is *widening*. It's now less "two groups of people speaking past each other" and more a sharp funnel. - Napkin math somewhere around 6B people (~75% of the population) have barely come in contact with LLMs at all. - Around 1-2B (~20%) are casual and infrequent users of free-tier ChatGPT-like products. This group sees derpy chatbots and treats them a bit like a better Google search, a writing aid, or etc. Maybe an agent tries to book you a flight. I have non-tech friends who (reasonably, imo) say they have not much use for it at all. Even many professionals outside of math&code are in this tier. For example, execs and many other functions spend a lot of their time talking to other people, so while they understand what is happening intellectually, it is still second-hand and a bit abstract. - Now we get to professional use of frontier-grade LLMs in math&code. Somewhere around 20M people (0.2%) see first-hand that large, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt. Building apps, copying apps, translating apps, decompiling apps from binaries... This has all happened very quickly and recently - less than 1 year ago, I was writing code manually by hand, typing memorized computer code commands into a code editor character by character, occasionally pressing Tab to autocomplete a little chunk of code. - And finally we get to the ~5,000 people (~0.00006%) with access to frontier-grade systems internally. The external world has seen the preview. It looks like swarms of thousands of agents collaborating over weeks on software mega projects: minting zero days, running cyber attacks and defenses at machine speeds, discovering new science, advancing the frontier of mathematics. Things that would have taken top professionals in the industry years of work. Meanwhile, human review and comprehension are starting to fall behind. For example, people are still involved in the "archeology" of the OpenAI-HF incident from many months ago. Mathematicians may be poring over the 722 manuscripts on frontier mathematics for a while. The funnel is driven by a combination of factors: 1. The impact scales with ambition, problem size, and horizon. A question with a paragraph answer barely stresses the system. You need a reservoir of big, difficult problems that you really care about. This aspect drives the consumer / professional dimension of the funnel. 2. The jaggedness of the system (which I have written about a lot separately). Capability peaks in domains that are digital, verifiable and economically valuable. This is because LLM capability emerges from reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards on a curated environment mixture driven by revenue potential. This aspect primarily drives the area (e.g. math&code) dimension of the funnel. 3. Access. Free-tier, paid-tier, internal. So this is the weirdness of the moment. The general public has mostly not interacted with these systems. When they have, it looks like a derpy chatbot. The majority of professionals still see only a modest uplift. And a small sliver of professionals are experiencing the vertigo of the curve going vertical. And it is all happening at the same time.

Spain's illegal immigration debacle. A warning to Europe and America. More than a month after, Sánchez says Ceuta has to accept "a structural reality" with thousands of migrants: "They are not invaders." He suggests that the 6,000 new reception places in Ceuta will be permanent: "The State needs to have larger centers to cope with this reality." elespanol.com/espana/politic… elespanol.com/espana/tribuna…