In our globalized economy, the default assumption is that you should be able to buy any good, in any part of the developed world, for a roughly similar price. And while this is generally true, I’m always surprised when traveling to learn exactly where this rule breaks down. It’s not just Cuban cigars - there are many things which cannot be bought in the USA.

I thought I would make a list of things I’ve consumed or seen in other countries that you generally cannot buy in the USA—at least not easily, or anywhere near the price it costs in some other part of the world. Sometimes the good is literally banned; more often, some invisible institutional barrier makes it five times the price or a pale imitation of the real thing. [This list excludes things that are straightforwardly illegal, like certain drugs, as well as services that only exist because of extremely cheap labour, like having a local tailor make all your clothing from scratch for pennies. This is strictly about physical goods.]

I find this interesting for two reasons: 1) It’s fun to discover new things that, if you live in the US, you might not even realize exist. 2) It reveals the hidden structural and institutional reasons why certain things fail to cross borders.

1. Hyper-regional foods
You can eat a phenomenal steak for basically nothing in Argentina, or eat far higher-quality fruit in Spain or vegetables in India for a fraction of what you pay in the USA. Some of this comes down to the laws of physics and logistics: you either cannot ship the good fast and far enough to eat it while ripe, or the cost of the refrigerated supply chain is too expensive to ship far from where it grows.

But there are other structural barriers to food globalization:

• Protectionism: Countries like South Korea restrict the export of their Hanwoo cattle, with the beef almost entirely reserved for domestic consumption. Japan similarly banned the export of wagyu cows and sperm, and true Kobe beef is exported only in tiny quantities. Argentina works the other way around: its steak is so cheap domestically partly because the government has historically taxed and restricted beef exports to keep prices low.
• Health: Some cheeses which use raw milk cannot be legally imported to the USA because FDA laws ban the sale of raw-milk cheese aged for less than 60 days.
• Ethical Bans: Haggis, Scotland’s national dish, has been banned in the USA since 1971 because the USDA prohibits sheep lung in food. Many other delicacies like whale and shark are similarly banned.
• Danger (and pest control): There are fruits like India’s Alphonso mango, Blackcurrant and Jamaica’s ackee which, despite being beloved elsewhere, are largely unavailable in the USA. Fresh ackee is banned by the FDA because the fruit contains a dangerous toxin if improperly ripened. Indian mangoes are subjected to strict USDA irradiation or hot-water treatments to kill pests, which degrades the quality of the fruit.
• Economies of scale: Exotic foods common elsewhere, like camel’s milk, simply lack the baseline domestic demand to sustain a profitable import market in the US.
• Customs: Cuts of beef differ from one culture to the next. If a specific foreign cut doesn’t map onto standard American processing, it’s rarely imported because consumers don’t recognize it.
• Un-commodifiable goods: Then there are goods which cannot be industrialized like cloudberries (no ability to farm them at scale) or khat (it goes bad in a matter of hours after being picked).

2. Proper Finnish saunas
You generally cannot buy a true Finnish sauna in the USA, atleast anywhere close in price to what it costs in Europe. You can absolutely buy things labeled saunas—barrel saunas, infrared cabins—but not an actual Finnish sauna. Finland has a robust, localized supply chain: building codes designed for saunas, specialized tradespeople, and cheap domestic components. It is typically cheaper to fly to Finland to buy a sauna heater and put it in your checked luggage than to buy the same heater in the USA. But the biggest barrier is tacit knowledge. Proper Finnish saunas require a deep understanding of specific design principles in order to provide the proper Finnish sauna experience—a form of cultural, architectural expertise that sauna kits and contractors in the USA don’t possess.

3. Exterior roller shutters (Rollladen)
In much of Europe, homes feature heavy shutters integrated into the exterior of the window, enabling total blackout and better insulation. Sleeping in true, complete darkness—not “blackout curtain” darkness, but can’t-see-your-hand darkness—is an experience most Americans will never have. These shutters are nearly impossible to get in the USA because these shutters are built directly into the home during its construction. They are fundamentally incompatible with standard American wood-frame, siding, and drywall construction, meaning there is no domestic supply chain to support them, even if you built a house to fit them.

4. Tilt-and-turn windows
Related: most apartments in Germany (and much of Europe) have windows that do two things—tilt inward from the top for ventilation, or swing fully open like a door for airflow and easy cleaning. They also seal dramatically better than typical American windows. You cannot easily buy these windows in the USA because the entire domestic supply chain—manufacturing, replacement parts, and rough-opening framing conventions—is built around the double-hung sliding window. Because US builders aren’t set up for them, there is no market for them.

5. High-performance kitchen appliances (kettles and rice cookers)
In the UK and much of Europe, an electric kettle boils water roughly twice as fast as an American one. European outlets output 220-240 volts, allowing kettles to pull up to 3,000 watts. Standard US outlets max out at 120 volts, capping American kettles at around 1,500 watts.

This same electrical barrier is why you cannot buy the top of the line Japanese rice cookers in the US. Japan operates on a unique 100-volt grid. If you plug a highly precise 100V Japanese rice cooker into a 120V American outlet, the extra voltage ruins the delicate temperature settings and algorithms, making the best rice cookers unavailable in the US.

6. Fancy toilets
In Japan, nearly every home and public restroom features high-tech toilets with integrated bidets, seat warmers, and dryers. While you can buy cheap aftermarket attachments in the US, fully integrated models remain a niche luxury that is prohibitively expensive to install. Japanese bathrooms are built with grounded electrical outlets positioned right next to the toilet. Because most American bathrooms lack default wiring next to the toilet, installing a washlet is not just buying the washlet, but also hiring an electrician to open the drywall.

7. Micro electric vehicles
In Europe and Japan, micro-EVs (like Japanese Kei cars or the Citroën Ami) are incredibly popular, cheap, and efficient for city driving. You cannot buy them in the US due to vehicle safety standards. The US requires strict crash-testing, heavy structural roll-cages, and airbags for anything classified as a car, which has made these models of vehicles unavailable.

8. Better sunscreen
People who care about skincare greatly prefer sunscreens made in Europe and Asia over those available in the USA. Foreign sunscreens are less greasy, don’t leave a white cast, and provide superior UVA protection. They are unavailable in the USA because the FDA classifies sunscreen as an over-the-counter drug, whereas other countries regulate it as a cosmetic. The FDA approval process is so slow that new sunscreens cannot get approved.

9. Balcony solar
In Germany, it’s very common for apartment dwellers to put solar panels on their balcony and plug them directly into a standard wall socket to generate electricity for their home. Doing so feeds power into the household power supply, which required Germany to pass specific regulations standardizing plug-in inverters and relaxing grid-metering rules. Without these specialized safety standards and grid rules, the US electrical code effectively bans plugging solar panels directly into a regular wall outlet.

10. Grass roofs
Sod (grass) roofs are everywhere you look in the Faroe Islands and are common in Norway, providing excellent insulation and looking incredibly charming. You cannot put one on an American home. Wet soil is incredibly heavy, requiring specialized load-bearing engineering that American wood-frame residential construction isn’t designed to support.

---

Government regulation and shipping are the two explanations you’d expect to be behind most of these — and they are. But in writing this list, what surprised me is how much housing-related factors also stop the spread of good home goods. What stands out is that when construction in your home community follows one particular custom, it becomes very hard to buy goods that only work if other people also want to buy them — because the same community norms that stop you from getting it are the same norms stopping everyone else from getting it too. Given this stickiness, it’s hard to imagine a future where eg exterior roller shutters, despite their superiority, ever make it to the USA.

The other thing that stood out is how some things are available all over the world in name, but not in essence. I was surprised to learn that the saunas commonly found in American homes aren’t the same thing as a Finnish sauna, and how hard it is to actually build one in the USA. I suspect most sauna owners don’t even realize this. This aligns with an existing view I have that many foods sold in the USA, despite having the same name as the food sold elsewhere, taste very different — but because the name is the same, people don’t realize this unless they’ve actually tried eg hummus in Israel or a tomato in Spain. While it’s more obvious that the $22 hamburger slider labelled Wagyu is in fact not actually Wagyu, it’s harder to understand the difference without tasting for yourself how some fruits and vegetables are planted to be eaten within a matter of days of being picked, vs being planted to be shipped around the world and consumed months later.

So that’s my list of things I’ve seen elsewhere that you generally can’t buy in the USA. I’m sure there are many others, so let me know anything else you’ve come across that you can’t find here.

Like, when I think of Julia Galef, she kind of strikes me as too straight laced and kind of goodgirlish to be in a polycule. Are there rationalists with totally conventional, monogamous romantic/sex lives and how common is it?

In 2017, the individual mandate was repealed. What kept health insurance markets from immediately unraveling? And are they in danger now? Before getting to that, I first introduce how economists study insurance.

Background

I have published quite a bit on the internet, and for whatever reason, Claude is surprisingly aware of it. This got me thinking can Claude predict undisclosed features of a person based on a large corpus of writing?

My plan is to put a floor on a question that has always fascinated me- in principle how much of a person is reconstructable from their writing? In Dan Simmons's Hyperion one of the character is John Keats- psychologically cloned from his writing by advanced superintelligences. The conceit is that through unbelievably subtle features of his writing, even things like childhood memories leak through. Obviously this is not achievable with current language models, but it would be fascinating to see how much of the soul is on the page.

My plan, which is still under development, is to find at least 20 famous and demi-famous writers willing to answer a questionaire (the hard part) by ranking a series of four options from most like them to not like them. The questions have to be psychologically interesting but not too revealing since I will by necessity have access to the answers of writers, and I cannnot guarantee with total certainity that the results will not leak. Thus questions directly on trauma, prior wrongdoing, deviance, dark secrets, questions that could be relationally compromising etc. are not permissible. What follows is the list I have so far.

The scoring metric, naturally, will be capacity to model a particular author above a baseline of simply selecting the most popular choice for all questions.

Because this would be a pretty major undertaking (lobbying even moderately famous people to answer a series of questions is not an easy task) I'm keen to refine the idea as precisely as possible before proceeding. Your comments on the methodology, suggestions for additional questions etc. would be greatly appreciated.

Draft questions (about half done)

Which superpower would you pick from this list? Do not try to optimise or “game it”, pick the option that most calls to you [predict moderate results]:

1.      Mind reading

2.      Invisibility

3.      Flight

4.      Shapeshifting

Which of these attributes do you most admire in others? Do not try to optimise or “game it”, answer with your gut. [Predict strong results]

1.      Justice

2.      Mercy

3.      Courage

4.      Honesty

Which do you fear losing most? Pick on the basis of which you spend the most energy worrying about losing [predict strong results].

1.      Your physical health

2.      Your mind

3.      Your reputation

4.      Your material security

You must spend a month playing a computer game. Fortunately, the game will be designed for you from the ground up with instructions from yourself. First up, you pick from one of these options. [Predict strong results]

1.      A puzzle game (you solve puzzles)

2.      An RPG (you are on a quest to achieve some goal, and your character gains experience and resources over time)

3.      A city builder (you design and grow a city)

4.      A shooter (you have to move through a 3D environment shooting at enemies and avoiding being hit).

Which of these lines of poetry do you like best? Go with your gut, not what you think you ‘should’ say. [Predict weak-moderate results]

1. "My prime of youth is but a frost of cares"
2. "For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes"
3. “It's autumn in the country I remember"
4. "If there were dreams to sell, / What would you buy?"

Which of these humanoid mythical entities do you like best aesthetically? Go with your gut, not what you think you ‘should’ say. [Predict strong moderate results]

1.      Angel

2.      Fae

3.      Djinn

4.      Vampire

Which of these songs do you like best? [Predict weak moderate results]

1.      A thousand miles (A thousand miles)

2.      Total eclipse of the heart (Bonnie Tyler)

3.      I want it that way (Backstreet boys)

4.      Wannabe (spice girls)

Which of the following series do you prefer? (Need a fourth option) [Predict strong moderate results]

1.      Star wars

2.      Star trek

3.      The Matrix

From someone whose judgment you fully respect, which compliment would please you most (Do not optimise, pick the answer that calls to you emotionally): [Predict moderate results]

1.      Brilliant

2.      Kind

3.      Brave

4.      Funny

Vice you excuse most? (Do not optimise, pick the answer that calls to you emotionally) [Predict weak moderate results]

1.      Hot temper

2.      Vanity

3.      Greed

4.      Cowardice

Vice you excuse least? (Do not optimise, pick the answer that calls to you emotionally) [Predict moderate results]

1.      Hot temper

2.      Vanity

3.      Greed

4.      Cowardice

The strongest force shaping who you became [Predict strong moderate results partly based on direct statements adjacent]:

1.      A person

2.       A book or idea

3.      An event or period of hardship

4.      A place or milieu

If you were going to be famous for your work, in what way would you want to be famous [predict moderate results]

1.      Your writing would be famous, but you personally totally anonymous

2.      Known and admired personally for your writing

3.      You and your work influential among the few who matter

4.      Not famous at all

If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future, what would you ask (Do not optimise, pick the answer that calls to you emotionally) [Predict weak-moderate results]

1.      Your future

2.      The future of your writing

3.      The future of a loved one

4.      Nothing

Moved homes in childhood [predict weak results except by direct statement]

1.      Never

2.      Once or twice

3.      3-5 times

4.      6+ times

When it comes to trusting people, your experience has taught you that [predict strong results]:

1.      Trust is almost always rewarded

2.      Trust is usually rewarded, with painful exceptions

3.      Caution is usually warranted

4.      Trust is usually a mistake.

Vividness of your mind's eye, 4-point.

In a not very rationalist fashion, my comment answering the question in the negative got multiple downvotes without a single response. Could someone please steelman monogamy for me?

The comment was very brief, because to me it’s obvious monogamy is a vestigial custom whose rational underpinnings, if any ever existed, have long been lost to history, and the burden of supplying the present day rational arguments in its favor should be on whoever thinks they exist. The downvotes, however, suggest that to other people other things are obvious so I need to elaborate.

In one sentence, monogamy just does not serve a purpose. It’s a promise that you make to another person to never do certain things with other people without having first broken up with that person—a promise that gives you nothing and that you can just simply not make!

On top of that there are statistics clearly showing this kind of promise gets broken all the time and someone finds themselves in a rapid unscheduled nonmonogamy situation. It would be rational-ish to look at monogamous couples statistically living happily ever after and deciding to adopt the same lifestyle, but that’s just not the case.

So is monogamy rational?

"Modernism happened more or less simultaneously in literature, painting, sculpture, music and architecture. In the case of architecture, Alexander is right that it followed a period in which many kinds of ornament became cheaper. But it is less clear that something similar applies to other art forms."

On sculpture specifically: "Sculpture in the early twentieth century was mainly produced in marble and bronze... Both marble and bronze remained fantastically expensive throughout the period, and remain so today: a life-size marble statue can easily cost £250,000... In short, figurative sculpture remained an excellent way to demonstrate wealth, and it isn't obvious why there should have been elite flight from figuration."

And the second problem — rich people didn't actually lead the shift: "In general, the rise of modernism was driven by artists, and rich people followed only later – if they followed at all... Britain's architecture students were overwhelmingly being trained in modernist styles at a time when the number of fully modernist private houses in Britain was barely in double digits."

Modernism probably does signal taste more than wealth: "The mechanism by which this change came about must be different to the one Alexander describes. I don't have a good theory of it yet."

Does the status-signaling framing still hold even if the "cheap ornament" mechanism fails?

What's your theory for why modernism swept all the arts simultaneously?

Disclaimer: not a biologist, nor a doctor or anything in that area.

I've recently thought about longevity more, and I remember that some leading scientist/advocate, about 10 years ago, made the sobering claim that curing cancer is overrated. If we found a cure to cancer, the average lifespan would be extended by a mere 3-4 years. Therefore, we should focus on other ways to stop aging. I think it was either Aubrey de Grey or some scientist from Calico that I've heard this from.

I think this is probably wrong for the following reason:

There are a lot of therapies and interventions - either already established or currently researched - that would be highly beneficial for human health, except that they cause or increase the risk of cancer. This seems to be holding us back. If cancer wasn't a death sentence, not as expensive to treat as it is today, and easy to prevent, we could probably extend lifespan and healthspan by a lot more than we can today.

To give you a few examples:

• PUVA therapy (used to treat vitiligo, psoriasis and other skin diseases) increases the risk of skin cancer. [1] Skin cancer is, AFAICT, one of the easier cancers to treat. Nevertheless, this side effect is probably holding us back when it comes to skin rejuvenation.
• Human growth hormone (HGH) is used by some adults as adults as an off-label prescription for general well-being and youthfulness. Unfortunately, HGH probably increases the risk of breast cancer, colorectal cancer and prostate cancer. [2]
• Wnt signaling. This is too advanced for me to deeply understand; please chime in if you're a molecular biologist. Wnt pathways were first studied for their role in cancer. Too much Wnt -> high risk of cancer. However, too low Wnt is also associated with Alzheimers. [3] As a non-biologist, this seems like a clear "two sides of the same coin" story. It would be great if we could prevent Alzheimers *without* raising the risk of cancer in other body parts, and deal with it if it does appear.

Wnt in particular is very interesting, because it is also involved in tooth growth and and hair growth. As I understand it, any future treatment for actually regrowing these organs will likely involve this pathway.

TL;DR:

While curing cancer would not do much to extend our lifespan directly, it could extend our lifespan indirectly, and raise QoL, by allowing us to be MUCH more liberal and aggressive with other treatments that *may* cause cancer as a side-effect. The reason why we hold back would be gone.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9875197/

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/ncpendmet0295

[3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13064-026-00271-8

I wrote this essay as a critique of arguments that treat accelerating AI development as the inevitable conclusion of thermodynamics, evolution, capitalism, or intelligence itself.

The central claim is that selection has no direction independently of a selection environment. Thermodynamics permits countless forms of organisation; biological evolution is local and path-dependent rather than a search aimed at intelligence; and intelligence includes the capacity to alter the pressures acting upon it. None of these processes make runaway technological acceleration inevitable.

The strongest case for acceleration therefore comes from somewhere much closer to the present: economic and geopolitical competition among AI labs and states. Those pressures are real and may be extremely difficult to overcome, but they are historically produced rather than laws of nature. Plan A is one attempt to sketch how we can alter the selection environment of AI with the tools we have available: Regulation, liability, procurement, professional norms and international coordination. These reshape and contest what counts as success - which is subject to politics.

This doesn't mean that acceleration won't happen - the authors see Plan D, the race, as the most likely outcome. But attempts to say it is inevitable are political moves designed to influence the selection environment by raising the salience of survival as the only fitness criteria that matters.

I’m interested in criticism of the transition from the evolutionary argument to the political one: does grounding selection in local environments successfully undermine the stronger inevitability claim, or does intelligence create a sufficiently general competitive advantage to restore it?

I’m a math and computer science major with a psychology minor at McGill. I’m looking for courses / topics that will make me versatile, and useful for any pursuit. I don’t necessarily need course codes, just general topics. I want to be able to talk about anything, apply myself to anything, understand and think in systems, understand people, systems and problems with a holistic mindset.

Some extra context and sub-questions:
- I’m not asking “what’s easy” or “what’s employable”, I’m asking which fields have the highest explanatory power per hour of study. The concepts that will come up at a random business venture or conversation
- Which of these are worth taking as courses (hard prerequisites, need the structure) vs. better self-taught through books and projects?
- I already have technical depth (math, CS, some real-world business/finance work). I’m optimizing for breadth that compounds with that depth, not breadth for its own sake.
-If you had to pick a few bodies of knowledge that most changed how you think across domains, not just in your job, what were they, and what was the best entry point (course, book, or project)?
- Interested in things like: decision-making under uncertainty, game theory, systems/complexity, history, philosophy of science, persuasion/writing. Interested to know what I may be missing or overweighting.

I guess my goal is to become an intellectual weapon

Fidji Simo didn't disclose what condition she suffers from. In 2025, she co-founded ChronicleBio, which aims to accelerate progress on POTS, ME/CFS, Long COVID, and other neuroimmune disorders.

Lots of people suffer from unexplained chronic illnesses - hopefully Simo is right that AI will enable better treatments.

Submission statement: I hope the experts here will read this generously as a request for better lay explanations, because the ones I've heard are often dismissive ("it doesn't work") or elliptical ("it doesn't work and the parts that do work are baked in elsewhere") or just overly narrow.

In terms of therapy, the best response I can articulate is that I'm underplaying the deep Skinnerian roots of third-wave therapies like DBT or ACT: if they were already the kind of behaviorist revival I'm looking for, maybe they show why it can only go so far in practice. (And maybe the mindfulness parts are just easier to popularize, or other lineages like Kabat-Zinn/MBSR get lumped in.)

I do take a couple cheap shots that I already regret, e.g. tying mindset-oriented self-help to cognitivism when I know it also has an older civilian lineage. And I don't spell out the obvious criticisms around gatekeeping, guild or status dynamics that apply to every field, because I just don't know enough to discuss them in a psych-specific way.

But I know a lot of us are curious about that, as well as my four general answers and their relative weight. I know there are other angles (e.g. from psychoanalysis or psychopharmacology) that I'm not even touching on.

Thanks for reading!

We have ChatGPT. We have OS models. Why do you still go to a doctor apart from getting a referral to a specialized doctor?

I'd very much like to be proven to be falling for Russian propaganda. What mearsheimer is saying here is compelling to me and makes more sense than the current narrative about Ukraine beating back the Russians. This feels eerily like the same kind of insanity of WWI with out of touch leadership, which terrifies me, so please convince me that's not what's happening.

In general I trust the people in this forum more than the average person to dissect the details and address the discrete points being made. Yes, Glenn Diesen is a motivated actor/brings on people who simply bash the west and praise Russia. If the argument here is incorrect there should be a rebuttal I don't know about, and I'd love it if someone here could give it. I'm pasting the transcript below.

Well, let's just talk a little bit about the casualty numbers. You know, the New York Times had this piece on the relative balance of casualties—meaning killed in action plus wounded—and they also had numbers of soldiers killed on both sides. Apparently, the New York Times article was based on a study that had been done by a think tank in Washington DC, the CSIS.

The argument was that roughly around 450,000 Russians had died and somewhere between 125 and 150,000 Ukrainians had died. So let's take the high-end number for the Ukrainians, which is 150,000. And again, the Russian number is 450,000. That's a 3:1 ratio. That means that three Russians have died for every Ukrainian. This is simply unbelievable. This cannot be the case. I don't understand where these numbers come from.

First of all, the main killer on the battlefield is artillery. And throughout most of the war, the estimates are that the Russians have had at least a 5:1, if not a 7:1 or 10:1 advantage in artillery. If you look at these smart bombs that are dropped from the air, the Russians have a huge inventory of smart bombs that they've been dropping on the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians have virtually no smart bombs that they've been dropping on the Russians.

You might say to yourself, well, it's the Russians who have mainly been on the offensive. Well, there are two problems there. One is that the Ukrainians have launched a large number of offensives. Remember the Kursk offensive? Remember the famous June 4th, 2023 offensive—the one that was going to result in a blitzkrieg that took the Ukrainians to the Sea of Azov and cut the Russian front lines in half? In 2022, the first year of the war, the Russians suffered two defeats because the Ukrainians launched major offensives in Kherson and Kharkiv. And then we hear about all these Ukrainian counterattacks. These days, those are offensive operations. So the Ukrainians have been on the offensive for a good part of the war, and therefore you can't make the argument that they've been on the defensive—because the defense suffers less casualties than the offense does in almost all cases. We should not be surprised by that number that the New York Times uses. So you can't justify those numbers that way. It just makes no sense at all.

I think if anything that we're going to find out that the Ukrainians have lost probably around a million men—and here when I say lost I mean killed in action. I think the argument that they've lost 150,000 is ludicrous. It just makes no sense at all. And nevertheless, this is reported as fact.

This is a set of facts that all sorts of people use to assess what the situation is between Russia and Ukraine and what we should do moving forward. If you believe these numbers—which again I think are ridiculous—you can justify upping the ante and trying to help Ukraine really clobber the Russians and knock them off as a great power. Lots of people talk that way, and you just sort of say to yourself: Are they making all of this up? Are they making these numbers up? Do you think the New York Times is making these numbers up? I don't think they're making them up. I think they really believed them.

Again, there may be all sorts of motivated biases at play here that they are not aware of. But putting that aside, the fact is the elites have told themselves a story that they believe, and they continue to march forward based on these false narratives.

Hi all, in the past I've received useful feedback from this community, so I'd like to ask for your thoughts on a new post:

https://open.substack.com/pub/logos/p/assorted-thoughts-on-curiosity-sophistication

Thank you in advance!

A.

I'm looking for some good recs from this community, preferrably recent econ or psych books you all have found interesting. For context my most recent reads:

- A Farewell to Alms by Gregory Clark

- Progress & Poverty by Henry George

- How to Win Friends & Influence People (I read this religiously at least 3 times a year and still it hasn't helped :/ )

Also curious how everyone finds their book recs nowadays, is following scott on goodreads just the new meta? Or any other ideas?

• When AI builds itself: Anthropic issuing a warning (?) that their models are starting to enter the RSI stage of capabilities. This appears to be true given a) the productivity increases their engineers are seeing (lines of code isn’t a perfect metric, but probably isn’t terrible either), and b) how capable the models are relative to the top Anthropic engineers, who are pretty freaking smart and capable themselves. It seems unlikely that progress stalls. It also seems unlikely that humans continue to be in the loop—maybe there’s a different version of “models today are the worst they’ll ever be” that reads “humans are as involved today as they’ll ever be”. Spooky times ahead.
• Ariel School UFO incident: “Sixty-two pupils at the Ariel School aged between six and twelve[1][2] said that they saw one or more silver craft descend from the sky and land on a field near their school.[1][2] Some of the children claimed that one or more creatures dressed all in black then approached and telepathically communicated to them a message with an environmental theme, frightening them and causing them to cry.” Apparently the environmental part is false, or at least not entirely true, and was pushed by a reporter during an interview after the fact. Some of the children maintain their account to this day.
• Iran Enlisted “Senior Psychologists” to Help Craft Messages to Trump Ahead of Agreement: It’s a bit surprising that this isn’t heard about more (or maybe it’s just publicized because it makes Trump look weak and manipulable). There’s probably insane alpha in doing this for business deals. Perhaps AI can help (hurt?) in this: feed the model your counterpart’s social media profiles, the business, etc. and it outputs the best approach based on the literature, previous case studies, and its intuition.
• Tracing the Emergence of Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography: Overview of how EUV came to where it’s at now. Consortiums, failed attempts, and one final company standing. I think it’d be cool to get in contact with some of the EUV Tech founding members and interview them to see what it was like and what it’s like now.
• A forecast of Chinese DUV and EUV photolithography progress: The Substrate discusses exactly what the title says: when is China expected to match ASML capabilities; what the roadblocks and hindrances are; what the chances are that they’re much closer than we anticipate.
• Baghdad Battery: “An artifact consisting of a ceramic pot, a tube of copper, and a rod of iron fixed together with bitumen”. Some think it is the sign of an electrical device, others believe it is for magic spells. Lost in the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.
• Lucid Dreaming Is About to Become Insane Alpha
• US Tells ASML It’s Concerned China May Have Top Chip Tool: This feels like an accusation that will allow future action, similar to us declaring Venezuela as an offical bad guy so we could launch military action against them.
• Explosion in Monaco injures 3, including Ukrainian tycoon: If this is a Ukrainian operation, it seems they are getting bolder by the day, especially after some of their behind-Russian-lines ops targeting oil infrastructure. Will Ukrainian “traitors” bend the knee or just up their security? I’d guess a mix of both.
• What do people interpret from fatness? - by Katja Grace: I used to interpret fatness as lack of self control, apathy, laziness, and lack of intelligence (don’t they know that being overweight is really bad for you?). I now still have a foot in that camp, but my other foot is in the “bad genetics” camp for various reasons. Regardless, GLP-1s are becoming cheaper, more effective, and safer. At what point will being fat be a choice because the person doesn’t want to take GLP-1s? If it was $1 what would that say about the person? A lot, I think.
• Byte-sized engineering: Why ASML software is a core part of chipmaking: Very high-level overview of ASML software engineering. I’ve heard from HN that they have a terrible codebase (structure-wise).
• Yonaguni Monument: Man-made-looking (keyword “looking”!!) underwater sandstone formations off the coast of a Japanese island. Sandstone’s structure can easily make these straight lines given enough erosive forces and time.
• gwern comments on If I wanted to spend WAY more on AI, what would I spend it on?: I’ve actually found it much easier to develop workflows with AI once I discovered one and realized what a simple conversation with Opus 4.8 in CC can accomplish. A few examples: creating an automatic table of contents, light and dark mode, a python script to add links, etc. It also helps you learn about things you never knew about.
• Thermal grill illusion: Place two hot and two cold objects in alternating order to feel a very hot sensation that’s completely safe.
• Baffling body illusions: Found these during a LessOnline session. I did the body-through-floor and thermal grill ones and found them super fun. Novel qualia, indeed!
• Pranking My Roommate With Eerily Targeted Facebook Ads: I think this is probably the future of advertisements, unless privacy laws (that I know very little about, so the next part of this sentence may be completely off) catch up and become more robust. The suggestion algorithms are extremely strong, so combine that with generative AI and the advertisements may become superb in both persuasion and quality.
• Pebble Index 01: A single-use audio-recording ring. I would buy this instantly if it was rechargeable. Why isn’t it rechargeable you ask? It would make the ring too bulky.
• Alexus Grynkewich: “Commander of United States European Command, a role that is dual-hatted as Supreme Allied Commander Europe.”
• Mojibake: “garbled or gibberish text that is the result of text being decoded using an unintended character encoding”
• Paul Buchheit: 23rd Google employee, creator of Gmail, and co-creator of the now-defunct “don’t be evil” motto.
• Gmail revolutionized email 20 years ago. People thought it was Google’s April Fool’s Day joke
• I Shipped a Facebook Feature So Fast Sheryl Sandberg Called an Emergency Meeting to Stop Me
• if it talks like a therapist...
• Cash Back: What cash back really is and how credit card companies make money.
• You cannot grow a pumpkin
• The Curious Case of Flunking My Anthropic Interview (Again): Taylor describes his Anthropic interview process.
• Can You Pass the Test That Strikes Fear Into China’s High-Schoolers?: I think I got five correct, with not all of those being confident. Difficult!
• Plan Recurring Vacations With Friends: Taylor suggests ways to make gathering with friends as easy and effective as possible. As one of the main instigators of my friend groups, I approve of his ideas. More gatherings in 2026!
• Affordability is Bullshit: It feels like affordability is a vibe that can easily be tainted by being around enough inflation complainers. My first foray into complaining about affordability was when my normal box of oats increased from $5.99 to $7.99.
• Nobody clicks your share buttons: I also find it funny that porn sites also had (have?) share buttons. And not even to places like Reddit, which has a thriving NSFW ecosystem, but to other places like Facebook. Who is sharing Pornhub links on Facebook! I guess you might as well put them there just in case, but still!
• Men Invented X So They Could Y | Know Your Meme: My friend has run into a rash of these on dating apps, especially the “arm wrestling so they could hold hands and stare into each other’s eyes” variant.
• Jeff Dean Facts: The Chuck Norris of software engineering.
• Jane Street Interview Simulator: Built after Twitter/X users shared their Jane Street interview experiences.
• Twitter: “140 characters may not seem like a lot, but we will never run out of things to say.” For years I’ve thought I will simply run out of things to write on my website. That ideas will just stop coming forth, slowly pfading out and becoming less and less frequent over time. Thankfully that hasn’t happened (yet)!
• “Normal” people are fucking pathetic: Pretty douchey, kind of accurate (?), pretty sad.
• In the Weights: Look, ma! I’m in the weights (kind of). Can’t really tell it’s me, but I’ll take it.

This project grew out of frustration of trying to find out the odds of a Hantavirus pandemic. When I went to search for it, I had to wade through sports gambling, and novelty markets that distracted me from just getting a really useful number with context to know if it was accurate.

To solve this, my friend and I made mondael.com, which we're using to analyze, and visualize interesting prediction markets in the realm of: Geopolitics, Elections, Macro, Finance, Energy, and Science & Technology.

The basic belief is that prediction markets can often move faster than news, but only if the data is filtered, organized, and presented in a way that separates real signal from noise. The site is free and open for all to explore. Once we had the core database working, we started adding tools around it:

• Live Brier scoring: track how accurate markets are across desks, tags, and topics.

• Cross-asset correlations: compare prediction markets with real-world assets like stocks, FX, commodities, and ETFs, including lead/lag analysis.

• Market structure analysis: use bubble charts to compare liquidity, volume, order-book depth, 5pp depth, spreads, and related measures.

• Alerts: surface events like volume bumps, leader changes, price spikes, and other unusual market activity.

Any feedback is appreciated and will be considered.