ZD 26.32: Optimized to the Limit
The limit pushes back.
🏇 Too Thoroughly Bred (Works in Progress)
Horses have been selectively bred for thousands of years. Humanity might have reached the point of diminishing returns. A handful of stallions sire greater and greater numbers of offspring; genetic diversity is collapsing. Nineteen of the 20 horses that started the Kentucky Derby traced their lineage to Secretariat, but none inherited his double-sized heart.
🐻 Only Small Forest Fires Can Prevent Bigger Fires (Michael Woudenberg)
The Great Fire of 1910 started America’s crusade for total wildfire suppression. By the 1930s, the U.S. Forest Service mandated all fires be out by 10 a.m. the day after discovery. Initially, this policy was successful. In reality, it just created the fuel for much bigger, infinitely more destructive infernos.
🦅 Endangered Housing (Maxwell Tabarrok)
A Harvard University study showing how good intentions can go wrong. The number of endangered species scaled exponentially from 82 in 1970 to more than 1400 today. The layers of protection have displaced some 9.1 million housing permits, concentrated in places like San Francisco and Los Angeles where housing is already very dear.
🏗️ Data Center Construction: The Local View (Jasmine Sun)
When the data center is coming to your backyard, it feels different. Janesville, WI was once home to a humming GM plant, but the locals would rather keep the bare slab than hear the hum of a server farm. Mount Pleasant, WI, was once supposed to be home to a giant Foxconn factory and nearly went broke for its troubles. The subsequent deal with Microsoft was by the book, but residents did not want to be taken twice. Underneath everything, nobody trusts big technology, especially when they want to come to your neighborhood.
🧓 Blue Zones Are Not Real (Michael Easter)
People tell you about these legendary blue zones — places where magical lifestyle and good genes lead to measurably longer lives. It turns out those places also tend to have generous pension schemes and poor record keeping in the early 20th century. The single biggest predictor for being a supercentenarian is to not have a birth certificate to prove it.
🛢️ Crude’s Inventory Conundrum (Bob Elliott)
Contrary to some predictions, oil prices have remained somewhat stable even with the Strait of Hormuz still effectively closed. A big part of this story is how China has cut oil imports impressively. But observed inventory levels don’t match consumption. Where is the missing Chinese oil?
🎫 Bots Broke the Box Office Numbers (StephenFollows.com - Using data to explain the film industry)
The trusted source of box office numbers was taken down by an army of bots. They were searching for early returns for their Polymarket bets. This could happen to you too.
🕵️ Bots Talking Among Themselves (Simon Willison)
Last week, we shared that Hugging Face was attacked by a swarm of OpenAI agents. The story is much, much deeper. The attackers created a message board to talk among themselves as they debated the morality of escaping the sandbox. Simon Willison has a great lead-in, but if you want the good stuff you might want to just skip directly to the eye-popping Black Hat conference talk.
🧑🔬 AI Outruns the Math Class (Kai Williams)
Mathematicians are starting to see a world where AI writes a verifiably correct proof in a way no human can understand. Will AI’s superpowers discourage humans from thinking deeply about math?
🙈 Use AI for Work but Not at the Gym (Bruce Schneier)
Don’t use AI when the point of the task is a workout. It is just as productive as having a robot lift your weights at the gym. Practice is important, even if we can have a machine do the work.
The Look
The Premier League feels predictable according to Dan Fleming. He ran 10,000 simulated seasons to prove the point.
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