📺 Only Murders in the Building, Season 5 declined in quality by quite a bit near the middle, enough to have me stop watching. Good thing we are a family of completionistis, because the show picked up steam and pulled off one of the best endings of the run. I for one cannot wait to see the crew in London, schmoozing with all the British guest stars.
Apple rejected an astronomy app from the iOS App Store because “it was astrology”. When the author appealed, Apple doubled down because “We understand that the app includes a live tarot reading feature.” Ridiculous, right?
Well. The author in question is Terry Godier, and while I understand that he has gained quite the following in recent months, I am not a fan. He is unabashedly pro undisclosed AI writing, having conjured — “written” would be inappropriate in this context — a whole essay on large language models being a whole new communication technology. Trigger warning for those sensitive to LLM-ese.
The app, “Dark Hours”, was supposed to be an iOS-native version of this website. It has some truly useful information on the quality of the night sky for stargazing at any given location. It also has the tells of AI generation: too wordy — or overly verbose, if you prefer LLM talk — in some places, too technical in others. Many small digits scattered around the screen. It even manages to fit a this-not-that in what should be a technical explanation.
I have nothing against using LLMs as a coding aide. Dave Weiner sings Claude praises daily in his blog, while being realistic about its limits. Half of the ATP Podcast is an advertisement both paid and unpaid for OpenAI and Anthropic. The creator of Pedometer++, Widgetsmith and many other apps, “Underscore” David Smith, had a good post on his use cases. If you look at their products you could never tell that they were “made by” AI, because they weren’t. If any of them has ever made a fully “vibe-coded” app, they have yet to publish it under their name.
But then if you do fully vibe-code an app, and I am not a programmer so professionals please chime in, can you and do you vet every single line of code? “Live tarot reading” is a weird mistake for a human reviewing an app to make, unless there is a live tarot reading advertisement (or, why not, full functionality) somehow baked into the thousands of lines of code. Stranger things have happened than an app behaving differently depending on the IP address, though they usually try to hide something from the App Store reviewers, not show it to them.
All this to say, the story smells and I’d withhold judgement until we have more information. Unless, of course, it was Apple using automated LLM-based review even in the appeal process, in which case: a plague on all their houses.
the crazy thing is not what Adolf wants, but the way he sees it & starts out to get it. I know he’s a clown, but by god, I like the boy!
Yikes! I do wonder what he would have made of Lovecraft Country.
🎙️ For all the complaints I had about ASCO’s oncology podcasts, I must admit not all professional societies are as bad. Hemetalks from ASH has much more fluid dialogue and more interesting topics. They even had a patient come in to talk about their experience going through a workup. Recommended!
If you have followed this blog long enough you will know that I am an unabashed fan of the life and work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, pugilistic social media presence and all. There is no simple way to summarize why — this post from the economist Branko Milanović is as good of an attempt as any — and reducing his Incerto series of books to a collection of One-Neat-Tricks (Ergodicity! Lindy! Skin in the game!) would not do them justice.
Having said that, here is One Neat Trick: when deciding to act, think about the best-case and the worst-case scenarios and try to pick one with known and limited downside and a potentially unlimited upside. The classic example here is buying stock options: for pennies on the dollar you purchase the right to buy stock at a certain price by a certain date. If the stock costs less than that price by the time it expires your only loss is the price of the option. But in the unlikely but possible case it skyrockets, you can pocket a good chunk of change. [Note: People misunderstand this as Taleb recommending that people from all walks of life go into options trading. Far from it. In fact, one thing he said at my first RWRI years ago which has served me well is that if you are not a professional trader and you earn money from a different profession, your priority should be capital preservation, not generation. ]
The flipside and what you should definitely not do is selling uncovered stock options. Yes, most of them will expire and be worthless and you will get to keep the modest steady income derived from the selling price. But in the unlikely but possible case it skyrockets, and you don’t actually own those stocks — that’s the “uncovered” part, and yes people actually do that — you will need to purchase them on the open market at that very high price. D’oh.
Rarely are real-life choices this clear. You usually have to pick between several bad options with the same limited upside and different downsides. Case in point — and we are finally getting to the point of the title — is what the Colorado town of Erie has to deal with. Some houses in Erie are yards away from the Draco pad, one of several new fracking projects slithering around Denver. The city council was initially against it, then one member did an about turn, changed his vote, and allowed the sale of mineral and oil rights “for up to $35 million over the next two decades” along with some 160 acres of land previously used for drilling.
Quoth the Mayor, Andrew Moore: “So when we get to the point of, ‘Hey, the state approved this’ — I can’t change that,” Moore said. “But I think we need to work to get as much as we possibly can for Erie.”
In case you missed it, his thinking was that the state approved it already, drilling is down in the next-door Weld County and Erie can’t stop it, so they might as well get something out of it, like keeping the 10/10 elementary school and building up some more of the infrastructure. The downside is that it is and the upside looks good, so what’s wrong with that?
Well, if you stopped to think about it for more than a millisecond a question may come to mind: why on Earth would a publicly traded company give anything to the town if they were going to drill and get the oil anyway, There Will Be Blood-style? Out of the goodness of their corporate hearts? Please.
First, the upside is not what it seems. This is from yesterday’s Denver Post:
Under the agreement negotiated by Owens, Erie would receive a $4.5 million upfront payment and 3% royalty interest for the life of the project, which the town projected at the time of the council’s vote could range from $19 million to $31 million. The royalties wouldn’t kick in until SM Energy has recovered 200% of its cost to develop Draco.
$4.5 million is significantly less than $35M, as there are no guarantees whatsoever that any royalties would be paid out: those development costs can skyrocket, particularly when it’s the company itself estimating how much everything cost. Fungible accounting ftw.
Worse yet, by selling their rights I can only assume that the townsfolk are giving up the opportunity to sue the company for any untoward consequences of pumping millions of gallons of pressurized fluid into a landscape pockmarked with old oil and gas wells. Paying the town $4.5 million to not have to think about would be a steal, and easily defensible to even the stingiest of the board members.
So these are the two bad, ugly, abysmal choices put forth: take the $4.5M upside in return for the unlimited downside if and when things go wrong and there is no one to hold liable; or don’t take anything but lawyer up and reserve the right to block everything in courts at the first sign of trouble while also getting some money for potential damages.
My choice would be preservation, but then one of the big reasons we are in Denver and not north of it is that we didn’t want to make choices like that.
🍿 Backrooms (2026) was the horror movie Wes Anderson would have made if he made horror movies and forgot everything he knew about plot. Fortunately, the plot was not the point — the physicality of the set and special effects more than make up for it.
I am shocked — shocked! — to find a zoomer “AI investor” caught swimming naked at the first turn of the tide:
Aschenbrenner, who had no previous trading experience before starting the fund, worked for the FTX Future Fund, the philanthropic arm of Sam Bankman-Fried’s empire before it collapsed in late 2022. He later joined OpenAI’s “Superalignment” team before being fired over an alleged leak.
With such an illustrious pedigree, how could things have possibly gotten so wrong so quickly?
And in the unlikely case you were still wondering if there was an AI bubble, even FT called it.
🍿 The Dink (2026) was a goofy blast. I knew absolutely nothing about pickleball beforehand and know marginally more having seen the movie. It still seems kind of dumb — why don’t they just take up badminton? — and therefore the perfect centerpiece for a Dodgeball/Blades of Glory-style farce.
PSA: when making tiramisu from scratch, do not — I repeat, do not — use mascarpone from Whole Foods unless you are really into tiramisoup.