March 2026 Links

nomagicpill
Wed, 01 Apr 2026 19:17:37 GMT

Why We Have Prison Gangs: Q&A whose ultimate answer is that gangs are a form of governance in a place that has little. Skarbek also talks about what being in a gang is like, rules they have in place (bedtime, taxes, no affiliating with sex offenders or former LEOs), similarities.

Plane Crash: Delian gives a play-by-play of his plane engine cutting off mid-flight, culminating in him crash landing on a golf course. The lessons learned extended elsewhere, namely where else did he simply say "I'll do it later", when later wasn't guaranteed?

Sirat is not about the end of the world: A great perspective on Sirat that contains spoilers.

Everything you ever wanted to know about Roblox, but were afraid to ask a 12-year-old

Maybe there's a pattern here?: Technology, no matter what its original purpose, often ends up getting developed or modified for war.

BASE experiment at CERN succeeds in transporting antimatter

Shameless Guesses, Not Hallucinations: Scott makes the case that we never hallucinated on test questions we didn't know the answer to, we just shamelessly guessed in hopes that just maybe our guess was correct. Are the models doing the same?

Roblox game-buying frenzy is turning teens into millionaires

Popular Roblox game Welcome to Bloxburg reportedly acquired by Embracer Group in $100 million deal: Markets in everything!

Dynamic inconsistency: "a situation in which a decision-maker's preferences change over time in such a way that a preference can become inconsistent at another point in time." Examples include governments never negotiating with terrorists and students wanting to push their exam back by one day.

Feeder judge: "prominent judges in the American federal judiciary whose law clerks are frequently selected to become law clerks for the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.[1] Feeder judges are able to place comparatively many of their clerks on the Supreme Court for a variety of reasons, including personal or ideological relationships with particular justices, prestigious and respected positions in the judiciary, and reputations for attracting and training high-quality clerks."

AI vs AI: Agent hacked McKinsey's chatbot and gained full read-write access in just two hours

Teach Me To Smoke: An exercise showing how "dumb" computers are and the difficulty programmers have in making sure the programs they write do what they want them to. I was taught this by being asked how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but I suppose times are different now.

Being John Rawls

Cryptologic Warfare Activity 66: "provides trained and ready Sailors to support the collection and exploitation of targets in support of national and strategic level signals intelligence and cyberspace operational priorities." I wonder why they are so open about this instead of just keeping it off the internet?

A Culture of Fear at the Firm That Manages Bill Gates's Fortune: An exposé on Michael Larson, Bill Gates' family office's (Cascade Asset Management) chief investment officer.

The Day After Move 37

Iran war chokes off helium supplies in threat to chipmakers and healthcare: I've seen this directly. Apparently some dude heard about this and was planning to buy a tanker full of helium and sell it to [redacted] at 4x the price, but chickened out when he realized what it would cost him. A similar situation happened in 2022 with the Russia-Ukraine war disrupting the production of noble gases.

Thanks to the Iran Hawks, Nuclear Nonproliferation Is Dead

Pakistan's Big Moment: Anik discusses the relationship that nuclear Pakistan has with Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Will they get nukes next?

AI Is Colliding With America's Affordability Crisis: Survey of Americans asking about daily affordability, AI, job losses. I think this ties in nicely to Justis Mills' "Everything's Expensive" is Negative Social Contagion.

AI Exposure of the US Job Market: Andrej looks at what jobs have heavy exposure to AI replacing them.

How is Felix Today? Why I put my whole life into a single database: Pretty self-explanatory. Lots of data and insights. I bet plugging an LLM in here would reap even more insights.

Year Unplugged: Going a full year with zero screens while tracking a lot of biomarkers.

Drake Equation: Customizable visualizer with some explanations of the equation itself. (Thanks to L for the link!)

Child's Play: A fun read about the state of SF startups run by younger people with a mindset to match.

Unorthodox Financial Advice: Calculate how much your time is worth. Figure out what debt is worth paying off. Use leverage to invest in index funds (I had never considered this before). Credit card churning because free money. HSAs as the ultimate investment vehicle. Removing your emergency fund because index funds are still effectively liquid (I think I mostly agree with this, and am doubtful that the cost-benefit of taxes vs. returns is in favor of the EF). Traditional vs. Roth IRAs. Rolling over 401(k) into Roth IRA. Tax loss harvesting.

HSA – The Ultimate Retirement Account

The Route to Performance: Howard Marks explains that being consistently above average wins the race (and the money!).

First Quarter Performance

How the Game Should Be Played

Conflicted on Ramsey: Jeff discusses how some Ramsey advice is generally good for the people who need it, but some of it is just plain silly, such as "if you have $10k of debt at 2% interest and $11k of debt at 10% interest, you should pay down the $10k first."

Price Gouging

Manager Of Investment Firm Pleads Guilty To Defrauding Investors In "Pre-IPO" Scheme: Matt Levine has been talking about how a lot of people are trying to get an in to private companies that are about to IPO. As expected, this is appears ripe for trust-me-bro-I-got-you fraud.

Label By Usable Volume: Chip bags found to be a whopping 20%.

Chore Standards: Jeff suggests "giving tasks to the person with the highest standards in that [chore] area", along with suggestions on how to make it a bit more fair if it feels unfair.

Here's to the Polypropylene Makers: Factory workers pulled 12-hour shifts for four weeks in complete isolation to keep pumping out a key ingredient for masks. Good on them for doing so, good on the company for paying them accordingly, and good on the world for letting them pay them that much!

Sobriety: Blair discusses Mark's newfound sobriety among life woes and how it is made him a much better person. Alcohol is underrated as a life detractor: it makes you more lethargic, angier, lazier, and a host of other bad things.

A Spanish-Speaking Robot in my Pocket: I think ChatGPT voice mode is severely underrated for things like this, which also includes just learning in general while your hands are occupied. I used to use ChatGPT voice mode while driving to ask it different history questions, test my understanding of things, etc. If only Anthropic stopped focusing on enterprise capture and made a voice mode...

The Simple Solution to Traffic: Wire all the car brains together!

A new lawsuit claims Gemini assisted in suicide

Marriage over, €100,000 down the drain: the AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion

Oracle and OpenAI End Plans to Expand Flagship Data Center: Key word "expand". They are still on track with the original deal and a few others, but aren't expanding. Meta swooped in and snagged the extra real estate.

The Two Engineers Who Scaled Cursor to $2 Billion Just Joined the Company Musk Said He Built Wrong: I suppose with Musk's financial backing a lot is possible...

Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters: I am doubtful they will be able to catch up at this rate (confidence = 70%).

The Man Who Thought He Could Keep AI Safe: A short look into Demis Hassabis's AI safety efforts as part of a book promotion.

Claude Mythos: A potential leaked blog post providing details of Anthropic's next model, Mythos. A few people were up in arms of Twitter asking them to change the name to something less Lovecraftian, but everyone's gotta admit it sounds pretty awesome, so who knows if they'll change it.

Anthropic Tells Judge Billions at Stake If US Shuns AI Tool (3)

Anthropic Tells Judge Billions at Stake If US Shuns AI Tool (3)

Joe Kent: "an American politician, former United States Army warrant officer, and former Central Intelligence Agency paramilitary officer who served as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center from 2025 to 2026." He resigned in 2026 in protest of the 2026 Iran war.

Shannon M. Kent: "a United States Navy cryptologic technician and member of JSOC's Intelligence Support Activity who was killed in the 2019 Manbij bombing. She was the wife of Joe Kent, who entered politics in response to her death." The ISA is one of the more obscure groups in the U.S. military, so I find it interesting that she was publicly labeled as an ISA member (assuming Wikipedia is correct, I didn't bother to keep searching).

A Track Star, Doping Allegations, & The NCAA's Anti-Doping Policy Exposed: Peptides strike again!

Gamblers trying to win a bet on Polymarket are vowing to kill me if I don't rewrite an Iran missile story

The Salaries of 60 New Yorkers: Some entries I was surprised by were interior designer ($1.5MM, expected less), coffee-cart owner ($47k, expected more, but maybe the shops are still the go-to), newstand owner ($4k, WTF?!), restaurant owner ($75k, I guess margins are as bad as people say!).

New test site: taketest.xyz: Some fun tests coded up by Claude and Emil Kirkegaard. Apparently I'm not as generally knowledgable as I thought I was (80th percentile)!

Dishwashing Home Robot Maker Sunday Hits $1.15 Billion Valuation: Training includes using the same hands the robot uses.

The TV Generals Have Something to Sell You About Iran: Ken calls out Petraeus, Keane, and Hertling for a) saying a lot of words that don't mean anything in the end, and b) being heavily invested in it (Petraeus is high up at KKR, who has money in the region; Keane sits on the board of General Dynamics (see the Redeye link above) and AM General; Hertling gets paid for his insights and avoids saying anything too far to one side to protect his reputation).

FIM-43 Redeye: A man-portable surface-to-air missile system developed by General Dynamics. Us MW2 boys may think it's the same as a (FIM-92) Stinger, but it's not! (NMP lore: I was the guy who would shoot down your Harrier, Pave Low, chopper gunner, and AC-130 within seconds of it getting called in. Can't have you dropping a nuke on me, sorry!)

Dan Caine: Four-star general and 22nd chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Nicknamed "Raizin" for his aggressive flying style.

Daniel R. Hokanson: U.S. Army general who held many leadership positions (a bit odd that Wikipedia doesn't have his promotion dates—I've found that they tend to have them for most generals). His nephew, Griffin, won the 2025 Best Ranger Competition.

2019 Manbij bombing: Suicide bombing in Syria attributed to ISIS.

Emil Michael: Master dealmaker who served as Uber's chief business officer, responsible for helping them break into the Chinese market. Oddly enough, between my adding this to my links in early March and my publishing these, contributor Ooligan changed the photo from his official USG portrait to a "better photo" (the current one), which I actually feel is worse. I feel like Wikipedia should have a rule about official USG portraits being required for active USG employees.

Jay Clayton (attorney): U.S. attorney for SDNY. Formerly chairman of SEC.

Neomi Rao: Appointed in 2019 by Trump.

Gregory G. Katsas: Appointed in 2017 by Trump. Supposedly a top feeder judge, along with Sutton.

Michael Mongan: "served as the Solicitor General of California from 2019 to 2025". He also served as Anthropic's lawyer during the Anthropic vs. DoD/DoW supply chain risk lawsuit, which is how I found his name.

Millennium Hires Four Citadel Stock Traders in Post-Bonus Churn: Saaket Mehta, Steven Jozkowski, Adam Weitzman, and Daniel Mazur.

the case for linkposts (and a list of my favourites): Ma, look! I made it on a not not Talmud post again!

assorted links — 3.26.26: Parker puts a few links out there. I especially like the Holdco Tycoon.

Dry Scoop Your Creatine: This works! I was expecting an experience similar to the cinnamon challenge, but was pleasantly surprised! This will be my go-to creatine inhal...consumption method from here on out.

'I Deserve a Little Treat,' Says Woman Who Has Never Denied Herself Anything: In all seriousness, I suspect this is a more serious problem for health than most people think. So many times I've seen people reward their exercise with something that effectively negates the work they just put in (assuming they're trying to lose weight). Exercise is the reward! The treat is for rare occasions!

The Public Fires Kristi Noem: This is a good reminder that enough public negative sentiment will cause politicians to do things to make the public happier, else it risks their re-election and control odds. Protesting does work when done correctly and effectively!

Roberts defends Supreme Court against Trump attacks

Judge Ejects Federal Prosecutor From Court and Orders Bosses to Testify

Judge Orders Prosecutors to Testify - full transcript: See above link for backstory.

Trump Team to Hold Daily Meetings on Getting Revenge

Netflix Is Telling Writers to Dumb Down Shows Since Viewers Are on Their Phones: Once you notice this it's hard to unnotice.

'Five Nights at Epstein's' Game Goes Viral at US School Campuses

NYC singles are looking for love at Medieval Times: 'It's like Hooters— but for women': I recently went to Medieval Times and was surprised at the amount of seemingly single, attractive women there. I would also think that being a knight at MT wouldn't be considered attractive. But hey, to each their own! (And yes, I did yell "huzzah!" a few times.)

Have You Heard About Whole Foods Jail?: If not, go conspicuously steal something and let me know if you find out what it is.

Delta Force Sicario Border Scene: Are Those Guys CAG?: A review of Larry Vickers' (former CAG) review of the Sicario border scene.

Baby-faced Goldman Sachs bankers could be fired over 'unauthorized' magazine photo shoots: This made headlines within Goldman the day it was released. These guys obviously love the hustle—they should get promoted!

02/05/26 - Remember the key, no matter which scenario it is, you should pay for dinner before you head back up again.

Maotai: "a style of baijiu made in the Chinese town of Maotai in Guizhou province ... the spirit has served as part of the standard fare for Chinese diplomatic meetings and dinners."

Laura Alito Is the Best Daughter of a Judge Ever: "all web-based evidence of their existence is likely to disappear soon" was prescient: there are very few pictures and information of Alito's children on the internet, except for during his confirmation hearings.

Alito's Wife Shocked Even the Activist Who Secretly Recorded Her

Eric Zhu: A young guy with some agency (according to Sam Kriss, at least)!

[Traveler, your footprints]: By Antonio Machado.

Katie Holmes had her own secret entrance into Whole Foods

Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over'

Dnepropetrovsk maniacs: The larger story of the infamous "Three Guys One Hammer" video that circulated the web man years ago. Two of the assailants are serving life in prison in Ukraine.

Discuss