“A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.” David Hume |
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| 1 | | Iran says Hormuz stays shut until Washington accepts its terms Iranian officials told Reuters that Tehran sees little chance of a breakthrough before the Nov. 3 US midterms. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the strait “will not be open to everyone” until an agreement is reached; Brent touched $111.99 on Tuesday. WHY Iran is using the strait as leverage and calls the nuclear dispute a pretext; Washington says any deal must close Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon. Next: Pakistan’s army chief Asim Munir is in Tehran to mediate, with Qatar also relaying messages. |
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| 2 | | Drone strike on a market in disputed Abyei kills scores A strike on Amiet market, near Abyei town, killed at least 73 people, according to Abyei’s information minister, who later put the toll at 153. South Sudan blames Sudan’s army, which has not responded. WHY Abyei is oil-rich land claimed by both Sudan and South Sudan since 2011; sources told Reuters the strike hit a fuel depot the Rapid Support Forces had used for supplies in their war with the army. Next: South Sudan has summoned Sudan’s ambassador, and the UN has called for the attacks to stop. |
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| 3 | | Japan launches the first mission to bring back soil from a Martian moon JAXA’s MMX spacecraft lifted off on an H3 rocket from Tanegashima. It is due to land on Phobos and return samples to Australia in 2031, the first ever from a moon other than our own. WHY Nobody knows whether Phobos is a captured asteroid or debris from an ancient impact on Mars; rock in hand could settle it. Next: arrival at Mars in 2027 and a Phobos landing no earlier than December 2028. |
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| 4 | | Amazon deforestation falls to its lowest level since records began Brazil’s PRODES satellite data show 3,335 sq km of Amazon cleared between August 2025 and July 2026, down nearly 42% in a year and the lowest since 1988. WHY The government credits tighter satellite monitoring and stiffer penalties for illegal logging. Next: the Oct. 25 presidential runoff; Lula targets zero illegal deforestation by 2030, and challenger Flávio Bolsonaro has pledged the same by 2029. |
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S&P 7,712.57 +0.28% | NDX 29,490 −0.13% | 10Y 5.12% −3bp | BRENT $108.79 −0.69% | BTC $82.7k +0.87% |
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| Money rotated out of megacap tech: the Russell 2000 rose 1.65% while Meta, Alphabet and Apple fell. Yields slipped after weak September housing data, and Brent gave back a spike to $111.99 on hopes for the Iran talks. |
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Today’s question If every forecast is a recipe rather than a gauge, what does it mean to trust a number you cannot audit? |
ESSAY Silver Bulletin · Nate Silver Silver argues that polls are not a broken gauge that always reads the same amount too blue, so you cannot just correct for 2016 and 2020. Pollsters keep changing the recipe (weighting to past vote, likely-voter screens, herding), so even the direction of the next miss is uncertain. The part that matters most is correlation: treat Senate races as independent coin flips and Democrats look like 91% favourites; model shared error and it drops to the mid-70s. |
POST One Useful Thing · Ethan Mollick Mollick lays out the curve in numbers: the length of task an AI can finish half the time went from about four minutes in 2024 to 17 hours by April 2026, and an exam answer that cost 30 cents now costs 0.04 cents. Progress stays jagged: superhuman at math, still weak at long-form writing. His open problem is control: delegating to agents is closer to “conjuring” than working, and you lose sight of what was actually done. |
ESSAY henrikkarlsson.xyz · Henrik Karlsson Karlsson asks how patterns of tone and rhythm can make trees look new through a car window or make strangers in a church cry together. He rejects evolutionary accounts as too thin (the Kalash hear minor chords as happy) and Schopenhauer’s metaphysics as explaining everything and so nothing. His answer is emergence: music needs its own higher-level concepts, as a dune cannot be read from one grain. The open question is whether that gap can ever be explained or only marvelled at. |
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WORKFLOW geoffreylitt.com · Geoffrey Litt Litt argues that checking an agent’s output is not enough. To keep steering a project you need a working mental model of it, or you build up “cognitive debt.” His fixes come from teaching: an /explain-diff skill that writes a prose “literate diff” ordered by logic rather than by file, a five-question quiz you must pass before shipping, and “micro-worlds”, small tools an agent builds so you can do the work yourself and learn it. |
Make your agent teach you Turn Litt’s explainer-and-quiz loop into a reusable skill for one of your own vibe-coded projects. | 1 | Write an /explain-diff skill: background first, the goal before any code, prose ordered by logic, not by file. | | 2 | Have it end every explainer with five questions, and don’t merge until you can answer them unaided. | | 3 | Run it on your last three changes and note which answers you missed. That is where your model of the code is thin. |
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PREDICTION MARKETS Next Event Horizon BETINT, whose data the WSJ uses, estimated how much Kalshi traders made betting on the new White House press secretary before the announcement, when she was about a 1% favourite; Kalshi opened an investigation. A WSJ report also found about $108M of $167M traded on ADI Predictstreet came from wallets apparently linked to the company. Markets that pool information also pool information nobody should be trading on. |
AI MODELS Interconnects · Nathan Lambert DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (552B parameters, 16B active) leads a price-performance chart on the agentic coding benchmark DeepSWE. Meanwhile DHS barred DeepSeek from federal civilian procurement, and China’s commerce ministry proposed pre-approval before frontier models are shared abroad. Open weights improve just as governments start treating them as exports. |
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Tool Simon Willison’s tool stores the whole LaTeX source in the URL, so a proof becomes a shareable link. | | Tool Ten small editors, from spreadsheets to animation, where the link is the document. No accounts, nothing stored on a server. |
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Until tomorrow. Wed 21 Oct · 19:00 ET |
