“…you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” Richard Feynman |
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| 1 | | Netanyahu orders Hebron sealed after a checkpoint attack, days before Israel votes Two Palestinian gunmen opened fire at a checkpoint in Hebron on Friday and were killed; Israeli officials say two soldiers died. Netanyahu ordered the city cordoned off and told forces to prepare a full West Bank closure. WHY Netanyahu says a broad operation is needed to stop further attacks; ministers Smotrich and Ben Gvir want the Palestinian Authority dismantled, and Hamas praised the gunmen. Next: Tuesday’s election, where his main rival is Gadi Eisenkot, and whether the army launches the wider operation. |
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| 2 | | Brazil votes Sunday in a near-tied Lula vs. Flávio Bolsonaro runoff The final Quaest poll had Flávio Bolsonaro at 45% and Lula at 44%. Foreign diplomats in Brasília are discussing recognising the winner quickly to blunt premature outside declarations, Reuters reports. WHY Lula, 80, seeks a fourth term on welfare gains and a shorter work week; Bolsonaro, the former president’s son, promises a harder line on crime, spending limits and his father’s release from prison. Next: results Sunday night, and whether the loser accepts them. |
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| 3 | | FDA approves an immunotherapy that may let some rectal cancer patients skip surgery The FDA gave accelerated approval to GSK’s Jemperli for untreated stage II–III rectal cancers with a DNA-repair defect (dMMR/MSI-H). In a 154-patient trial, almost three-fourths needed no surgery, radiation or chemotherapy after more than two years. WHY These tumours are unusually visible to the immune system; the drug blocks the PD-1 signal they use to hide, so the body clears them without treatments that can damage bowel, bladder and fertility. Next: longer follow-up to confirm how durable the responses are. |
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| 4 | | Clearing rats from atolls lets seabirds help reefs keep pace with rising seas A Science Advances study of 28 islands in the Indian Ocean and French Polynesia found reefs beside rat-free seabird islands grew 1.8 to 2.5 times faster than reefs beside rat-infested ones. WHY Seabirds carry ocean nutrients ashore; their droppings fertilise corals and the parrotfish that make sand, and native plant roots hold that sand in place. Next: rat eradication and replacing coconut plantations, a cheap option where sea walls are impractical; some figures are projections. |
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S&P 7,623.7 −0.52% | NDX 28,957.5 −0.00% | 10Y — — | BRENT $116.72 +3.14% | BTC $80.8k −0.97% |
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| Brent settled at a five-month high as new Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia and fresh US–Iran threats fed supply fears, and yields rose on the inflation risk. Most stocks fell while energy gained and chipmakers steadied; Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon report next week. |
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| Both of today’s essays are about the gap between the picture in your head and what is actually happening. Ben Kuhn argues that the people worth copying are the ones who can look straight at evidence that a job, plan or belief has failed, and pay the cost of saying so early. Sasha Chapin comes at it from the other side: if you chase the result you imagine, you get a counterfeit of it. One says stop protecting the plan; the other says stop staring at the outcome. |
Today’s question Why is the advice so obvious when it’s a friend’s life, and invisible when it’s yours? |
ESSAY benkuhn.net · Ben Kuhn Kuhn’s thesis is that reasoning clearly about uncomfortable truths (this job, plan or belief is wrong) underlies most good decisions. His evidence is Wave’s CEO, who went through about ten failed apps and pulled out of countries where the strategy wasn’t working, writing off years of effort because he could admit it was wasted. The tension is timing, since staring too rarely keeps you stuck and too often means you never commit. Feeds your note: seeing your own situation as clearly as a friend’s. |
ESSAY sashachapin.substack.com · Sasha Chapin A short, candid warning: in any practice, chasing the “after picture” you want (calm, compassion, focus) produces a fake version of it. He walks through three meditation styles where straining for the outcome yields blankness, forced niceness or tense pseudo-concentration, and admits he spent about eighteen months of his early twenties doing exactly this. The open question for a builder is whether you can aim at a goal at all without bending the thing you’re aiming at. Feeds your note: surrender over rigid plans. |
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WORKFLOW karpathy.bearblog.dev Karpathy shipped a real paid app (photo of a menu in, a picture of every dish out) without writing any code himself, using Cursor and Claude. The prototype was fast; the pain was everything around the code: API keys missing from Vercel, about 1,000 lines of outdated Clerk login code, and Stripe matching payments by email instead of user ID. His lesson is that most of the work now lives in dashboards and browser tabs the model can’t see, so pick simple stacks and services with plain-text docs. Read it before your next deploy: it maps exactly where agents trip. |
A notes sparring partner A small script that picks one of your notes each morning and returns a counterargument, two related notes, and a 60-second video outline. | 1 | Clone your personalweb repo and write a Python script that reads src/content/notes and parses each note’s date and text. | | 2 | Pick one note at random, find its two closest notes by keyword overlap, and send all three to a model with Simon Willison’s llm CLI, asking for the strongest objection and a 5-beat video outline. | | 3 | Run it on a daily GitHub Action that emails you the result, then mark which outputs actually made you want to write. |
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AI MODELS simonwillison.net Moonshot’s new model scores 55 on Artificial Analysis, behind only Claude Opus 5.5 at 58, at $2/$10 per million tokens, half Opus’s price. Moonshot says full weights ship by Nov 4. If that holds, a near-frontier model becomes something you can run and modify yourself. |
AI SECURITY simonwillison.net Wiz used AI models to find two remote-code-execution bugs across PHP 8.x, which runs WordPress and Drupal. A leaked video pushed the fix out a day early and exploits spread overnight. AI is speeding up both bug-finding and the race to patch. |
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Tool Open a photo and watch it get painted stroke by stroke. Built from one sentence of prompt: a model of how small a useful weekend tool can be. | | X account Aphoristic one-liners on agency, work and money. Good raw material for video-essay hooks. |
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Until tomorrow. Sat 24 Oct · 09:36 ET |
