“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” Ralph Waldo Emerson |
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| 1 | | Brazil votes in a tight runoff between Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro Polls close at 16:00 ET; electronic counting usually gives a result within hours. Flávio Bolsonaro led the first round by more than 2.2 million votes, and AP says final polls showed a neck-and-neck race. WHY Lula runs on living costs and security and calls his rival a threat to democracy; Bolsonaro, a Trump ally, runs on crime and food prices and says he would seek amnesty for his father. Next: the winner will name at least three Supreme Court justices. |
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| 2 | | Israel heads into Tuesday’s election with neither bloc near a majority AP calls the vote, the first since the October 7, 2023 attacks, a likely referendum on Benjamin Netanyahu. Polls show Gadi Eisenkot’s new Yashar party ahead of Likud, but neither camp at the 61 of 120 seats needed to govern. WHY Netanyahu calls an independent October 7 inquiry a political witch-hunt and frames the vote as “right or Palestine”; the opposition runs on that inquiry and on ending Orthodox draft exemptions. Next: exit polls Tuesday at 16:00 ET, then weeks of coalition talks. |
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| 3 | | A personalised mRNA vaccine cut melanoma recurrence by 42% in a phase 3 trial In 1,137 patients whose high-risk melanoma had been removed, adding Moderna and Merck’s intismeran to Keytruda cut the risk of recurrence or death by 42% versus Keytruda alone, results presented at the ESMO congress in Madrid show. WHY Each vaccine is built from the mutations in a patient’s own tumour, so the immune system learns to spot those cells if they return; the ICR’s Alan Melcher calls it strong proof of principle but wants longer survival data. Next: a US filing, and trials in kidney, bladder and lung cancer. |
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| 4 | | Russia and Ukraine agree a humanitarian ceasefire in occupied Oleshky The White House says Melania Trump brokered a local ceasefire so aid can enter the Russian-held town on the Dnipro and civilians can leave by a designated route. Russia’s general staff said its forces would hold fire on the Kherson axis. WHY AP reports residents of the town, flooded when the Kakhovka dam collapsed in 2023, face hunger and disease before winter; Ukraine had long asked for a truce to evacuate them, though its negotiator warns it will be hard to implement. Next: evacuations this week, and Putin has agreed to resume US-mediated talks as soon as next month. |
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S&P 7,623.7 −0.52% | NDX 28,957.5 — | 10Y 5.00% +5bp | BRENT $116.72 +3.14% | BTC $80.6k −0.22% |
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| Oil set the tone: Brent settled at its highest since April after fresh Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia, reviving inflation worries and pushing the 10-year back to 5%. Chips steadied after Thursday’s selloff over AI spending, so the Nasdaq fell less than the Dow; the Fed meets Wednesday and is widely expected to hold. |
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Today’s question What would you build if you trusted your own taste over the consensus? |
ESSAY sashachapin.substack.com · Sasha Chapin Chapin argues that if you listen without judging, people reveal most of who they are within minutes, through posture, eye contact and the way they tell their own stories. His example: someone retelling a work dispute can show a victim mindset without saying so, and over years this perception quietly sorts which relationships deepen. The surprising turn is that people who see your blind spots often stay silent on purpose, out of compassion, until you’re ready. It pushes your note on wanting friends to feel safe confiding in you. |
ESSAY benkuhn.net · Ben Kuhn Kuhn, an engineer now at Anthropic, argues that safe rules like “experts are usually right” make you throw away specific knowledge you actually have. His own case: he valued startup equity by deferring to VC prices, ignoring what he knew about Wave’s growth and founders, and badly underrated it. The hook is the asymmetry: underconfidence is usually the costlier error, but its damage is invisible, because no one sees the ideas that were never tried. It speaks to your note on thinking for yourself instead of outsourcing it. |
ESSAY karpathy.bearblog.dev · Andrej Karpathy Karpathy argues that frontier labs are not building animal-like minds that learn from experience; they are summoning “ghosts,” intelligences shaped by human text. Pretraining does the job evolution does for animals, a crude but dense starting point, which is why a zebra can run minutes after birth and a model can write with no lived experience at all. The open question: can ghosts be pushed toward learning from their own experience, or will they stay as different from us as planes are from birds? |
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WORKFLOW addyo.substack.com Osmani argues the bottleneck in agent-assisted coding has moved from writing code to knowing it is correct, so the highest-leverage move is giving the agent checks it can run itself. Concretely: write the end-to-end test for your one key user flow before prompting, add one property test (“the cart total always equals the sum of its items”) that a library hammers with thousands of inputs, and keep the test command fast and quiet. The catch he leaves open: if the same agent writes the feature and the test, both can share one misunderstanding. |
Note threader A small script that reads your notes and pairs the ones circling the same idea, so each pair becomes the seed of a 1–5 minute video. | 1 | Before any prompting, write one test: given your surrender note and your building note, the script must return them as a pair. | | 2 | Have an agent write threader.py that embeds every file in src/content/notes and prints the five closest pairs, each with a one-line shared thread. | | 3 | Run the test until it passes, then pick one pair and outline the video it suggests. |
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AI STARTUPS business-standard.com (Bloomberg) OpenAI is seeking about $30 billion at a $1.25 trillion valuation, down $150 billion from the figure discussed earlier, with Coatue in talks to co-lead, Bloomberg reports. The cut came as tech stocks fell on worries about AI spending after Meta’s and Tesla’s results. The thing to watch is Anthropic’s IPO, expected next month, which could reset what investors pay for frontier labs. |
PREDICTION MARKETS predictionnews.com Combined weekly volume in crypto contracts on the two CFTC-regulated platforms hit a record $2.7 billion, driven mostly by bets on Bitcoin’s price, per TradingView data. It shows the category drifting from forecasting events toward short-horizon price trading. Meanwhile attorneys general in Maryland, Ohio and Tennessee are pressing state cases against the platforms. |
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X account Physicist and philosopher of knowledge; short, sharp posts on explanation, optimism and why problems are soluble. | | Tool The Python property-testing library behind today’s Build idea: state a rule, and it hunts for the smallest input that breaks it. |
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Until tomorrow. Sun 25 Oct · 13:32 ET |
