“Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.” Alan Turing |
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| 1 | | Israel’s election leaves both blocs short of a majority With about 90% of votes counted, Netanyahu’s bloc holds 53 of 120 Knesset seats, Gadi Eisenkot’s 48, and the two Arab-led parties a record 19. Final results are due November 4. WHY The vote was a referendum on Netanyahu’s wartime record: he wants a right-wing government, Eisenkot wants him out, and the Arab parties say they will help oust him. Next, President Herzog picks a nominee; with no government in about 100 days, Israel votes again. |
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| 2 | | Iran weighs a Qatari plan to end the war as tankers hit mines in Hormuz Iran says it is discussing a plan with mediators to end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Its Revolutionary Guards said three oil tankers caught fire after striking mines on what Iran calls an unauthorized southern route. WHY Iran wants ships on routes it controls near its coast; the US has urged the southern lane, which Trump declared mine-free in August. Tehran is expected to answer the Qatari draft by week’s end. |
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| 3 | | A basic income pilot cut hunger in three Amazon communities A University of Bath evaluation of Cool Earth’s two-year cash pilot for 211 Asháninka and Yanesha people in Peru found households unable to afford nutritious food fell from 73% to 26%, and labour migration from 43% to 18%. WHY Unconditional payments let families stay on their land instead of leaving for wage work, and most interviewees reported reforestation and less burning. The authors call the results preliminary because the pilot had no control group. |
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| 4 | | Restoring one mitochondrial fat reversed age-like muscle wasting in mice University of Copenhagen researchers report in Nature Aging that falling cardiolipin drives the fibre shift seen in ageing muscle; restoring it to about two-thirds of normal reversed wasting and prevented early deaths in mice. WHY The shift looks protective, muscle trading power for defence against oxidative stress, which is why antioxidants made the mice worse. Cardiolipin is also lower in older people’s muscle; the team now wants to test whether it can be raised there. |
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S&P 7,744.0 +0.28% | NDX 29,813.2 — | 10Y 5.04% +5bp | BRENT $115.32 +1.26% | BTC $81.3k — |
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| The Fed held rates, but two dissents in favour of a hike kept a December increase in play and pushed the 10-year above 5%. SK Hynix’s record quarter lifted chipmakers, and Brent rose on Houthi attacks and fears of renewed US strikes on Iran. |
| RELEASED FOMC (Oct) held at 3.75–4.00%; 10–2 vote, with Cook and Hammack dissenting for a 25bp hike |
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Today’s question Why is it easier to be wise about a friend’s life than your own? |
ESSAY Dynomight · Dynomight A working mathematician says AI has made him about 50% more productive, and that humans still matter because models are weak at building good abstractions and clear exposition. Pushing the model for simpler proof strategies once tightened a bound from 9.7 to 7.1. The tension: he wrote it without AI as a time capsule, and admits his defence of exposition might just be humans guarding their relevance. Feeds your note on outsourcing less of your thinking. |
ESSAY Contraptions · Venkatesh Rao Rao argues AI anxiety repeats mercantilism’s mistake: treating a resource as scarce and hoardable when abundance can create new demand. His mechanism is the “industrious revolution”: tea, sugar and tobacco made pre-industrial Britons choose to work more, lifting working days from about 250 a year to 300, and he expects cheap intelligence to make people invest more thought, not less. The open question: is intelligence far more rivalrous than tea? |
ESSAY From the Dining Table · Hannah Moel A short first-person piece on Solomon’s paradox: we reason more wisely about other people’s problems than our own, and the gap is distance, not missing wisdom. It leans on Igor Grossmann’s experiments, where people reasoned better about strangers’ relationship conflicts than their own. The hook: the wisest king in the story failed at his own life, not for lack of knowledge. Feeds your note on advice you can give but not take. |
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WORKFLOW Anthropic Engineering Agents on long tasks drift and grade their own work too kindly, so Anthropic split building from judging: a generator writes code while a separate, skeptical evaluator clicks through the running app and fails anything below written thresholds. A solo run of a retro game maker cost $9 and shipped a broken play mode; the full harness cost $200 and worked. The cheap lessons transfer to your setup today: a fresh reviewer session with a checklist, handoff notes when context gets long, and one commit per passing feature. |
A Solomon’s-paradox journal A small tool that rewrites your dilemma as a friend’s, asks what you would tell them, and keeps every answer so you can reread your own advice. | 1 | With Claude Code, build a one-page app: you type a dilemma, it returns the same situation about a friend and asks for your advice. | | 2 | Append each dilemma and your advice to a dated markdown file, so it can feed your notes site later. | | 3 | Borrow the harness idea: open a fresh session as a skeptical reviewer with a written checklist, and commit only when it passes. |
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PREDICTION MARKETS ABC News Utah brought 13 counts of violating its gambling ban, plus one of profiting from illegal activity, naming CEO Tarek Mansour and COO Luana Lopes Lara, after a federal judge ruled state law applies and the 10th Circuit declined to pause enforcement. Kalshi calls it “crazy overreach” and says only federal law governs event contracts; the CFTC has sued at least 10 states on that theory. With cases in about 20 states, analysts expect the Supreme Court to settle who regulates the industry. |
AI CAREERS Latent Space Felix Rieseberg says he stopped using traditional coding interviews because Claude now beats candidates at them and they don’t predict who ships. His advice to juniors: chase business impact, pick one radical idea, and build a weekend prototype instead of writing specs. |
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Tool A LaTeX alternative where equations are first-class and the preview updates as you type; the free tier covers Analysis problem sets and notes. | | Blog The classic case for atomic, densely linked notes written for yourself: a model for growing your short notes into essays. |
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Until tomorrow. Thu 29 Oct · 09:36 ET |
