“How much trouble he avoids who does not look to see what his neighbour says or does or thinks…” Marcus Aurelius |
|
| |
|
| 1 | | Iran says tankers struck mines and caught fire leaving Hormuz Iran’s Revolutionary Guard says tankers hit mines over the past day while exiting the strait by an unauthorized route; the AP could not confirm the claim, and an oil slick has already shut beaches in the northern UAE. WHY Iran says ships must use routes it permits; U.S. officials have told regional governments to prepare for possible renewed strikes after the Nov. 3 midterms, the AP reports. Next: Iran’s reply to a message from Vice President Vance. |
|
| 2 | | Spain’s high-speed rail crash toll reaches 74 as a control-room order is probed A Renfe train rear-ended a stationary Iryo train near Urda, Toledo, on Wednesday; the Interior Ministry puts the dead at 74, with 15 people in critical condition. WHY Transport Minister Óscar Puente says that after a computer failure, central command let trains resume at normal speed with one stalled ahead, an order he called “inexplicable.” Next: why controllers did not see the stalled train. |
|
| 3 | | UN tally: 252 million hectares now under restoration in 149 countries A UNEP progress report on global restoration pledges counts more than 1 million jobs created, with China reporting the largest land area. WHY Pledges are turning into land on the ground; the gap is money, with annual finance needing to rise more than fourfold to reach 1 billion hectares by 2030. |
|
| 4 | | A 1996 limit on fast network-distance estimates is pushed further Manoj Gupta of IIT Gandhinagar extends the classic Dor–Halperin–Zwick 2-approximation for all-pairs shortest paths to close vertex pairs, without giving up its near-optimal running time. WHY The trick is sampling the network at several scales instead of one; the result is theoretical, but such estimates underpin routing and network analysis. |
|
| |
|
S&P 7,720.39 −0.30% | NDX — — | 10Y 4.98% −7bp | BRENT $114.88 −0.38% | BTC $77.3k −3.1% |
|
| Alphabet had its worst day on record after a revenue miss and slowing search growth revived doubts about AI spending, while most other stocks rose. Yields fell back below 5% despite a hot September PCE print; Brent eased on diplomacy hopes, and bitcoin slid after a $6.3 billion Binance exploit. |
| RELEASED GDP (Q3, advance) 3.4% annualized, up from 2.2% in Q2 |
| |
|
| Two of today’s essays catch the same error from opposite ends. Steve Huynh shows how much we overrate other people’s attention to us; Richard Chappell shows how readily we underrate their reasons, treating disagreement as proof of bad faith. Both shrink what you’ll do: walk strangely, say the true thing, argue with someone you love. Geoffrey Litt adds that the frictions of dealing with people are often where connection lives. |
Today’s question If almost no one is watching, whose judgment are you still performing for? |
ESSAY Good Thoughts · Richard Y. Chappell A philosopher argues that hostility toward someone is justified only by ill will or unreasonableness, never by policy disagreement alone. Because blame tracks what a person could know, he asks critics to check why the other side thinks it is being reasonable before assuming it isn’t. The hook: a commenter suggests reasonableness includes what you should have found out, which makes many fights about homework, not values. Feeds your note: disagreement isn’t zero-sum. |
ESSAY A Life Engineered · Steve Huynh A longtime Amazon engineer recalls being mortified by a crinkling chip bag in a tense negotiation; no one noticed. The spotlight effect cuts both ways: the stares you dread mostly aren’t there, and neither is the attention you assume your good work gets. His fix is to worry less about being seen and report plainly, and often, what you’ve actually done. Feeds your note: the stares while walking backward. |
ESSAY geoffreylitt.com · Geoffrey Litt Litt imagines cheap teleportation in 2035: commutes vanish, and so do walks and chance encounters. Borrowing Albert Borgmann’s wood stove, which heated the house and also gathered the family, he asks which frictions AI removes that were secretly doing social work (asking a friend, not a model, to explain something), and keeps some on purpose. Feeds your note: is convenience killing connection. |
| |
|
WORKFLOW mitchellh.com The creator of Terraform and Ghostty lays out six stages from skeptic to always-on agents, each a copyable habit. Redo your own past work with an agent to learn its limits, split planning from execution, give it a way to verify itself, and turn every repeated mistake into a line in AGENTS.md. The twist: start research runs before you stop for the day and read the reports in the morning. |
A nightly note-resurfacer Every evening your phone gets one of your older notes plus one sharp question that could turn it into a 2-minute video. | 1 | Write a script that pulls your notes from the personalweb repo and picks one older than 30 days. | | 2 | Send it to Claude with a prompt asking for one counterargument and one question a video essay could answer. | | 3 | Run it nightly with a GitHub Actions cron and push the result to your phone with ntfy. |
|
|
| |
|
MARKETS CoinDesk TRM Labs and Elliptic attribute the theft to North Korean hackers; Binance says about $3 billion has been frozen and withdrawals remain paused. Liquidations quadrupled to $1.57 billion. The open question is whether exchange risk was ever priced in. |
PREDICTION MARKETS Coinpaper Kalshi’s month is running roughly 10% above September’s record, with Polymarket US near $10 billion; The Block puts Kalshi near 83% of volume across the three main venues. Sports drives most of it; Tuesday’s midterms test whether politics can too. |
| |
|
Tool Send a push notification to your phone with one curl command; free, open source, the last mile for any personal automation. | | Blog An engineer who writes long, data-heavy essays on why things work badly; start with “95%-ile isn’t that good.” |
|
| |
Until tomorrow. Fri 30 Oct · 09:36 ET |
