“Our doubts are traitors, / And make us lose the good we oft might win / By fearing to attempt.” William Shakespeare |
|
|
| 1 | | Iran claims more tankers hit mines in Hormuz as a Qatari draft deal awaits Tehran’s reply Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said a fourth tanker hit a mine Friday on an “unauthorized route”; the claims are unverified, and CENTCOM says the southern lanes are clear and safe. WHY Iran wants the U.S. port blockade lifted, sanctions eased and frozen assets released; Trump wants a guarantee Iran never gets a nuclear weapon. Next: Tehran’s reply to Qatar’s edited draft, expected this weekend. |
|
| 2 | | Poland’s top court is seized in a standoff between the Tusk government and President Nawrocki Parliament-elected judges entered the Constitutional Tribunal with state security officers Friday and announced the suspension of chief justice Bogdan Święczkowski, who was barred from the building. Nawrocki flew back from Senegal and called it a forcible takeover. WHY The government says PiS-era appointments were unlawful and wants the new judges seated; Nawrocki has refused to swear in five of them. Next: his emergency talks with parliamentary groups today. |
|
| 3 | | FDA approves the first plasmid DNA immunotherapy, for a rare HPV-driven airway disease Inovio’s Voceryq treats recurrent respiratory papillomatosis, where HPV causes airway growths that need repeated surgery. In a 32-patient trial, 7 of 26 people with three or more prior-year surgeries needed none afterward. WHY Two DNA plasmids, for HPV proteins and the immune signal IL-12, train the body to attack infected cells instead of cutting growths out. Accelerated approval means confirmatory trials come next. |
|
| 4 | | A personalized mRNA melanoma vaccine cut recurrence or death by 42% in a phase 3 trial Merck and Moderna report intismeran plus Keytruda cut the risk of recurrence or death at two years by 42% versus Keytruda alone in high-risk patients after surgery. WHY Each vaccine encodes up to 34 neoantigens from the patient’s own tumor, training T cells that Keytruda keeps switched on. The results are company-reported; peer review and an FDA decision come next. |
|
| |
|
S&P 7,580.1 −1.82% | NDX 28,384.9 −3.46% | 10Y 4.94% −4bp | BRENT $113.43 +2.37% | BTC $77.2k −0.96% |
|
| Intel fell 28.58%, its worst day since 1974, on a weak fourth-quarter forecast; chip stocks dropped 7.20% and the Nasdaq 100 entered a correction as Amazon’s negative free cash flow revived AI-spending doubts. Hormuz tanker incidents lifted oil; buyers moved into Treasuries. |
| |
|
| Today’s two pieces circle one failure: not saying the thing. Sarah Constantin argues that people stuck before a big change are usually dithering, and that everyone around them can already see what they want. Paul Graham’s disagreement hierarchy is the other half: when you do speak, aim at the central point, not the person or the tone. Both treat honesty as a skill you practice, not a mood you wait for. |
Today’s question Is most resentment just a disagreement you never said out loud? |
ESSAY Rough Diamonds · Sarah Constantin Constantin, a math PhD, says that when someone keeps describing a change they want and names no real obstacle, they should make it. Outsiders can’t predict the outcome, but they can hear the desire, the one thing the person can’t see in themselves. A commenter adds the fix: name and bound the vague worries, then move. It complicates your surrender note: letting go may still take one deliberate leap. |
ESSAY paulgraham.com · Paul Graham Graham ranks disagreement in seven levels, from name-calling and tone policing up to refuting the central point. The levels describe form, not correctness, but they cap persuasiveness, and most meanness lives at the bottom. His hook: climbing the ladder makes people less hostile, not just more accurate. It gives structure to your note that disagreement isn’t zero-sum. |
| |
|
WORKFLOW Simon Willison Willison argues models can now make browser games that are fun, so the bottleneck has moved from code to concepts. His loop is copyable: a one-line prompt naming the engine (three.js or Phaser), an explicit ask to make it fun, playtest, short concrete feedback, then a coding agent once the prototype works. No game took him more than about four hours. The open question: if execution is cheap, what makes your idea worth building? |
A note sparring partner A daily message that brings back one of your old notes with the best argument against it, so short notes grow into video essays. | 1 | Ask Claude Code to write a script that reads the notes in your site’s repo and picks one you haven’t resurfaced in 30 days. | | 2 | Have it call a model to return one sharpening question and the strongest counterargument to the note, aimed at its central point. | | 3 | Schedule it with a GitHub Actions cron and send the result to your phone with a push or email each morning. |
|
|
| |
|
MARKETS Derek Thompson Thompson argues the AI buildout depends on money from outside the chip-cloud-lab loop, which nobody can yet measure. Ramp data shows over 55% of its businesses paid for an AI model in September. That unmeasured external revenue is what Friday’s selloff was pricing. |
PREDICTION MARKETS RG A watchdog counts $221 million on congressional markets by Sept. 30, versus $92.4 million for all of 2024, yet 55.1% of live books could be moved five cents for under $1. The question before Tuesday’s midterms: how much of a thin market’s price is collective belief, and how much is one trader? |
| |
|
Tool An ad-free, algorithm-free place to collect links, images and notes into channels. Good for gathering material for a video essay before you know its shape. | | Tool Self-hosted agents that watch the web and act for you: digests, change alerts, webhooks. A hackable Zapier you own. |
|
| |
Until tomorrow. Sat 31 Oct · 09:37 ET |
