“The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.” Blaise Pascal |
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| 1 | | Barbados eliminates mother-to-child HIV transmission WHO certified on 30 October that Barbados has eliminated mother-to-child transmission of HIV as a public health problem. No such infections were reported among infants born there from 2022 to 2024, and 98% of pregnant women living with HIV received treatment. WHY HIV testing and treatment are free for all pregnant women regardless of nationality, and exposed babies get early testing and follow-up. To keep the status, Barbados must sustain funding and improve follow-up of women and children. |
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S&P 7,541.40 −0.51% | NDX 27,989.8 −1.39% | 10Y 4.89% −3.5bp | BRENT $104.77 −7.63% | BTC $77.0k −1.30% |
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| Brent had its sharpest drop in three months after Iran’s president said the supreme leader had given the government powers for talks and Trump said a settlement could happen. Tech sold off on Oracle’s planned $10 billion stock sale and the Marvell–Lumentum merger, while cheaper oil eased the 10-year yield. October jobs come Friday. |
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| Three writers on what wanting is made of. Paul Bloom says a lottery ticket buys a path, and the path is what makes a fantasy vivid. Sublime asks whether the spark she kept chasing was only distance, a gap her body already knew. Monika Jiang treats the frictionless life as the same kind of fantasy: freedom with nobody in it. Each starts from something that feels good and asks what it costs to keep it imaginary. Together they suggest one test for any desire: does it survive being answered? |
Today’s question When you hide what you feel to keep someone close, who exactly are you keeping close? |
ESSAY boundary · sublime Sublime argues leaving can be a farewell, a request for permission and a confession at once, a triple meaning she finds in the Filipino words magpaalam and ipaalam. She used to stay until things broke, pining for people who would never ask her to stay, then noticed that kilig (giddy attraction) and kaba (dread before bad news) feel alike in the chest. Her turn is the uncomfortable part: she was unavailable too. This speaks to your note on self-respect and saying what you feel. |
ESSAY Oneliness · Monika Jiang Jiang argues frictionless, AI-mediated living sells freedom while deepening isolation and pushing its costs onto other people. A disrupted Berlin commute sends her home early and into an unplanned visit with her sibling; Sweden’s shared laundry room is her model of a life built through friction. The catch she admits: friction lands unevenly on caregivers and migrants, and she shares the individualism she criticizes. This pushes your question about convenience killing connection. |
ESSAY Small Potatoes · Paul Bloom Bloom concedes the math ($5 a week for 20 years is $5,200, or about $11,015 invested at 7%) and still calls an occasional ticket a reasonable purchase. It buys a concrete path to a fantasy, which makes imagining vivid, and its constraints keep the daydream from going dull. The same mechanism turns a vague threat into dread, a tension he leaves open. Worth holding against your work at Novig: what does a bet buy besides expected value? |
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WORKFLOW ampcode.com · Thorsten Ball Ball’s claim is that a code-editing agent is an LLM, a loop and enough tokens, and he shows it in about 300 lines of Go. Each tool (read, list, edit) is a name, a description, a JSON schema and a local function; the client resends the conversation, runs whatever the model asks for, and loops until it gets plain text. The surprise is the model chaining tools without being told the steps. Retype it once and agents stop feeling like magic. |
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PREDICTION MARKETS bostonglobe.com Polymarket gave Democrats a 74% chance of sweeping both chambers on Monday; Kalshi had them at 74% for the Senate and 94% for the House. Michigan’s El-Sayed held 78% despite Haley Stevens endorsing his Republican opponent. Tonight grades those prices in public, while the IRS still hasn’t said how event contracts are taxed. |
AI SECURITY interconnects.ai After October’s wave of disclosures, Nathan Lambert concedes that calling open models “fine” was too loose and expects a costly forced change in how software is secured. He still says open weights aren’t the main driver: damage was growing exponentially before ChatGPT, and real attacks need several steps to line up. Open question: do attackers or defenders adopt cheap open models faster? |
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Tool A browser game for learning proofs in Lean, starting from the natural numbers. Good practice alongside Analysis. | | Newsletter Steve Huynh on skipped basics: a video he wrote off as a flop had driven about $75,000 in sales. |
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Until tomorrow. Tue 03 Nov · 09:36 ET |
