“If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid with regard to external things.” Epictetus |
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| 1 | | Democrats take both houses of Congress Democrats won the House and Senate, with 54 Senate seats counted on Wednesday and the Alaska and Mississippi races still open. Trump said he would accept the results and work with them. WHY Vance blamed the Iran war for the losses; Trump said it played a part, citing gasoline prices. Jeffries says Democrats will hold the administration accountable. The new Congress sits in January. |
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| 2 | | Iran says four tankers burned near Hormuz as Trump weighs strikes or a deal Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said four tankers were destroyed after hitting mines near the strait, following a US strike on Tuesday. Trump told the FT he has no immediate plans to attack; Axios reported he is still weighing strikes, a deal or continued pressure. WHY Iran says it will reopen the strait only if the US meets seven conditions, including ending its naval blockade and lifting sanctions. Trump says Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. Next: whether Qatar’s draft restarts direct talks. |
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| 3 | | A generic twice-yearly HIV prevention shot clears the FDA at $40 a year The FDA tentatively approved Dr. Reddy’s generic of lenacapavir for 120 low- and middle-income countries, 16 months after the original was approved, at $40 per person per year. WHY Gilead’s voluntary license allowed the generic, and Unitaid, Wits RHI and CHAI backed its development. First supplies are expected by the end of 2026, with broader availability in 2027. |
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| 4 | | 63 countries have now eliminated a neglected tropical disease WHO says 63 countries had eliminated at least one such disease as of June, up from 42 at the end of 2020. Sleeping sickness cases are down 98% since 1999, and Guinea worm fell to a record low of 10 human cases in 2025. WHY The programmes behind the gains, mass treatment, surveillance and vector control, are the ones WHO says aid cuts are now disrupting; resources sit 30% below pre-COVID levels. WHO’s next mark is 100 countries by 2030. |
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S&P 7,688.6 +1.58% | NDX 28,437 +0.91% | 10Y 4.89% −6bp | BRENT $94.62 −8.67% | BTC $80.3k +2.5% |
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| Stocks rose as investors bet a Democratic Congress means gridlock and Trump said he would accept the results; Brent fell on hopes of less escalation with Iran. Amazon, Microsoft and Apple gained while Nvidia and data center builders dropped on fears of new limits. |
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Today’s question What would you refuse to hand to an agent, even if it did it better? |
ESSAY jxnl.co · Jason Liu Once AI makes production cheap, the scarce skill is noticing what is worth making, and Liu defines taste as modeling what people will like, which means risking something other than the average. His method is “eating”: sample widely, transcribe solos, try things on, learn who made what you consume. The catch is that AI removes the friction where this learning used to happen, so he argues for rebuilding it by hand, and treats taste as closer to courage than consensus. Feeds your note on taste and outsourced character. |
ESSAY Substack · Jessica Gwynne Gwynne runs a regulated accounting firm and has built 289 automations in five years; fewer than ten of the 106 still running use AI. She argues the “AI employee” repackages rule-based automation, and that the first question is whether a task should exist at all. She fired her agent, Edna, after it ran live Meta ads that made her look like she wanted a date, yet rebuilt her system in Claude, and that contradiction stays open. Her full framework is paywalled. Feeds your note on agents and lost control over the mundane. |
STORY Standard Ebooks · Anton Chekhov Chekhov’s 1886 story follows Iona Potapov, an old sledge-driver in St. Petersburg whose son has just died, through one snowy evening of fares. He keeps trying to tell someone, and each passenger brushes him off. It has lasted because almost nothing happens except a man looking for one listener, in about ten minutes of reading. Feeds your idea of conversation as what keeps you grounded. |
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WORKFLOW lucumr.pocoo.org · Armin Ronacher Instead of one tool call per turn, the model writes a short JavaScript script that calls tools in a batch, so large outputs stay in the script and out of the transcript. The sandbox has no network or filesystem; tools are the only way out. His example pulls 100 GitHub issues, classifies each in parallel and returns the 12 most frustrated in one call, which would flood context done step by step. He leaves open how well this holds up with smaller models and long-running scripts. |
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PREDICTION MARKETS RotoWire Kalshi and Polymarket closed near 94% for a Democratic House and 75% for a Democratic Senate, and both called it. Kalshi’s own tally has favorites winning 479 of 487 resolved races, with upsets in the South Carolina and Iowa Senate races. Its midterm volume passed $2.5 billion, against $1.3 billion for 2024, though one 75% call that lands says little about whether 75% was right. |
STARTUPS TechCrunch CrowdStrike is buying Fiddler AI (about $400 million), which monitors agents in production, and Dreadnode (about $95 million), which tests models and agents for flaws before launch. The bet is that companies are deploying agents faster than their policies can keep up. Dreadnode was founded in 2023 and had raised $14 million. |
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Blog Kevin Simler, coauthor of The Elephant in the Brain, on philosophy and human behavior. Start with the interactive “Going Critical.” | | Tool Cuts silent or still sections from video automatically, by command line or web app. A quick first pass for short video essays. |
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Until tomorrow. Thu 05 Nov · 09:36 ET |
