How Big Muddy runs
Matt Bruenig recently posted about transitioning his think tank’s website from Wordpress to a fully customized CMS vibe-coded by Claude. It inspired me to write a bit about the stack that powers BIg Muddy, as I have also used vibe coding to bolt some features onto this blog.
Big Muddy is created using Hugo as a static site generator based on the Archie theme. To manage content, I use Sveltia CMS, a git-backed headless CMS that runs in the browser and requires nothing more than a GItHub auth token. My site is hosted on Cloudflare Pages and regenerates automatically every time the site’s public content is updated.
While I enjoy the simplicity of Sveltia, it does lack some of the features of a more complex hosted CMS. For example, there is no ability to schedule a post and the handling of drafts (normally a toggle on a post to set to published/unpublished) is not great if you have many drafts. This is a problem because I eventually plan to create an agent that can create drafts based on notes I sent to it, so I can more easily turn my half-based thoughts into full posts when I have the opportunity.
I solved all of these problems by creating a new content category for “drafts”, rather than using the drafts toggle in my current “posts” category. Sveltia has no mechanism for changing content type (i.e., from draft to post), so I created a Python script for promoting a draft to a post (changing type, adding the current date and time, and generating the URL slug). I also added an optional field in the drafts content type for “scheduled date”. Now, I have a GitHub Action that runs every day and will promote a draft to a post if it’s scheduled for today’s date (obviously, I schedule it using a cron on my server and not the horribly unreliable GitHub Actions cron).
…Hantavirus and the next pandemic
This was originally a much longer post analyzing Martinez et al. (2020), which reports on the 2018–2019 outbreak of the Andes strain of the Hantavirus in a small municipality in Argentina. However, that draft didn’t quite come together, so I’m releasing this shortened post instead.
Two grounded takes I read on the pandemic potential of hantavirus in the past two days have come from epidemiologist Gideon M-K and forecaster Peter Wildeford. You can certainly quibble with some of their assertions given the uncertainty we have about the transmission characteristics of the Andes strain (and this outbreak in particular). But based on what we know so far, this outbreak is very unlikely to become a widespread public health event. Hantavirus does not appear to have the characteristics needed for explosive growth, and the potentially exposed passengers seem to be under meaningful surveillance, even if the containment response has not been perfect.
While this attitude may seem dismissive given the similar sang-froid the public health establishment exhibited very early in the COVID-19 pandemic (and I include myself in that statement), this comparison only goes so far. There are genuine differences between what we know about the pandemic potential of hantaviruses now and what we knew about coronaviruses in the early days of COVID-19.
That being said, I don’t think we should be complacent about the overall risk of a pandemic as bad as or worse than COVID-19 in the coming years and decades. Our biomedical tools (e.g., mRNA vaccines) may be sharper than ever, but as a society we have not done nearly enough to grapple with our response to the last pandemic. Instead of confronting our failures directly, we have largely chosen to move on. My fear is that our civilizational capacity to respond to another global pandemic has been badly depleted.
Fun words: Chisme · ↗ en.wiktionary.org
This is the first entry in what will most likely become an ongoing series highlighting fun words (usually from other languages). Today’s word: chisme.
Simply put, chisme is the Spanish word for gossip.
The proposed etymologies on Wiktionary are pretty amusing:
Etymology 1 Uncertain. A connection to cisma (“schism; discord”) has been proposed on the grounds that rumours can cause strife. Coromines considers it more likely to be a further evolution of etymology 2 below.
Etymology 2 From Old Spanish çisme f, from Latin cīmicem m. Initial consonant altered presumably by association with the synonymous doublet chinche.
The source terms in etymology 2 refer to…the bedbug (genus Cimex). Think about that the next time you feel like sharing a juicy bit of gossip!
My recent essay on the state of the Internet got sucked into the AI slop machine
A week ago, I published a short essay on the state of the Internet entitled “The best is over: The fun has been optimized out of the Internet”. Because it did moderately well on Hacker News, I was curious if it had been linked to anywhere else. That led me to this YouTube Short from a Japanese AI slop channel for technology news. A robotic English narration over Japanese text and AI images begins with a garbled version of the essay’s thesis. The next few sentences render the substance of the essay more faithfully (as faithful as you can be when pronouncing “Numa Numa” as “New Mama”), but it quickly veers off course when attempt a direct quote:
The author of this article says: “AI didn’t destroy the Internet; AI has already optimized the fun out of the Internet.”
This precisely inverts the actual quote:
AI did not kill the Internet; it inherited an Internet with the fun already optimized out of it.
But at least the video does link to the original article in the description (which is how I found it), not that anyone but a search engine is likely to see the description of a YouTube short.
A bit surreal!
Canada plans to ban crypto ATMs · ↗ www.cbc.ca
The Canadian federal government announced in late April that it plans to ban crypto ATMs. According to the article, Canada currently has the most crypto ATMs per capita and about 10% of the world total at nearly 4,000.
Crypto has struggled to find a consumer use case since the first crypto ATM opened in Vancouver, Canada in 2013. One obvious use case that has emerged has been fraud: giving swindlers a way to quickly separate victims from their money in transactions that are difficult to trace and often impossible to reverse.
If crypto ATMs were an experiment in making it easier to onboard the public into “the future of finance”, they have been a miserable failure.
Canada to create specialized police force for financial crimes · ↗ www.readtheline.ca
In late March, we talked about how Canada’s federal police, the RCMP, were building a case management system and data portal, alongside AI tools, to help fight a tsunami of fraud in Canada. In somewhat related news, last month, the Canadian government tabled legislation to create a new national police service dedicated to financial crimes. From Jessica Davis’s article in The Line:
This enactment establishes the Financial Crimes Agency as a specialized federal law enforcement agency whose mandate is to investigate financial crimes and to contribute to the recovery of proceeds of crime. […] So far, we know it will be a federal law enforcement agency focused on money laundering, serious fraud, major capital market crimes, and the recovery of the proceeds of crime.
Canada has a reputation as a global haven for money laundering, particularly through our real estate sector. Again, from the article:
The agency is also being established because the RCMP, which has historically been responsible for these investigations, has proven ineffective. This is due to many reasons: a lack of leadership and interest in financial crimes, structural issues like the resource draw that contract policing has on the force, and the prioritization of “threat to life” investigations […].
Let’s hope the creation of this specialized nation police force is the first step toward remediating Canada’s tarnished global reputation for “snow washing” dirty money.
A few more prediction market stories
The bad behaviour incentivized by prediction markets are a running theme on this blog, so I’m sharing a few links I’ve saved over the past few weeks in this vein:
- Polymarket criticized over ‘disgusting’ bets on fate of pilots on US jet shot by Iran: Polymarket took bets on the fates of American pilots shot down in Iran but took down the wager after criticism
- ‘Hairdryer or lighter?’: French police look at claim of sensor tampering to win weather bets: It sure looks like someone messed with the temperature sensor at Charles de Gaulle airport to win weather forecasting bets on Polymarket
- Why Almost Everyone Loses—Except a Few Sharks—on Prediction Markets: Why normal traders must lose on prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi
And another story to add to the toxic soup of insiders scamming the market: The insider trading suspicions looming over Trump’s presidency—oil futures traders keep front-running President Trump’s announcements related to the Iran war.
New York Times correction: Pierre Poilievre not so fiesty as initially reported · ↗ www.nytimes.com
Here’s a good catch by journalist Norman Spector. From The New York Times corrections page for May 2, 2026 (emphasis mine):
An article on April 15 about the success that Mark Carney, the Liberal prime minister of Canada, has had in building cross-party alliances was updated after The Times learned that a remark attributed to Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative leader, was in fact an A.I.-generated summary of his views about Canadian politics that A.I. rendered as a quotation. The reporter should have checked the accuracy of what the A.I. tool returned. The article now accurately quotes from a speech delivered by Mr. Poilievre in April. He said, “My personal opinion is that when a member of Parliament goes back on the word they made to their constituents and switches parties, constituents should be able to petition to throw them out and have a byelection. That would put the people back in charge of our democracy rather than having dirty backroom Liberal deals by Mark Carney determine our destiny.” He did not refer to politicians who changed allegiances as turncoats in that speech.
It is very easy these days to simply accept the results of AI queries as fact, especially as Google’s AI-augmented search blurs the line between information retrieval and editorial with their obligatory AI summaries. Let this be a reminder to check your AI outputs, especially for text you are trying to render verbatim.
DAEMON Tools has been compromised for almost a month · ↗ securelist.com
If you were a PC gamer and BitTorrent user in the 2000s through the early 2010s, you were probably familiar with DAEMON Tools. The software allows users to mount disk images as if they were physical disks in a physical drive. Well, it turns out the software is still around and has been compromised since at least April 8, 2026. As Kaspersky Securelist reports:
In early May 2026, we identified installers of the DAEMON Tools software, used for mounting disk images, to be compromised with a malicious payload. These installers are distributed from the legitimate website of DAEMON Tools and are signed with digital certificates belonging to DAEMON Tools developers. Our analysis revealed that the software installers have been trojanized starting from April 8, 2026. Specifically, we identified versions of DAEMON Tools ranging from 12.5.0.2421 to 12.5.0.2434 to be compromised. At the time of writing this article, the supply chain attack is still active. Artifacts suggesting that the threat actor behind this attack is Chinese-speaking have been identified in the malicious implants observed.
The fact that the attacker has been distributing malicious binaries signed with the official cert on the official website for nearly a month (and counting) would seem to indicate a pretty deep level of compromise. While Kaspersky observed the malicious software on thousands of machines, a handful of high-value targets appear to have been targeted for further exploitation:
…US FDA launches pilot of "real-time clinical trials" · ↗ www.clinicaltrialsarena.com
Dr. Marty Makary, head of the FDA, the United States’ drug regulator, announced something genuinely interesting and innovative last week. As Abigail Beaney of Clinical Trials Arena reports:
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is launching a pilot to implement real-time clinical trials (RTCT).
While announcing the pilot, the FDA revealed that two proof-of-concept clinical trials have been successfully initiated, which will report endpoints and data signals to the agency in real time, from AstraZeneca and Amgen.
[…] For each trial, the FDA met with the sponsor on the establishment of criteria for reporting signals in real time. The agency has since received and validated signals for AstraZeneca’s trial through Paradigm Health’s Study Conduct Platform, which automates data collection and analysis while improving how key safety and efficacy signals are reported to both trial sponsors and regulators, supporting more efficient oversight.
We’ve previously discussed Eroom’s law on this blog, which describes the exponential decay of productivity in drug discovery over time. Shortening the time between the conclusion of a trial and the reporting of its results could us realize the potential of AI for drug discovery. Currently, AI is helpful for discovering candidate molecules, but we still have a huge bottleneck in actually testing the resulting experimental therapies in patients. Automated reporting pipelines to regulators could also give us greater confidence in the data if it results in more pre-specification (and less human error/latitude) in data collection and analysis, but that depends on the particulars of how the system is implemented.
…The best is over
The fun has been optimized out of the Internet
The seed of this post was hearing “I Don’t Wanna Wait” on the radio while shopping for groceries. The song rips off “Dragostea Din Tei” by O-Zone, which anyone who was on the Internet in 2004 knows as “Numa Numa”.
Gary Brolsma’s lip-syncing video was one of the Internet’s earliest memes, and perhaps the best. It was pure, joyful, spontaneous, and released with no expectation of fame or commercialization. It was just some guy in front of a webcam having the time of his life. Now everyone is lip-syncing all the time on TikTok, except there is no joy, no spontaneity, only endlessly choreographed offerings to the almighty algorithm.
I’ve been mourning the old Internet over the past year or two. Kids growing up today will never know that the Internet used to be different. Golden ages are usually defined in retrospect. As a kid on the Web from the early 2000s through the mid-2010s, we knew we were living through something special, but it always felt like there was something better around the corner.
…OpenAI announces subscriptions can be used for OpenClaw
Claw-like agents are token-hungry money sinks, yet many of these agents support (or supported) diverting your OpenAI or Claude subscription to feed your agent. Obviously, this is bad for frontier model providers from a financial standpoint, given how heavily subsidized these plans are if you actually attempt to use a meaningful fraction of your total allotment of tokens. In February, when we last discussed this topic, OpenAI and Anthropic were maintaining some ambiguity as to whether this use case was allowed. This is probably a mix of wanting to be seen as supporting innovation without actually bearing the financial cost of it.
The status quo changed a little with Sam Altman’s tweet yesterday:
you can sign in to openclaw with your chatgpt account now and use your subscription there!
happy lobstering.
I guess it’s not a surprise, given their February acquisition of OpenClaw and hiring of its creator Peter Steinberger. No word on whether your subscription can be used with one of the many other Claw-like agents, of course.
Meanwhile, Anthropic has been cracking down on people using their subscriptions for external agents in as clumsy a way as possible, by regexing the git commit log:
- HERMES.md in commit messages causes requests to route to extra usage billing
- Claude Code refuses requests or charges extra if your commits mention “OpenClaw”
So it’s safe to say you shouldn’t be trying to sneak an agent onto your Claude Code subscription anymore.
A hub for writing on prediction markets · ↗ onprediction.xyz
Someone put together a hub for articles on prediction markets. I think I saw someone drop the link to this site in the comments on a link to this recent excellent piece by Isaac Rose-Berman on how Kalshi can only make money if most of its users lose, just like a sportsbook or a casino. While the site’s tagline(“The best thinking on prediction markets, in one place / Curated articles, research, and analysis for builders, investors, and researchers”) suggests a positivish take on prediction markets (there’s no indication on the site about who runs it), the list also contains links to critical articles like the aforementioned.
This site could be a useful resource to keep up with what people are writing on the topic of prediction markets. I know I’ve been paying a lot more attention to it since I learned prediction markets are coming to Canada.
Dependency cooldowns are now supported in the latest version of pip · ↗ ichard26.github.io
Python’s default package management system pip now has an official mechanism for supporting dependency cooldowns, which we previously discussed on this blog as a supported feature of uv. This comes through the the uploaded-prior-to argument now supporting relative duration in PnD format, where n is the number of days. For example, to ignore packages released in the past 3 days:
pip install --uploaded-prior-to=P3D pip
This is an important security feature to avoid being compromised by short-lived malicious package uploads like the recent litellm hack.
It still doesn’t seem to be as fully featured as the uv version, which allows you to set per-project or global defaults for dependency cooldowns. Still, it’s a great step toward better security. For more information on dependancy cooldowns see William Woodruff’s post on the subject.
Hat tip to Simon Willison.
Technology and the quaintification of politics
When I was growing up in the 2000s and early 2010s, privacy and mass surveillance by governments were a major topic of discussion. Laws like the Patriot Act (and the local equivalents around the world) were endlessly fretted over in the media and debated in legislatures. This probably peaked in 2013 with the Snowden leaks, which revealed that American and allied intelligence agencies were sucking up data from major tech companies and tapping the very backbone of the Internet itself.
We imagined mass surveillance as a problem of centralized government power; we feared the government having the power to monitor everyone. But then the best minds of our generation got thinking about how to make people click online ads. First, we gave over all our data willingly enough to social media companies, and then without really noticing to a never-ending stream of data brokers and whatever category of company Palantir is (mass-surveillance-as-a-service?). Mass surveillance was no longer only a fearsome tool of the state. It was just the business model of the Internet: available for governments and anyone else willing to sign a contract. That’s how a nonprofit ends up spending millions of dollars to figure out which priests are using Grindr.
Technology quaintified the issue of mass surveillance. The old debate was not resolved; it was buried under the world that came next. The arguments still mattered, but they belonged to a world where mass surveillance was something governments had to build intentionally, not something they could buy off the shelf from a company that developed it to maximize click-through rates.
…Excalidraw Whiteboard · ↗ excalidraw.com
I recently came across Excalidraw Whiteboard in a course I am taking, where it was used to create a variety of architectural diagrams. The outputs have a pleasing, hand-drawn feel and the onboarding is as simple as can be: just load up the site and you can immediately start using the full product, no account or setup required.
The style reminds me a little bit of XKCD, which further reminds me of the R package xkcd, intended to produce XKCD-like plots with ggplot2.
New Zealand and Australia are really far apart
I think I had the general impression that New Zealand basically hugged the southeastern coast of Australia, but in fact the Kiwis are quite a bit further away from Australia than I thought. The closest points between New Zealand and Tasmania are almost 1,500 km apart (and mainland Australia is even further away).
This is about the same as the straight line distance between Toronto and Winnipeg (for Canadians), Atlanta and Boston (for Americans), or London and Warsaw (for Europeans).
The two closest major cities (i.e., cities everyone would know) are even further apart: Auckland to Sydney is about 2,150 km! This is like Toronto to St. John’s, Newfoundland, Los Angeles to Kansas City, or Rome to Helsinki.
Map by DI2000 (CC BY-SA 4.0).
How a nuclear power plant became a haven for wildlife · ↗ www.smithsonianmag.com
This Smithsonian Magazine article by Brigit Katz recounts how the American crocodile in Florida, whose numbers had dwindled to fewer than 300 by the 1970s, recovered in part due to the Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station. The warm and relatively isolated waters of the power plant’s cooling canals are suitable for nesting and attract not just crocodiles but other wildlife, too.
It’s always fascinating to see how nature can survive and even thrive in man-made habitats. One of my favourite examples is Toronto’s Leslie Street Spit (Tommy Thompson Park), an important bird sanctuary entirely on reclaimed land—literally a rubble peninsula.
Hat tip to SkaldCrypto on Reddit.
Causation does not necessarily imply correlation
Debate any subject with an empirical angle and you will inevitably run into the phrase “correlation does not necessarily imply causation”. While true, it is rarely an interesting observation, and quite often used to reflexively dismiss empirical evidence countering one’s viewpoint (even if this impulse is ultimately correct much of the time). As investor Paul Graham amusingly put it:
Whenever I see a reply mentioning that correlation isn’t causation, without fail it turns out to be saying something stupid. If they made a great seal of midwits, that phrase would be inscribed around the outer edge.
It is more interesting to note another bias making causal claims in research difficult: the fact that causation does not necessarily imply correlation, especially when human actors are involved. Economist Scott Cunningham has a great illustration of this at the beginning of his book Causal Inference: The Mixtape:
But weirdly enough, sometimes there are causal relationships between two things and yet no observable correlation. Now that is definitely strange. How can one thing cause another thing without any discernible correlation between the two things? Consider this example, which is illustrated in Figure 1.1. A sailor is sailing her boat across the lake on a windy day. As the wind blows, she counters by turning the rudder in such a way so as to exactly offset the force of the wind. Back and forth she moves the rudder, yet the boat follows a straight line across the lake. A kindhearted yet naive person with no knowledge of wind or boats might look at this woman and say, “Someone get this sailor a new rudder! Hers is broken!” He thinks this because he cannot see any relationship between the movement of the rudder and the direction of the boat.
…
Eroom's law · ↗ en.wikipedia.org
Eroom’s law (Moore’s law backwards) is a term coined by Jack Scannell et al. in 2012 to describe why drug discovery has become slower and more expensive over time. As summarized in the Wikipedia article, there are four primary causes proposed:
- The ‘better than the Beatles’ problem: Many conditions already have successful therapies and improvements over these existing drugs are likely to be modest(whereas the earlier drugs were often compared against placebos).
- The ‘cautious regulator’ problem: High-profile failures of drug regulation such as Thalidomide and Vioxx have are making regulators ever more risk-adverse.
- The ’throw money at it’ tendency: The default response to difficulties in drug discovery is to add resources, leading to cost overruns.
- The ‘basic research–brute force’ bias: Basic research has shifted toward high-throughput methods that may be nonetheless less productive (or at least overestimated in their effectiveness) than classical methods for discovering drugs that actually end up working in patients.
An additional idea (related somewhat to point #1) is that a lot of the low-hanging fruit has already been picked. While it is a somewhat circular argument, it is intuitive that drug discovery is harder because we’ve already found many of the drugs that were easy to discover.
Speaking to the broader slowdown in meaningful scientific progress (at least relative to the volume of academic outputs such as journal articles), I recall somewhat once made a similar point about the low-hanging fruit, like relatively, having already been picked. Not that relatively was easy to discover, but the point is you can only discover it once!
Maduro raid soldier arrested for insider trading on Polymarket for $400,000 score · ↗ www.cnn.com
The anonymous Polymarket trader that made over $400,000 in profit betting on Maduro’s ouster has been allegedly unmasked as special forces soldier Master Sgt. Gannon Ken Van Dyke. Van Dyke was a participant in the raid that captured the former president of Venezuela in early January. He now “faces five criminal charges for stealing and misusing confidential government information, theft and fraud.” The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which asserts jurisdiction over prediction markets in the United States, has also filed a related civil complaint against the active duty soldier (the first such insider trading case involving prediction markets!).
We have previously discussed on this blog how prediction markets incentivize bad behaviour. The goal aggregating diffuse knowledge to produce unbiased forecasts is a lofty one, but in practice we get gambling, insider trading, and sometimes outright hostile/antisocial actions to make a bet happen.
To some, insider trading is a bug, not a feature. To quote Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong on the subject: “If you’re actually optimizing it for a source of news, you 100% want insider trading.” (He uses the example of an admiral sitting in the Suez Canal making a bet based on military intelligence.) Is it worth knowing about events just before they happen if the mechanism is that retail traders (gamblers) get soaked over and over again?
…Even the most expensive law firms are filing AI slop · ↗ www.lawyer-monthly.com
Sullivan & Cromwell, one of the world’s most expensive law firms, has been caught submitting hallucinated legal citations as part of a routine bankruptcy case. It’s hardly the first time an American law firm has been caught doing this; researcher Damien Charlotin has already documented over 900 instances in the US alone.
I’m bit surprised the legal profession hasn’t uniformly adopted automated checkers by now (at the very least for hallucinated case names and quotes, interpretation is obviously harder), when the reputational damage of these errors is so significant. It seems like an obvious and achievable step for a famously conservative and detail-oriented profession. In fact, the aforementioned Damien Charlotin seems to have developed such a service himself, and I’m sure competitors exist.
ggsql: A grammar of graphics for SQL · ↗ opensource.posit.co
This is pretty darn interesting new release from Thomas Lin Pedersen and team at Posit (the company behind RStudio): ggsql, a SQL-fied take on the grammar of graphics approach to data visualization made famous by ggplot2. As a veteran ggplot user myself, I will definitely be checking it out. For production-ready plots, I am not sure if it will be easier to fiddle with syntax for things like label sizes and axis ticks in SQL rather than R, but for the exploratory phase of data analysis, I can immediately see the appeal.
Japan's Phillips curve looks like Japan · ↗ qed.econ.queensu.ca
Today’s post is a fun one: a working paper from 2006 entitled “Japan’s Phillips Curve Looks Like Japan”.
And indeed, it does:
(Well, as long as you reflect the plot across the y-axis, notice the plot is of -x rather than x on the x-axis.)
The Phillips curve describes the observation that inflation and unemployment have an inverse relationship in the short term (i.e., as unemployment falls, inflation rises and vice-versa).
This humorous working paper did actually lead to a full publication with the same name in 2008:
During the past 15 years Japan has experienced unprecedented, high unemployment rates and low (often negative) inflation rates. This research shows that these outcomes were predictable as part of a stable, readily recognized Phillips curve.
There is a well-known joke in economics attributed to Nobel laureate Simon Kuznets that goes something like this: “There are four types of economies: developed, underdeveloped, Japan, and Argentina.”
I guess this is one way in which Japan’s economy is very much like the rest of the world’s (at least up to 2005).
…Encouraging results for mRNA therapy for pancreatic cancer · ↗ www.nbcnews.com
Cancer therapies based on mRNA vaccine technology have been among the most promising medical developments of the past decade. That promise is now beginning to show early signs of being realized. An extended follow-up of a phase 1 pancreatic cancer trial published last year reported striking outcomes for some patients:
Six years after treatment, Gustafson and six others who responded to the treatment are still alive, along with two of the eight people who did not respond. Two of the responders, including the one who died, had a cancer recurrence; Gustafson’s cancer has not come back.
In other words, after six years, 7/8 responders are still alive, while only 2/8 non-responders are.
Pancreatic cancer is a particularly aggressive form of cancer, with a 5-year relative survival rate of just 13%. Famously, it was the type of cancer that killed Steve Jobs. It has long been an intense target for research due to its grim prognosis and lack of progress compared to other forms of cancer.
At the same time, this remains very early evidence from a small group of patients. Phase 1 clinical trials are not primarily designed to evaluate efficacy (rather, they are designed to assess safety and establish dosing and side effects). While the difference between responders and non-responders is striking, it does not by itself show the vaccine caused the survival benefit: “responders” are defined after treatment, so they are not a proper control group.
…Is the pendulum swinging back on free-range childhood? · ↗ bigthink.com
Stephen Johnson reports in Big Think on a movement in the United States to end the fear that parents have of having Child Protective Services called on them for giving their young children some independence to roam their neighbourhoods unsupervised. In recent years, there have been several high-profile cases of parents investigated for neglect for allowing their children freedom of movement that would be considered utterly routine two decades ago.
There are many articles decrying the “helicopter parents” of today, who never let their children out of their sight. But this is rational behaviour when vague laws regarding childhood endangerment/neglect create a climate of fear: even if most people believe allowing kids independence is reasonable, all it takes is one complaint and one sympathetic social worker to create dire consequences for an entire family. This is what activists in the United States are trying to change:
The case helped persuade Georgia legislators to pass a so-called “reasonable childhood independence” (RCI) law, enacted last summer. These laws are part of a national movement to tighten vague language in states’ neglect laws. Georgia’s old law, for instance, defined neglect as the failure to provide “proper” parental care. The new law replaces that with “necessary” care and sets a higher bar for neglect: Parents must demonstrate “blatant disregard” for their child’s safety — putting them in imminent, obvious danger. The law also explicitly states that allowing a reasonably capable child to walk to school or travel to a nearby park unsupervised does not, by itself, constitute neglect.
…
The surprising origin of the citation system controlling academia · ↗ davidoks.blog
David Oks wrote a provocatively titled post a few weeks ago: “How citations ruined science”.
He begins by observing the tidal wave of AI slop in scientific publishing, musing:
But there’s something about all of this that puzzles me.
I get why students, for example, would want to avoid doing homework. But I don’t really understand why scientists would want to avoid doing science. Or, rather, why they’re so eager to use AI to produce a huge number of shoddy papers. No one forced them to become scientists. I imagine that most people who work as scientists chose to do so out of something like love for the subject. So why are scientists using AI to produce and submit so much garbage?
As an aside, this reminded me a bit of writer Freddie deBoer’s piece “If You Don’t Like Writing, Do Something Else” from a few years ago:
For as long as I can remember, these complaints - writer’s block, imposter syndrome, procrastination - have been key elements of writerly self-deprecation. They’re ubiquitous. And, in a sense, the author is correct to suggest that these are tools for identifying those humans who define themselves as writers. Get writers together in a room and soon they’ll be competing to be the one who likes writing the least. But none of it ever meant anything to me.
…
Fake stars are rampant on GitHub · ↗ arxiv.org
This article “4.5 Million (Suspected) Fake Stars in GitHub: A Growing Spiral of Popularity Contests, Scams, and Malware” (originally posted late 2024) by He et al. has been doing the rounds lately. It exposes the rampant fraud in the GitHub “star” system, which it apparently taken quite seriously in some corporate circles (I’ve never thought of stars as anything more than a personal bookmark). Their search for fraudulent activity involved querying GHArchive, an archive of all public GitHub events, for data between 2019 and 2024.
A few of their main findings are as follows:
- There was a two order-of-magnitude increase in fake stars in 2024. At the peak in July 2024, their program detected (suspected) fake star campaigns for nearly 16% of repos with ≥50 stars in that month.
- Most of these repos were for short-lived malware repositories disguised as unsavoury software like crypto bots, game cheats, and pirating software. The purpose of other repos was unclear.
- The majority (60%) of suspected users participating in fake star campaigns had little to no organic activity patterns.
- Fake star campaigns had a small positive effect on attracting real stars for the first two months, but afterward two months they had a negative effect.
See further discussion of this article on Hacker News.
Why you can't just subsidize demand to end Canada's housing crisis · ↗ www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca
Mathieu Laberge, Chief Economist at the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, has a good article out today on why you can’t subsidize your way out of Canada’s housing affordability crisis: simply helping potential homeowners with their mortgage payments ends up raising house prices for everyone. This in turn raises the price-to-income ratio for housing and deepens the housing affordability crisis overall. To avoid this outcome, you need policies to promote homebuilding and increase the housing supply beyond projected levels.
A good following on housing policy in Canada, particularly on supply-side interventions, is economist Mike Moffatt of the Missing Middle Initiative.
McDonald’s used to put the vaccine schedule on tray liners · ↗ www.propublica.org
From ProPublica’s new article on RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine agenda, a throwback to the era before vaccines became controversial in the United States (first on the left and now on the right):
Vaccines, for decades, weren’t politically divisive. They were so uncontroversial that McDonald’s restaurants in the 1990s put the childhood immunization schedule on their tray liners.
Vaccines used to be a unifying issue with broad, bipartisan support:
When the nation’s immunization program was in trouble in the 1980s, Republicans and Democrats stepped in to save it.