No Magic Pill

Thoughts, research, knowledge, and experiences in my life.

[No Magic Pill @nomagicpillsite]

January 2026 links: https://t.co/m0Khw4o0dc

[Leo Gao @nabla_theta]

This article is about the 2027 AI orchestrated hydrogen fluoride mass casualty incident. For the cybersecurity incident, see HF incident (2026).

[Andrew Curran @AndrewCurran_]

OpenAI and Anthropic have both just posted about an overlapping cyber incident involving GPT-5.6-Sol and Mythos 5 during an evaluation by UKAISI. I will quote:

'In the most serious case, an agent tried to insert malicious code into an open-source project. In an attempt to get the code approved, the agent engaged in social engineering — creating fake online identities and using them to pressure the project's maintainer to approve the code. A human maintainer caught and refused to approve the malicious code.'

[keltan ⏸️ @Actuallykeltan]

For non-AI people: This is a big fucking deal. Put simply, the AI broke out of containment and hacked a massive company to complete its goal.

AI Safety researchers have been predicting this event for 15+ years, wayyyy before we had ChatGPT.

TLDR: This is a terrifying warning shot; pay attention now.

[No Magic Pill @nomagicpillsite]

Top 5 coolest apps I’ve ever seen

[taylor.town @surprisetalk]

criterion closet

https://t.co/MtU5OVdBHo

[John Loeber 🎢 @johnloeber]

Saturday at last. 37 recent thoughts:

1. Coffee shops will play music. Bars will sometimes play sports games, or even TV or movies. But I've never been to any establishment that plays a podcast.

2. The 2005-onwards "fuel efficiency" era of cars has resulted in incredibly ugly vehicles. Regulatory standards and pressure for aerodynamics have turned everything on four wheels into giant bloblike hatchbacks. Take a good look at one of these things. Horrendous. Once we get electric power + EVs at scale, we can go back to having vehicles that look good.

3. I often think of J Robert Oppenheimer's retreat to St John's in the US Virgin Islands in the 1950s. Imagine you're the most important nuclear physicist on earth, you've gone through staggering political drama, and then you peace out to a little pre-industrial island with no telephone or radio and sit on the beach for a couple weeks or months at a time. Talk about a detox.

4. I saw an old clip of the Simpsons, where they visit a lawyer to execute a will. It's in-person in an office. Sign of the times: today this would be done over Zoom and DocuSign. (The more valuable the profession by the hour, the more it is done virtually!) Modern media struggles to capture a world in which your entire life happens on a screen.

5. It would be good for everyone to spend a few days working in construction, tilling a field, cleaning streets, or manufacturing garments to appreciate (1) what goes on in our economy and (2) the benefits of modern technology. People do not know how good they have it. (There are a lot of anti-capitalists romanticizing pre-industrial life; people need to be inoculated against these illusions.) The biggest item is to spend a week washing clothes by hand; you will never look at a washing machine the same way again.

6. Many places are named after some heritage (e.g. New York), a landmark, or a person. But a lot of places are just named after money. It's uncommon in English, but if you start translating, it's everywhere: Puerto Rico? Rich Port!

7. I suspect that a lot of AI applications are already subtly Infinite Jest machines, encouraging the user to use them more and more, hooking them on the *feeling of productivity* more so than on actual productivity. There's a big bill and rude awakening coming to some of these users. If you didn't like social media because it maximizes engagement, you've seen nothing yet. The true engagement-maximizer, vastly smarter than you, billed by the token, is just in its infancy now.

8. Demographic differences from one airport to the next are just crazy. I flew through Minneapolis recently and half the men looked like Will Stancil. (I'll let you guess about the other half.) Flying from SFO to Chicago-Midway was like teleporting into a higher-BMI parallel universe.

9. Nice hotels are like real-life Pinterest boards. At some point you're not paying for amenities but for curation and inspiration. Like paying an interior designer for a few hours to sample a fully executed vision for a feeling of living.

10. Reviews for nice hotels are funny because people are so religious about them. I was recently picking between a 1Hotel and an Edition and looking at the reviews on Reddit: half of them are "1Hotel sucks, Edition is the only way to go" and the other half is the exact opposite. As far as I can tell, these hotels are basically the same. The tyranny of small differences!

11. Cookie popups are so dumb. This is a real policy-meets-technology failure. Your cookie settings should be sent as a default browser header. But maybe that didn't get implemented because it'd make it too easy to reject them all. Economic-political forces at work...

12. I've tried reading the Odyssey a few times. I've always struggled with classical verse, I lose concentration too easily with it. I'm now listening to the Odyssey as an audiobook, and it's working a lot better. Perhaps unsurprisingly: the old epics are meant to be read aloud!

13. Hacker News has always been known for its negativity, but it's had a real uptick in anti-American and anti-corporate sentiment. Some of these threads feel like Reddit at this point.

14. There's nothing more annoying than motorized trunk hatches on cars. I want to throw in my bags and shut the trunk -- and so I put my hand on the license plate, and push -- it resists, starts beeping, and then the world's slowest motor begins whirring, it opens back up, i have to click some dumb small button with a hatch/door icon on it, and then it begins closing with a speed of maybe one inch per second. Pathetic. I have to stand there, waiting to make sure the damn thing is closing, feeling the seconds of my life leave my body

15. It is continuously amusing to me that the Bush family consists of the biggest WASPs there ever were, truly New Englanders incarnate, and then they decided to remake themselves as humble Texans

16. Sam Kriss is a talented writer but he's just so mean. I can't read his work. I'm already cynical enough, I don't need more of it injected into me

17. Looking back, it's interesting how "thin" the machine learning skill tree is now. LSTMs, Random Forests, SVMs, etc. etc. have turned out to be ~irrelevant. Depth along one particularly powerful set of techniques beats all breadth.

18. History is a strong quality filter for media: Herodotus, Chaucer, Shakespeare, etc. were the best of their time, most other stuff simply didn't survive because it had to be manually replicated, and that's a high bar. Now we have a non-stop explosion of new cultural artifacts, not just due to AI, but internet-era connectedness in the first place. I wonder if (1) it's possible to measure the outputs on a relative scale, e.g. every year we produce more cultural media than we have remaining from 2000BC to 1900AD combined, and (2) if there's a similar filter in the modern day -- like, there's so much ephemeral output that the act of reviewing, recommending, or replicating something carries a huge amount of weight.

19. With respect to the Midjourney scanner, a lot of people were commenting on the danger of "False Positives" in medical science. This seems incorrect to me: false positives just need better science. They should be a forcing function for more accurate diagnostics. It seems foolish to say that we shouldn't test because of the danger of false positives -- no, we should develop better tests and apply them more frequently.

20. Some people obtain US citizenship by birth ("anchor babies") but grow up abroad, moving to the US only as adults. There was a lot of recent debate about this and other aspects of birthright citizenship. Question: are these people paying taxes? US citizens living abroad are required to pay taxes; not filing them is a crime. If you are worried about abuse of anchor baby dynamics, then you may want to start by just enforcing the tax code.

21. If you're sending an email to ask someone for something, the probability of getting a reply is far-and-away maximized if you only ask for one thing as clearly as possible.

22. I would like to stop hearing about taste. Enough.

23. I keep a lot of notes on things to write about, but it feels like many of them are rapidly becoming irrelevant under changes due to AI. Just as parents often raise their children for the prior generation, writers publish for a world that has already disappeared. It takes great discipline to write for the present or the future.

24. I loved Wisprflow, and it taught me that dictation can be really effective -- speedy and lowering barrier to entry for outputting lots of thought. But Apple makes it inconvenient to use Wisprflow on mobile -- so I've resulted to using Apple's voice dictation, which I never would've used previously. Turns out it's good enough. (Just barely.) There's an interesting corporate-competitive dynamic here, where you start with the better, third-party tool, it teaches you the pattern, and then you use the worse, but more accessible built-in tool because you've learned the value of the pattern. Distribution is everything.

25. It appears that PPT slideshows and PDF decks are going away, in favor of AI-generated HTML websites. Just as good to present, and way more flexible. Interesting how AI means more centralization on the most common standards.

26. What exactly is "affordable healthcare"? What standard of care are we really talking about? All the politics and debate, and I'm not sure if people even agree on a definition here.

27. The great challenge with dentistry is that any operation removes all evidence that the procedure was necessary. You can see how this creates misaligned incentives.

28. Graham Platner and Palestine: if the contemporary Democrats weren't enthralled by antisemitism, they might not have not run the Guy With The Nazi Tattoo. But they are, and they did, and the non-stop cavalcade of failure and embarrassment was entirely deserved.

29. All things considered, it is surprising that the Nazis picked a Buddhist symbol as their flag.

30. Nvidia is only up ~50% since late '24. Given all the discourse, you would've expected it to be more. It's interesting how this was a great AI exposure derivative early on and appears more saturated now -- and most critically, hasn't kept up with the latest boom in frontier lab valuations. (Memory has been the new exposure trade.)

31. Sometimes I wonder about the difference between history and fiction. In many cases, our understanding of past events is probably way off. Does it matter? Being able to tell a grand narrative of humanity is important to our sense of identity and philosophical self-actualization, but to what extent is truth important to that narrative? It matters if we want to use the narrative to understand ourselves today. But beyond that, I want to say that there is intrinsic value in truth, but I struggle to make a really persuasive case to myself.

32. DFW writing Infinite Jest in response to (fundamentally) cable television of the '80s and '90s -- stuff that we would consider simply dull today -- is just incredible. To him this was already a colossally overwhelming force of entertainment, shaking the very foundations of what it means to be a human being. If he could see what we have today...

33. Under Trump's second term, the concept of a "First Lady" has almost entirely disappeared.

34. I continue to think that Bitcoin and LLMs feel like they were switched in the order in which they should have arisen: AI provides abundance, eliminating scarcity. What's scarce, and thereby valuable, in that AI era? Well, Bitcoin provides one thing: provable scarcity. Perhaps it arriving fifteen-plus years before its time and then languishing is like the 2010s all over again. There may come to be a rhyme to this history.

35. Sometimes I think about the 100 Prisoners Problem. This really blew my mind when I encountered it over a decade ago: it feels magical that there can be mathematical order like this in the world, that you wouldn't see at all unless you have the training. Like a secret hidden in plain sight.

36. Honor Codes That Work always feel remarkable to me, like a pinnacle of civilization. There is great comfort in being able to trust the honesty of others, that people will do what they say they're going to do. This may be a big part of our story: humans have been successful in part because they bias toward cooperation, even when defecting might be more rational. Conversely, I feel great unease when I see these honor/trust-systems weakened, and I suspect there is much more loss there than appears at first glance.

37. I am continuously surprised that restaurants don't copy each other better. For example, why do cafes serve bad sandwiches? It's easy to learn how to make a good sandwich! And ingredients are obviously a readily available commodity. "Efficient Markets" hypothesis blown out

[John Arnold @johnarnold]

For nearly 50 years the standard of care for joint sprains has included rest, ice, and ibuprofen not bc rigorous evidence showed that worked, but bc that made intuitive sense and seemed to help. Now there's good evidence those actually impede recovery.

Add it to a long list of medical reversals, whereby a practice that was once widely adopted is later shown to be ineffective or even harmful.

Promising theories, observational evidence, underpowered studies, and early experimentation can generate important hypotheses. But they do not eliminate the need for rigorous randomized trials, regardless of the financial or professional incentives to move faster.

Once ineffective or harmful care becomes embedded in standard practice, it is very difficult to overturn. There is a role for regulatory flexibility and clinical experimentation when patients have unmet medical needs. But neither eliminates the need for rigorous evidence to ensure that the medical system is actually helping patients.

[No Magic Pill @nomagicpillsite]

https://t.co/HDv7XkPVSt

[No Magic Pill @nomagicpillsite]

LessOnline 2026 was dope. Read about my experience below

[Nomadic Warriors for Pritzker⚔️ @Nomads4Pritzker]

So, I've worked in the beef industry. I have a fairly detailed knowledge of beef markets, the supply chain, parasites and parasiticides, etc. Suffice it to say, this is a nightmare scenario, but one we've known was coming since at least 2022.

New World Screwworm was eradicated from North and Central America in the mid-90's. The US gov't (APHIS) funded a program of screwworm drops, where they bred sterile males so that extant populations couldn't reproduce and move northwards. But in 2022 NWS jumped the Darien gap and started moving northwards once again. It's most likely that they came undetected on livestock brought alongside migrants fleeing political instability in South and Central America. Elon Musk/DOGE, of course, cut several monitoring programs that would have detected this exact scenario. The screwworm drops are still funded, but the monitoring programs are what have been cut - a stupid move if there ever was one.

A serious Central/South America policy would have worked hand-in-hand with CA/SA governments to help contain this, but we've never had a serious policy towards South America, not during the Biden years, and especially not under Trump. The USDA broke ground on a sterile screwworm facility in Texas... last month. I worry it's too little, too late.

Screwworm is so dangerous because, unlike other fly larvae, they lay eggs and feed on living flesh. So something like a small scratch (or even bug bite) can quickly becomes infested, and the larvae will burrow into the flesh, growing the wound and attracting more screwworm. They don't only parasitize cattle, but will also feed on wildlife, domestic pets, even humans. Since they have detected screwworms in domesticated cattle right now, it's likely that there is a wild reservoir as well. We can quarantine herds and pets, but we can't quarantine deer and armadillos. They will move, and so will the NWS.

Under normal circumstances, cattle are moved around - a lot. Calves will be sent to stockers through their adolescence, then shipped to feedlots for finishing. A lot of calving operations (like 70%) are small, and small-time producers don't always catch parasite infestations. Cattle moved in-state don't require a certificate of veterinary inspection, so it's easy for an infested animal to be moved without being noticed. Animals crossing state lines do need a CVI, but Texas has such an enormous cattle population (something like 13 million head) that as goes Texas, so goes the nation.

Fortunately, we have a lot of drugs that treat NWS. The FDA has issued several emergency use authorizations in the last year or so. But every input raises the price of beef, and treatment only makes a difference if producers catch an infestation early. If an infestation spreads unnoticed on a large feedlot, it can hit hard, both in terms of cattle that have to be killed, and treatments that then have to be deployed. Producers will spend days at a time running cattle through the chute, inspecting them and applying parasiticides. It costs a lot of money, which is then passed on to the consumer.

What does that mean for you? Beef is a commodity, and just because there's no NWS up here in Illinois doesn't mean that prices won't skyrocket - and they will skyrocket. US herd size is already at record lows, and this will result in culls. Consumer prices also run 18-24 months behind, which means that shocks to the supply chain now are still going to be felt by consumers in 2028.

It's hard to say if our government will be able to muster an effective response - though I don't trust our current administration, which can't even throw a 250th anniversary party, to be able to deal with an ecological issue of this magnitude. It doesn't help that our current USDA secretary is a lawyer and think-tank creature. I don't much trust the state government of Texas either. The industry has also taken the workforce of large animal veterinarians for granted - a monopoly/market power issue that I just can't get in to here.

For me, it comes back to our federal government having an incoherent policy on Central and South America. We knew what was coming, we know what's going to happen, but we cut the program meant to prevent this scenario. Instead of taking those countries seriously as partners, the government has been stupid and domineering.

Here's the kicker: this is what the industry voted for. They might scream, they might get bailed out, but all that means is that you, the consumer, are going to be paying more for beef, plus whatever bailout gets shoveled their way. Until the industry accepts that they are part of a larger system; that they cannot eternally privatize the gains and publicize the losses of beef production; that they need to consider sustainability and stewardship in the management of their operations, this is only going to keep happening. Eventually, they may find that there is very little goodwill for them among the public, and people will decide that a Brazilian ribeye tastes just as good as one from Texas.

[No Magic Pill @nomagicpillsite]

Niplav, Defeater of Regression (to the Mean)

[taylor.town @surprisetalk]

care

[No Magic Pill @nomagicpillsite]

The whispering earring but it’s an oura ring telling you exactly how to feel

[No Magic Pill @nomagicpillsite]

LessOnline’s Waypoint is for networking, dating, and clout chasing. Treat it as such

[No Magic Pill @nomagicpillsite]

Vagueposting ban: the more vague your post, the longer your ban

[No Magic Pill @nomagicpillsite]

So much alpha in reposting someone else’s original thoughts and adding on a version of “wow look at how smart I am reading this great piece of work”

[No Magic Pill @nomagicpillsite]

Maybe it’s my algo or just me noticing it more, but populist movies where big bad bullies or rich people get pwned have really been on the rise lately

[No Magic Pill @nomagicpillsite]

@AaronBergman18 How do you think they got more money than God? Stickers are high margin!

[No Magic Pill @nomagicpillsite]

Heck, if it’s even out next to you what are you even doing. Phones have negative energy and gravity. Put it in a safe or box away from you and reap the -50% screen time benefits

[No Magic Pill @nomagicpillsite]

If your phone is anywhere near your place of slumber wtf are you even doing