skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on Have you played with bubbles recently? in ~talk
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Comment on Have you played with bubbles recently? in ~talk
skybrian LinkAfter seeing someone else do it at the beach, we made our own bubble mix for creating giant bubbles, from an online recipe. This was to entertain our niece, but of course we had to try it out...After seeing someone else do it at the beach, we made our own bubble mix for creating giant bubbles, from an online recipe. This was to entertain our niece, but of course we had to try it out ourselves first.
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Comment on How two San Francisco Chronicle reporters broke the Eric Swalwell story in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
The Chronicle’s work had actually begun in early March. Bollag had heard from women outside the hothouse of the California gubernatorial campaign that Swalwell carried an “open secret.” But her initial interviews unearthed only rumors and second-hand accounts of the kind we don’t print.
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Then Arielle Fodor, a popular online content creator known as Mrs. Frazzled, began publicizing allegations against Swalwell. Fodor had in December posted a positive message about Swalwell, only to receive replies warning of his behavior. One alleged he’d slept with an intern.
Unverified claims of this kind against a public figure are challenging. They may be true, but we don’t publish them until we corroborate the details. We not only seek firsthand accounts from victims, but ask them about contemporaneous conversations they had and messages they sent that were consistent with their stories. We gather public records: police reports, 911 calls, lawsuits. We look for witnesses. We also look for facts that might counter or disprove an accusation.
The influencers’ posts lent urgency to our efforts. Which brings us to the cold calls. When Koseff rang Jane Doe, he hoped to gut-check whether the rumors were legitimate. She responded that she had firsthand knowledge they were, but didn’t feel comfortable elaborating.
She had her own question: Had someone leaked information about her to the Chronicle — perhaps a rival in the governor’s race? Koseff, who assured her there was no such leak, left that first call with the sense something had happened to her. The next morning, she asked to keep talking.
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The woman told Koseff that she’d been contacted days earlier by a CNN reporter. Though she had chosen not to speak to the network, the call prompted her to get in touch with Swalwell’s campaign to see what was going on — to find out whether her name had surfaced among rumored victims.
She said a staffer asked her whether Swalwell had ever been inappropriate with her, and then, when she hesitated to answer, said, “Actually, I don’t want to know.” When this person told her that Swalwell was not afraid of the rumors because he’d done nothing wrong, the woman said something broke in her. She wasn’t quite ready to share her experience, she said, but wanted the truth to come out.
On March 31, another online influencer, Cheyenne Hunt, posted a video airing more allegations against Swalwell. Koseff called Hunt, still trying to get in contact with potential victims of the congressman.
As he spoke to other sources and learned of Swalwell’s alleged pattern of reaching out to young women on the disappearing messages app Snapchat, he shared that information with Jane Doe. She was struck by the parallel to her experience. But she also worried that coverage of these allegations would not reflect the severity of what happened to her.
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Even as she continued to speak with the Chronicle, she learned that CNN, our competitor, was working on a story that would include multiple women. She contacted CNN and decided to speak with the network as well in solidarity with these women. Ultimately, she recorded an on-camera interview in which only her silhouette was visible.
Jane Doe also agreed to sit down with Koseff. She did so on April 8, the day after Swalwell, at a town hall in Sacramento, denied abusing or sleeping with female staffers during his seven terms in Congress.
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She walked him through her experience with Swalwell for two hours, saying he had begun pursuing her within weeks after hiring her at age 21 to work in his district office in Castro Valley. He was 17 years older. She said he sexually assaulted her twice — in 2019 after a dinner in the Bay Area and in 2024 following a gala in New York City — when she was too intoxicated to consent.
These were serious accusations, and Koseff and Bollag had more painstaking work to do. They confirmed through social media posts, videos, photos and documents that Jane Doe had been with Swalwell on the days in question. They reviewed texts she sent to a friend three days after the New York incident, stating she had been “sexually assaulted” by Swalwell. She wrote she had “blacked out” but “woke up once during it and even told him to stop at one point.”
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Koseff spoke with the friend and the woman’s then-boyfriend, whom she told about the alleged 2024 assault when she got home the next day. Both described her as still disoriented that morning. She said she did not file a police report, but agreed to allow us to review medical records showing she obtained pregnancy and STD tests a week after the incident.
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Jane Doe initially thought CNN’s reporting would publish before the Chronicle’s, which made her more comfortable because the network had located additional accusers and she preferred not to step out alone. The Chronicle agreed to hold off on publishing until multiple women came forward, either to us or through CNN.
Koseff and Bollag worked quickly to prepare a story that would be ready to go as soon as Jane Doe was comfortable. Bollag contacted Swalwell and his representatives Thursday afternoon, laying out our reporting.
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Swalwell’s team got busy. During the night, an attorney representing him sent Jane Doe a cease-and-desist letter, ordering her to retract her accusations. Her former boss was not only calling her a liar but saying she had a perverse motive: to wound his candidacy.
Koseff spoke to her Friday morning. Absorbing the fevered online chatter and the congressman’s threats, she feared Swalwell’s alleged misconduct would become “tabloid fodder” and that she might lose the ability to tell her own story. She told the Chronicle she was ready to move forward, even though hers would be the only accusation.
Political editor Sara Libby published our story just before 1:15 p.m. Friday. A couple of hours later, CNN published its story, which included three additional accusers. The articles complemented and strengthened each other precisely because we had worked in competition, not collaboration — another foundational argument for why strong journalistic institutions benefit readers.
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How two San Francisco Chronicle reporters broke the Eric Swalwell story
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Comment on Money for nothing: the roles of evidence in GiveDirectly’s journey to $1 billion delivered in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...]From the article:
One way to tell GiveDirectly’s story is thus as a bellwether for evidence-based decision-making. To win over skeptics we invested heavily, as I will describe, in causal evidence. And we benefited from the growth around us of an ecosystem that took that evidence seriously. If even a nutty idea like giving away money for nothing could survive and thrive in this environment, this bodes well for other efforts to elevate evidence over anecdote.
But there is more to it than that. Part of the point was to provoke questions not just about how to spend development dollars, but also about who should spend them. Questions, that is, about the allocation of power and not just its optimal exercise. From this point of view it was not so obvious what role program evaluation should play. If the money really is for nothing—free not just of strings, but of any particular sought-after result—then what exactly should one evaluate?
Experimental research can, in fact, still be useful even in this regard. It can because of a key difference between experiments in the social as opposed to the physical sciences. When Sir Ronald Fisher pioneered experimental methods at the Rothamsted Experimental Station, one of the world’s oldest centers for agricultural research, in order to figure out which fertilizers or seeds worked best, his “subjects” had no ethically significant agency: they were plants. But the subjects in a cash transfer experiment do. When a researcher documents the choices they make, we learn something about their preferences, their priorities, their vision of a good life. These insights have no analogue in a purely technical matter like agriculture productivity. And they have been an essential part of the story.
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The question was whether we needed to produce that evidence ourselves. Governments in South and Central America were already running large conditional cash transfer programs and, in many cases, measuring their effects using randomized controlled trials (RCTs). The results as we read them were broadly “positive” in that recipients spent money on reasonable-seeming things—investment as well as consumption, for instance—and that various indicators of well-being improved. Indeed, this evidence was one of a few things that had convinced us to begin in the first place. Would yet another RCT really be any more convincing?
We ultimately decided to run one as a matter of principle. Any non-governmental organization (NGO) asking for donations ought, we felt, to run an RCT if it could, as a sort of due diligence. Running one would be a statement of intent. It would show that we planned to do things the right way, and not market the idea on the basis of cherry-picked success stories.
It almost didn’t happen, even so. It almost died in—of all places—ethics review: Harvard’s Institutional Review Board worried that giving people money might harm them. This put us in a Catch-22: we had to argue that transfers would not have bad effects in order to justify a study to find out what effects they would have. Eventually, after months of delay, we prevailed.
It was worth the struggle. Transfers turned out to have a variety of positive effects, from reducing malnutrition to stimulating business investment to enabling people to build more durable homes. They did not increase spending on “temptation goods” like alcohol or tobacco. The study documenting these impacts has been influential among economists (cited nearly 1,900 times). And it has been influential for GiveDirectly—helping to earn a series of top charity recommendations from GiveWell, for instance.
So we carried on. At this time, we’ve completed or initiated 24 RCTs. We’ve come to see conducting—and not just citing—experimental research as a core strategy. It differentiated us. And it let us fuse research with direct impact to create an attractive risk-return profile. Worst case, your money substantially improves the lives of some very poor people. Best case, the evidence this yields also changes other people’s minds.
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We’d chosen to focus on making a few big payments for three reasons. One was the descriptive evidence that accumulating lumps of capital is otherwise hard for people near the poverty line. This makes it hard to start a business or make other productive investments, because these often require a large lump-sum purchase. A large transfer also enabled these larger purchases. Another was that they earn higher rates of return on their investments—in small businesses, agricultural inputs, housing, and so on—than we do when we keep the money in a bank or brokerage account. This means that keeping money on our books while we wait to transfer it to them is inefficient. And a third, perhaps reflecting the first two, was that when we asked people what they preferred, they almost all wanted lump sums. Yet for all that, we had never convincingly compared the impacts of the two. When we did, the results surfaced a lot of interesting economics—including the fact that UBI recipients often formed savings clubs to “reverse-engineer” their streams of small payments back into lumpier ones.
In short, setting out to solve what Bush might have called applied problems has often led to more basic scientific insights. As a result GiveDirectly studies have published in many of the top economics journals—including (if the names mean anything to you) the American Economic Review, Econometrica, Review of Economic Studies, and Quarterly Journal of Economics—even though in no case was publication in a top journal the goal.
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Money for nothing: the roles of evidence in GiveDirectly’s journey to $1 billion delivered
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Comment on AI populism's warning shots in ~society
skybrian (edited )Link ParentI think the reporter should have asked to see their electric bills and studied them. Although the quote was included to show someone’s “lived experience” there is also a factual component to it. A...I think the reporter should have asked to see their electric bills and studied them. Although the quote was included to show someone’s “lived experience” there is also a factual component to it. A person can angry but wrong about their power bill.
There could be innocent explanations for the discrepancy. Maybe that house is near Manassas but not in the area where the electricity rate is set by the city? But as it is I’m doubtful that their electricity bill went up due to an enormous, sudden rate increase and the high bill might be due to some other reason like more usage due to cold weather.
Also, I never argued that data center power usage isn’t a problem. I am skeptical that any retail customer’s electricity rate doubled like you suggested. That’s the part I’m discounting as rumor.
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Comment on AI populism's warning shots in ~society
skybrian Link ParentI think she sees populism on the anti-AI side and the people she interacts with who are pro-AI don’t come across as populist. It sounds like you want to find sinister motives for that.I think she sees populism on the anti-AI side and the people she interacts with who are pro-AI don’t come across as populist. It sounds like you want to find sinister motives for that.
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Comment on What Eric Swalwell’s exit means for Democrats in California’s governor race in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
The lack of a clear Democratic front-runner to succeed Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), who is term-limited, has raised concerns within the party. High-profile Democrats who could have cleared the field, including former vice president Kamala Harris, declined to enter the race. Some feared that support divided among more than a half-dozen prominent Democrats who did run would result in two Republicans advancing to the general election from the unusual June 2 jungle primary.
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After Swalwell’s campaign imploded, wealthy donors poured millions to boost Mahan, a more centrist candidate and the only top contender to hold elected office in the San Francisco Bay Area. On Tuesday, a super PAC backing Mahan launched an ad campaign in every state media market except for the Bay Area after receiving $12 million in pledged donations over the weekend alone to support the efforts, according to the group’s campaign manager, Matt Rodriguez.
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Voters have been apathetic. In mid-March, an unusually large share of voters could not offer an opinion on the gubernatorial candidates, according to findings from the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California at Berkeley.
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Name recognition and money goes a long way in California, where candidates struggle to reach large swaths of voters in expensive advertising markets. That’s why modern governors have usually been statewide officeholders before, like Newsom, a former lieutenant governor, or celebrities, such as Republicans Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ronald Reagan.
But this year, some of the well-known Democrats who could easily raise money decided not to run. Harris, who was a California attorney general and represented the state in the U.S. Senate before she became vice president, was widely seen as the prohibitive favorite had she entered the race. She is instead considering another presidential campaign. Sen. Alex Padilla (D), widely seen as a potential Newsom successor, also opted not to run, saying last year that he wanted to continue his work in Congress. Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis (D) withdrew from the race, and Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) instead ran for reelection — despite their offices often being a stepping stone to the governor’s mansion.
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Porter, who flipped a House seat in red Orange County in 2018 and unsuccessfully ran in the Senate primary in 2024, has also leaned into her brand as a staunch Trump critic. She received national attention as a sharp questioner of Trump administration officials in Congress and became known for often bringing a whiteboard to hearings. But she has also drawn scrutiny over allegations that she mistreated staff and for nearly walking out of a contentious interview with a local television reporter.
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Steyer, who made a fleeting presidential bid in 2020, has deep pockets. His campaign has spent at least $114 million on ads, according to data from AdImpact. But he is trying to win support for his affordability-focused populist campaign from a liberal base often leery of billionaires. He has faced criticism for his former hedge fund’s investment in a company that now operates immigrant detention centers.
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State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, the only current statewide elected official in the race, and Betty Yee, a former state controller, also have struggled to break through.
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What Eric Swalwell’s exit means for Democrats in California’s governor race
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Comment on Income tax will be dead within five years as AI jobs crisis grows, says Monzo founder in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentCountries that are serious about taxation often have a VAT tax, which is harder to game. They are regressive, though.Countries that are serious about taxation often have a VAT tax, which is harder to game. They are regressive, though.
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Comment on AI populism's warning shots in ~society
skybrian (edited )Link ParentI’m not going to check all of these, but I did check the first anecdote in the first link: With ChatGPT’s help, I was able to find the rate schedules for the city of Manassas. In 2016 it was...I’m not going to check all of these, but I did check the first anecdote in the first link:
John Steinbach was shocked to receive a $281 electricity bill in January 2026—a huge spike from the roughly $100 he’d paid the previous month. “It’s just so far beyond any bill that I’ve ever had,” he says. Steinbach, who has lived in his Manassas, Va., home for nearly 40 years, worries his rates will keep climbing as the outsized electricity demand from AI data centers grows. “They’re building them like it’s ‘Field of Dreams’—build it and the electricity will come—but we don’t see how that’s going to happen.”
With ChatGPT’s help, I was able to find the rate schedules for the city of Manassas. In 2016 it was $13.59 per month plus $0.0830 per kWh and the current rate schedule is $16.17 per month and $0.0984 per kWh, or about an 18% increase over a decade.
So, something doesn’t add up?
Here is a news story about how Manassas is considering a 10% increase.
But Council member Mark Wolfe said the data center power crunch isn’t driving the city’s proposed rate increase.
Instead, he said the 10% increase in rates is needed to keep the city’s electric system financially sustainable after years of flat rates and sharply rising costs in both materials and labor.
The city went without any increase in electric rates from 2017 through 2023, Wolfe said. The increase is needed now “to reestablish that our utility enterprise operations are sustained by the utility rate revenue.”
Also, for a Californian these rates look extremely low. We are paying about .30 per kilowatt-hour, three times as much.
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Comment on AI populism's warning shots in ~society
skybrian (edited )Link ParentHas anyone had their energy bill double due to a data center? What is that based on? You don’t need to know anything to repeat rumors. If you want to avoid spreading misinformation, these things...Has anyone had their energy bill double due to a data center? What is that based on?
You don’t need to know anything to repeat rumors. If you want to avoid spreading misinformation, these things do need to be checked.
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Comment on Allbirds announces pivot from running shoes to AI compute; stock surged over 700% in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentNo, I've read various comparisons but it seems difficult to figure out, which is why I'm suspicious of confident assertions. For customers, I've seen a comparison that using AI and watching...No, I've read various comparisons but it seems difficult to figure out, which is why I'm suspicious of confident assertions.
For customers, I've seen a comparison that using AI and watching Netflix are in the same ballpark, but I have low confidence in that.
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Comment on Allbirds announces pivot from running shoes to AI compute; stock surged over 700% in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentWhy wouldn’t manufacturing shoes be more environmentally harmful? It seems like a wild assumption to make without investigating.Why wouldn’t manufacturing shoes be more environmentally harmful? It seems like a wild assumption to make without investigating.
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Comment on AI populism's warning shots in ~society
skybrian Link ParentYes, there are people like that too and that’s bad. That’s not populism, though? The article isn’t about the managers. Although, I suppose the OpenClaw craze is a kind of influencer-driven...Yes, there are people like that too and that’s bad. That’s not populism, though? The article isn’t about the managers.
Although, I suppose the OpenClaw craze is a kind of influencer-driven populism. And there do seem to be lots of ordinary people using ChatGPT in inappropriate ways?
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Comment on AI populism's warning shots in ~society
skybrian Link ParentWhat I took from the article is that, while it’s possible to be a smart skeptic of AI, this is not the way to bet. There are inevitably going to be a lot of uninformed people complaining about AI...What I took from the article is that, while it’s possible to be a smart skeptic of AI, this is not the way to bet. There are inevitably going to be a lot of uninformed people complaining about AI who know very little about it but are sure it’s bad. Compare with populist beliefs about vaccines or the pandemic or 9/11 or child abuse or foreign aid or trade.
This seems to be true of many hot-button topic these days. Uninformed people on both sides make lots of noise while saying things that are wildly wrong about the specifics.
Of course, by taking a position it’s possible to be “directionally accurate” by coincidence. I don’t really consider that a “legitimate position.” There is more to making an argument than being on the right side. You also have to avoid repeating falsehoods.
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Comment on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s home targeted with molotov cocktail in ~tech
skybrian (edited )Link ParentThe trouble is that the alternative to paid labor is unpaid labor. There are situations when volunteers can play a role, but it would be unethical to expect nurses to go unpaid. Traditionally,...The trouble is that the alternative to paid labor is unpaid labor. There are situations when volunteers can play a role, but it would be unethical to expect nurses to go unpaid.
Traditionally, people relied on unpaid labor by family members. And I'm living that because my mother came to stay with us for the winter and I expect to do more of that. It works for us.
Except, it's not going to work for my wife and I because we don't have kids. It would be both unworkable and unethical to attempt to rely on volunteers when we get old.
I do hope we will be able to find caring people to help us, but I also expect to pay them.
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Comment on AI populism's warning shots in ~society
skybrian Link ParentPoliticians talk all the time about "creating jobs" and sometimes this happens, but at scale, creating new jobs is apparently easier said than done and people continue to worry.Politicians talk all the time about "creating jobs" and sometimes this happens, but at scale, creating new jobs is apparently easier said than done and people continue to worry.
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Comment on AI populism's warning shots in ~society
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...]From the article:
In 2026, the politics of AI has a new meta: “caring a lot about AI” is no longer correlated with “knowing a lot about AI.” AI is rising in salience faster than any other issue among US voters. Politicians gearing up for the 2026 midterms and 2028 primaries won’t lag far behind. That means AI policy is no longer the remit of a few wonky technocrats. From now until forever, most people regulating, protesting, and talking about AI will not be interested in AI per se, but rather how it impacts their preexisting belief systems and political agendas. These forces are stronger, more diffuse, and more volatile than we have seen in AI policy before. And the curve is just about to shoot straight up.
I define AI populism as a worldview in which AI is viewed not only as a normal technology but as an elite political project to be resisted. It regards AI as a thing manufactured by out-of-touch billionaires and pushed onto an unwilling public to achieve sinister aims like “capitalist efficiency” (layoffs) and “population management” (surveillance). AI populists don’t really care whether ChatGPT is personally useful, or if Waymos eke out some safety gains: AI’s utility as a tool is immaterial relative to the unwelcome societal change it represents.
Among the public, AI populism shows up as individual attempts to block AI encroachment; for example, data center NIMBYism, AI witchhunts among creatives, and in the extreme, assassination attempts like what happened to Altman this week.
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What seems likely is that the anti-elite and nihilistic attitudes that have dominated US political culture in the last few years are transmuting into anger at AI billionaires. Young people are particularly incensed. Gen Z already grew up in a world that they felt was shrinking, where grift and shitcoins and sports gambling looked like the only paths up. Now, they’re being told AI is the reason they can’t get a job—and potentially never will. Just as the United Healthcare CEO seemed like a justified target to many disillusioned and radicalized young people, so will AI executives be to many more.
Guar gum is the special ingredient I remember. There are various recipes online but I don't remember which one we followed.