Advocates for knowledge-rich curriculum often speak as though the evidence is finally on their side, and it is. But evidence was never the obstacle. The obstacles are ideological, professional, structural, and political. Many are deeply embedded in the culture of education and in American society itself. thenext30years.substack.com/…

It's hard not to notice that defenses of social justice work mostly turn on insisting that scholar-activism is a made up right-wing term—despite hiring committees, grant orgs, and scholars using it—rather than simply saying "here's why scholar-activist work is good and matters."

If lots of people believe that the state is working in zero- or negative-sum ways against their interests, then they become part of the coalition against state capacity. This is the simplest explanation of what's happening in the US and UK right now, and also what happened in the 1945-70s period in the same countries. Elites' right to rule is predicated on their ability to do what the public wants them to do. That is especially true for the stuff that is supposed to deliver results by going against instincts the public holds. This is a completely general application of principal-agent problems, rather than some special theory. It is completely logical that populism, which is stuff that makes a case based on the base instincts of the public rather than its outcomes, returns when the results are bad, because significant sections of the public do not believe it is worth holding their nose to, for example, let prices rise. If we want high state capacity then we have to create broad-based state legitimacy, otherwise a significant section of the public will vote for hunkering down, for defensive politics to protect their endowments. slowboring.com/p/trumps-war-…

for example github.com/oven-sh/WebKit/pu…

this is my personal singularity moment this post may sound like a paid ad. I only wish. I'm concerned, more so than happy. the world is changing, and, among the scenarios where AI goes terribly wrong, inequality is the most realistic, yet, the one Anthropic seems to be the least concerned about. I'm glad OpenAI is taking the opposite stance: *personal AGI for everyone*. I think this is a commendable position in the times we live. but who am I in the queue of the bread? anyway, Fable is here, so I'll just report my first-hour experience first of all, all my pet prompts are solved. → λ-calculus puzzles → bug questions → one-shot apps all are trivial to it. I don't have anything harder other than my ongoing work so, in the last several days, I've been toying with HVM5, a new interaction net evaluator with a faster loop. after writing the first version, I left 32 GPT-5 agents working for ~20 hours each. this resulted in up to 2x speedups, but the file size increased by 2-fold and quality decreased significantly. I then simplified the whole thing into an even simpler core, and left Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5 optimizing it for 8 hours. Opus got a legit 6% - 34% speedup in most benches. GPT got better results, but, sadly, an unusable file. I then asked Fable to optimize it. 2 hours later, it landed a 1770% speedup in one case, 100% in other 4, and 22% in average. yes, in 2 hours it outperformed me, opus 4.8 and a swarm of gpt 5.5 agents, by one order of magnitude. that could not possibly be legit. "it must be hardcoding the benchmarks" (GPT trauma). so I read its explanation and what it did was, indeed, the most high impact optimization one could try first. seems like HVM5 was wasting a lot of time garbage-collecting unused branches of pattern-match nodes. I had optimized that for static mats, but not for dynamic mats. skill issue. Fable figured how to do it for these, resulting in a massive speedup in some benches but wait, is that *correct*? I'm not sure yet, it is credible, but this is the kind of thing that is very easy to get wrong on interaction nets. the problem is, when I was ready to start auditing Fable's solution so I could tell whether it was buggy or legit, it interrupted me to tell me it had found a massive bug on the code *I* had written. ... wait, what? so... for garbage collection purposes, I stored a bit on lambda term pointers that meant "the variable bound by this lambda has been freed, so, its lambda must free whatever argument it is applied to". that's fine. yet, on duplicator nodes, I also used the same bit to mean "one of the duplicated variables was freed, so, treat this dup as a passthrough no-op". so, if a lambda entered a duplicator, it would mistake the lambda's collection bit for its own, resulting in corrupted interaction! that's a mouthful, why I'm writing this? just so you can appreciate the sheer absurdity of what just happened. I didn't ask it to find bugs. I asked it for an optimization. and even if I did ask it to find bugs, this bug is so astonishingly subtle and specific, identifying it takes mastering the domain to an extent that it beyond even me. I'd easily need hours or days to fix it, *if* I ever came across it. chances are it would just go unnoticed. and Fable found it and fixed it like it was nothing, while it was busy adding a 17x speedup to a file that neither I, nor Opus 4.8, nor a fleet of GPT 5.5 managed to barely make 2x faster. oh and there is also another tab where it is also ripping through Bend's codebase and finishing everything I had to do I don't know what to say anymore this isn't about Anthropic or OpenAI, this is about our collective future as a species. the world is changing, and we need to be aware of it, and discuss how to handle this change. receipt below . . .

goes on to argue that shared study of values requires allowing for reasonable pluralism. *That* is how we draw the line – everyone agrees we should avoid nuclear calamity, but not everyone agrees on progressive politics. 🧵12

one major difference between SF and Seattle politics is that in Seattle progressives are the more pro-housing coalition while in SF it is the exact opposite

.@tylercowen has the best take I've seen on AI and education:

Growing up in the early 80s, you could still feel the tremors of how big a deal the bicentennial was. You’d still see t-shirts, hats etc. There was even a Bicentennial Park in my hometown. 250 discourse seems way more quiet. But tbf, we don’t have a word for 250 of something.

seems like a bad sign if anthropic engineers don't write their own code and only use Claude, but in their interview process you only write code and never use Claude

Ossoff: This is what small men like Donald Trump and JD Vance and Stephen Miller will never understand—that our national greatness flows not through our blood or our genes, but through our ideas. Americans are not a race, we're a people united not by ethnicity, but by our shared convictions, and that is what makes us exceptional