Timothy B. Lee

No, the real inflation rate isn’t 15 percent Jordan Peterson and Jack Dorsey are touting a bogus theory about the inflation rate.

I'm a fan of this @binarybits.bsky.social piece that points out the incredibly simple and dumb error made by shadowstats. There's definitely some wiggle room for how you calculate inflation but you can't be significantly biased in the long term without it being obvious.

Donald Trump just laid out his vision for AI policy The president wants to help American AI companies compete with their Chinese rivals.

Great @binarybits.bsky.social piece with overview of and background of White House AI Action Plan

www.understandingai.org/p/donald-tru...

The American Time Use Survey came out recently, giving the most detailed look at how the country spends its days, so here's a quick thread

1st, the share of Americans reading for personal interest on an average day has fallen to the lowest level on record, down 10% from 2003🧵

How a big shift in training LLMs led to a capability explosion Reinforcement learning, explained with a minimum of math and jargon.

This is an excellent explainer by @binarybits.bsky.social .

arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/h...

Do you think that is influencing Netanyahu’s behavior today?

Have you tried o3?

YouTube video by Nonzero The Truth about Sam Altman | Robert Wright & Timothy B. Lee

The Truth about Sam Altman | @robertwrighter.bsky.social
and Timothy B. Lee (@binarybits.bsky.social), author of the Understanding AI newsletter, discuss what two new biographies reveal about the OpenAI CEO.

Fantastic @binarybits.bsky.social writeup of the Alsup ruling in Anthropic’s case open.substack.com/pub/understa...

But aside from AI training, yet another reminder of the power of analog media. This excerpt is tragic: Alsup’s right about books. But this is exactly how the digital economy works.

A graph showing a massive drop in US car imports as Donald Trump imposes tariffs on US motor vehicles

No urbanist has successfully kept more vehicles off the road than radical degrowth war-on-cars advocate Donald J Trump

On the flip side, progressive cities like Washington DC have put in a ton of traffic calming measures over the last 10 or 20 years.

There weren’t cars in the 1980s?

Apropos of nothing I feel like one of the most important things to help your kids develop is an ability to self-regulate.

Hey @niedermeyer.online is this going to mean no more Tesla takedown protests? Or are they going to become pro-Elon rallies?

There are a ton of people on the internet who don’t understand the difference between describing something and defending it. They think that if you write something about Trump and don’t explicitly add “and that’s bad” every few sentences you are a Trump apologist. These people are morons.

Gotta save those crucial law enforcement jobs.

I don’t know if any studies about this.

Groceries stores are famous for their fat profit margins.

Where does he say he is surprised?

Yes.

I hate it.

When fertility is below replacement there are fewer opportunities for young people and it worsens the finances of programs like social security and Medicare.

People are betting that FSD and maybe Optimus will give Tesla a far more valuable business than a conventional car company. If that proves wrong (and it probably will imo) the price will crash.

That tilda is important! I don’t believe “fully automating” is a coherent concept. There are only degrees of automation.

I feel like this has been happening for several years now? A lot of ai training data is generated by LLMs now.

Waymo has had dozens of crashes—almost all were a human driver's fault Human drivers keep crashing into Waymos that aren't even moving.

Great article on Waymo safety by @binarybits.bsky.social, who has IMO the best reporting on self-driving cars out there

Do you think Waymo does a worse job here than uber and Lyft drivers?

I read that nvidia deal as mainly just a decision to use nvidia chips in whatever adas thing they build. Nvidia may help in other ways but i doubt they have worked those details out.

But yeah the main takeaway is that they are not spinning up something new so much as trying to find a lower cost way to get some value out of their remaining cruise workers and associated IP.

GM has no clue what they are doing. Cruise was too expensive so they shut it down and laid off a bunch of the workers. Now they are trying to salvage what’s left in a way that reduces their burn rate.