Michael Green: Part 1: My Life Is a Lie. Markets, liquidity, factor models—none of these ever felt self-evident to me. Markets are mechanisms of price clearing. Mechanisms have parameters. Parameters distort outcomes. This is the lens through which I learned to see everything: find the parameter, find the distortion, find the opportunity. But there was one number I had somehow never interrogated. The poverty line. (more)

John Gall (September 18, 1925 – December 15, 2014) was an American author, scholar, and pediatrician.[1][2] Gall is known for his 1975 book General Systemantics: an essay on how systems work, and especially how they fail..., a critique of systems theory. One of the statements from this book has become known as Gall's law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_(author) (more)

the real name of David Wong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Pargin (more)

see affordability, poverty, precarity, inflation

The Agile Product Development equivalent of Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose? (more)

The reactive client-first (local-first?) store for your API. TanStack DB gives you a reactive, client-first store for your API data with collections, live queries and optimistic mutations that keep your UI reactive, consistent and blazing fast... Built on a Typescript implementation of differential dataflow, TanStack DB gives you real-time sync, live queries and local writes. With no stale data, super fast re-rendering and sub-millisecond cross-collection queries — even for large complex apps. (data store) https://tanstack.com/db

Mission Genesis is an initiative launched by the United States government to accelerate scientific research through advanced artificial intelligence (AI, mainly GenAI?) technologies. Announced in November 2025, the mission aims to revolutionize innovation across multiple scientific disciplines. The initiative was officially launched by the White House, emphasizing its strategic importance for national progress.[1] The Department of Energy highlighted that Genesis will leverage cutting-edge AI computing to solve complex scientific problems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Genesis (more)

Warren Weaver (July 17, 1894 – November 24, 1978)[1] was an American scientist, mathematician, and science administrator.[2] He is widely recognized as one of the pioneers of machine translation and as an important figure in creating support for science in the United States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Weaver (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Read the Roon. Roon, member of OpenAI’s technical staff, is one of the few candidates for a Worthy Opponent when discussing questions of AI capabilities development, AI existential risk and what we should do about it. (more)

Rusty Guinn: You. Will. Eat. The. Bugs. *I have eaten bugs. I did not do so willingly. (more)

The (Truly) Greatest Hits Edition. Sam Valenti (SV4) is an old friend of WITI. He’s the founder of Ghostly International and runs the essential music Substack Herb Sundays. (more)

Zeynep Tufekci: The CDC Is Still Repeating Its Mistakes. By issuing covid-19 recommendations that are simultaneously too timid and too complicated, the CDC is repeating a mistake that’s hounded America’s pandemic response. The new guidelines are rigid and binary, and aren’t accompanied by explanations or a link to an accessible version of the underlying science, which would empower people to both understand them better and figure things out for themselves. (more)

Ben Hunt: A Truth That's Told With Bad Intent. That’s Isaac Newton in William Blake’s painting, one of the major villains in Blake’s philosophy. Why? Because Newton was a modeler, a proponent of Science with a capital S, the most repressive force in the modern age. I think Blake was absolutely right. Our narratives of COVID-19 are all lies. (more)

The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid-19 Kill. The distinction between droplet and airborne transmission has enormous consequences. To combat droplets, a leading precaution is to wash hands frequently with soap and water. To fight infectious aerosols, the air itself is the enemy. In hospitals, that means expensive isolation wards and N95 masks for all medical staff. (more)

an air-purifying respirator, in which respirable air is obtained by filtering a contaminated atmosphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respirator (more)

a process of starting from a flying status https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne (more)

Zeynep Tufekci - Opinion | Why Did It Take So Long to Accept the Facts About Covid-19? A week ago, more than a year after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that we face a pandemic, a page on its website titled “Coronavirus Disease (Covid-19): How Is It Transmitted?” got a seemingly small update. (more)

Shanaka Anslem Perera: The Algorithm That Detected a $610 Billion Fraud: How Machine Intelligence Exposed the AI Industry’s Circular Financing Scheme. At precisely 4:00 PM Eastern Time on November 19, 2025, Nvidia Corporation released third-quarter earnings that exceeded Wall Street expectations (more)

Ed Zitron: The Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble Vol. 2. As I reported earlier in the week, OpenAI spent $12.4 billion on inference between 2024 and September 2025 (more)

The naturalistic decision making (NDM) framework emerged as a means of studying how people make decisions and perform cognitively complex functions in demanding, real-world situations. These include situations marked by limited time, uncertainty, high stakes, team and organizational constraints, unstable conditions, and varying amounts of experience (ill-structured)... The NDM movement originated at a conference in Dayton, Ohio in 1989, which resulted in a book (Decision Making in Action: Models and Methods ISBN:978-0-89391-943-6) by Gary Klein, Judith Orasanu, Roberta Calderwood, and Caroline Zsambok.[1] The NDM framework focuses on cognitive functions such as decision making, sensemaking, situational awareness, and planning – which emerge in natural settings and take forms that are not easily replicated in the laboratory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_decision-making (more)