Daily Picks

Wednesday, 9 September 2026

11 new posts

Red-and-green macaw (Ara chloropterus) couple in flight in Mato Grosso, Brazil

Giles Laurent · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

Nautilus
Society & IdeasNautilusJake Currie

Forget 10,000 Steps? Pace May Matter MoreHow Fast You Walk May Determine How Long You Live

TL;DR

The 10,000-step goal is a marketing myth; walking pace matters more than step count, and a brisk 30-minute walk can significantly cut mortality risk.

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Dwarkesh Podcast
TechDwarkesh PodcastDwarkesh Patel

Most of AI's pretraining gains came from data, not modelsPretraining progress is mostly coming from data

TL;DR

From 2019 to 2025, data improvements contributed 12x more compute efficiency gains to pretraining than model improvements (3.7x), but the real value of model research was enabling ever-larger scale of training.

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The Atlantic · Health
Society & IdeasThe Atlantic · Health

Let AI be the doctor? Medicine should wake upMedicine Needs to Get Serious About AI

TL;DR

Medical organizations insist AI can only assist human doctors, but evidence shows fully autonomous AI already outperforms humans on some tasks, and resisting it only holds back progress.

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Where’s Your Ed At
TechWhere’s Your Ed AtEd Zitron

The AI bubble's core: a few big clients and trillion-dollar compute promisesConcentration Risk

TL;DR

OpenAI and Anthropic rely on venture-funded AI startups for 80% of enterprise revenue, and their trillion-dollar compute commitments resemble subprime ARMs, creating huge concentration risk.

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The Conversation
TechThe Conversation

Pennsylvania sues TikTok for addiction — but that suit is messier than it soundsPennsylvania is suing TikTok over ‘addictive’ features – but that’s messier than it sounds

TL;DR

Suing over addictive design risks carving a nuanced problem into a black-and-white verdict.

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Noahpinion
Society & IdeasNoahpinionNoah Smith

Liberalism needs a new philosophy of immigration

TL;DR

Liberals must acknowledge that immigration is not a human right and craft a sustainable policy that benefits native citizens, or the far right will keep rising.

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404 Media
Tech404 MediaJoseph Cox

YouTube Channel Gave Hunter Biden Its Subscribers' EmailsChannel 5 Gave Hunter Biden a List of Its Subscribers’ Emails for Some Reason

TL;DR

Channel 5 handed over its subscribers' email addresses to Hunter Biden to promote his memecoin, a move data privacy experts say may be illegal.

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The Intrinsic Perspective
Society & IdeasThe Intrinsic PerspectiveErik Hoel

Mathematicians Enter the Dark Forest: A Guide to Avoiding AI PlagiarismCulture Becomes a Dark Forest

TL;DR

AI has turned mathematics and creative work into a survival game in a dark forest: publishing your work in the open invites instant copying, so people now hide their ideas like the 'wallfacers' of Liu Cixin's novel.

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Rest of World
Economics & PolicyRest of WorldViola Zhou

China's professionals become gig teachers for AINow it’s China’s experts who are gig workers training AI data

TL;DR

Amid economic downturn and government push, underemployed Chinese professionals are turning to AI training gigs to earn extra income, though the work is poorly paid and unstable.

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ChinaTalk
TechChinaTalkEthan Kessler

Taiwan's drone ambitions hit a wall in its own legislatureCan Taiwan Build Drones?

TL;DR

Taiwan's plan to build drones for security and economic growth is being undermined by political infighting and supply chain realities.

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Pluralistic
Society & IdeasPluralisticCory Doctorow

Anti-vax and antitrust are falling into the same trapPluralistic: Anti-vax/anti-trust (09 Sep 2026)

TL;DR

Anti-vax and antitrust both stem from collective amnesia: vaccines and antitrust laws worked so well that later generations forgot how terrible disease and monopoly used to be.

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