Daily Picks

Friday, 18 September 2026

10 new posts

Street lights on the promenade, Norderney, Lower Saxony, Germany

Dietmar Rabich · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

Klement on Investing
TechKlement on InvestingJoachim Klement

Let AI do the homework and exam scores drop 20%Do your homework, but do it right

TL;DR

Students who use generative AI for homework finish faster and score higher on it, but lose about 20% on exams where the machine is not available.

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Your Local Epidemiologist
Economics & PolicyYour Local EpidemiologistKatelyn Jetelina

Want a say on US vaccines? You have two days to post a commentTwo days left to comment on HHS's vaccine category proposal

TL;DR

A 30-day comment window from the US health department is laying the groundwork to bypass the existing vaccine recommendation process and narrow access.

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The Atlantic · Health
Economics & PolicyThe Atlantic · Health

He runs the CDC, and he told anti-vaxxers the White House is theirsRFK Jr.’s Brazen Reassurance to Anti-Vaxxers

TL;DR

Kennedy used his office as health secretary to endorse the anti-vaccine movement he founded, while a measles outbreak kills people in Pennsylvania.

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Nautilus
Science & HealthNautilusKristen French

You don't have one brain, you have twoYou Have Two Brains, Not One

TL;DR

The brain is not a single organ but two separately originated ones fused together: one runs breathing and heartbeat, the other runs memory and poetry.

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Pluralistic
TechPluralisticCory Doctorow

A chatbot can't predict 'I want a divorce'Pluralistic: Textured (18 Sep 2026)

TL;DR

Large language models excel at finding statistical regularities in the world, but it is the surprises beyond those regularities that define understanding, creativity and human relationships — and that is precisely what AI can never learn.

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404 Media
Tech404 MediaJason Koebler

AI execs admit it: the biggest theft on the web‘Doom Loop’: OpenAI and Microsoft Admits LLMs Are Destroying the Web and Built on Theft

TL;DR

In a newly unsealed court filing, Microsoft and OpenAI executives admit their models were built on stolen work and are now eating the websites they stole from.

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The Conversation
Economics & PolicyThe Conversation

Nepal asked for $20m in climate damages. The fund has paid out nothingFlood-damaged Nepal wants help from the global climate Loss and Damage Fund – but it’s waiting, along with 118 other countries

TL;DR

Four years after it was created and with 119 countries queuing up, the Loss and Damage Fund has disbursed nothing, which shows rich countries will acknowledge a debt on paper but not in practice.

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Noema Magazine
Economics & PolicyNoema MagazineBranko Milanović

The rich now hold top salaries and top portfolios. AI is coming for thatThe End Of Upward Mobility

TL;DR

America's wealthiest people sit at the top of both the wage scale and the capital scale, and the meritocratic story that justified them is being forced open or shut by AI.

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Dwarkesh Podcast
TechDwarkesh PodcastDwarkesh Patel

Ten thousand AIs thought for 88 hours and cracked a human problemNoam Brown – Agent swarms, alignment, & recursive self-improvement

TL;DR

AI's ability to solve hard problems is growing tenfold a year, but what actually caps recursive self-improvement is queueing for GPUs to run experiments, not intelligence.

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Quanta Magazine
Science & HealthQuanta MagazineSteven Strogatz and Janna Levin

Quantum weirdness dies of noise, not of being watchedWhere Does the Quantum World End and Ours Begin?

TL;DR

The line between quantum and classical is not drawn by a conscious observer but by quantum information leaking into the environment and spreading beyond any hope of recovery.

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