(2026-09-21) Zvim Monthly Roundup46 September2026

Zvi Mowshowitz: Monthly Roundup #46: September 2026.

AI has taken over this blog.

We still refuse to abandon the rest of the world.

Bad News

A good reminder that most news is bad news, and chosen because the bad news in question is rare, which is good news, but the pattern overall of choosing this to be news is bad news, and often the bad news is that the bad news was chosen as news and now people are talking badly about it.

Wrong answers are a skill issue.
shellac! in the bay!: what does telling someone “skill issue” mean
A: “you’re doing this wrong, this is pretty easy to fix if you actually try”
B: “there are good returns to being more skilled about this”

I see this as being both A and B at different times.

Is it a curse?
eloïse: The curse of a good trait is that people around you will have it less. Being smart sounds good, but the experience of being smart is being surrounded by retards. Being considerate sounds good, but the experience of being considerate is getting much less consideration from the world than you put out. I think about this when I’m around someone with a lot of rizz. They live in a world of dullards.
That’s true only if you judge relative to yourself. Intelligence, consideration and rizz greatly raise your access to others with intelligence, consideration and rizz, including across such traits. So the question is, are you only thinking in relative terms?

Only about half of all psychology professors said, when asked to pick, that they put social equity concerns before truth, although the rest are overwhelmingly ‘it’s complicated.’ It’s not complicated.

I strongly agree with David Perell that it is sad that we used to make it a priority to make a variety of things beautiful, and now we don’t and merely make them functional. The big one is architecture, but this also applies to things like tickets, as per Ted Gioia’s The Banishment of Beauty From Everyday Life.

That beauty buys so much goodwill.

I knew coal plants got people killed but I did not know they also have a lot of radioactivity, or that this is still an active subject of a cover-up.

Nature incinerates what credibility it has left, says ‘the death of Jason Arday must prompt deep reflection.’

Focus Only On What Matters

Much failure is about failing to realize what is important. Hindsight sometimes helps, and sometimes it does not.
Ben Vinegar: I recommend people look at indie game postmortems (there’s a lot on Reddit, Youtube)
A recurring theme: “It turns out I was just making games for other indie game devs, and I found out too late they don’t actually buy games”
Rich Uncle Pennybags: i watched a failed cafe post mortem on youtube for whatever reason and the failed proprietor spent more time talking about subtle variations to the coffee due to weather than his decision to locate himself in a commuter town and open at 9:00
the decision to buy the absolute most expensive equipment he could afford and not do anything about the office standard issue grey carpets and unadorned white walls also struck me as questionable.

Woke 1 Was Crazy

Matthew Yglesias points out the arguably worst part of it, which is that even the people who successfully avoided saying absurd or false things were still scared into silence.
Once the reasonable people are running for the hills, everything is f**ed.
Matthew Yglesias: And what I personally remember most bitterly about Woke 1 is not the behavior of the most hysterical people; it’s the behavior of the people who knew perfectly well that others were behaving hysterically and who carefully avoided saying false or insane things (that’s how you can know that they knew) but who also avoided actively contesting them.
This was, for the most part, savvy behavior.*

The winners were those who ducked the storm — budget experts who knew it wasn’t true that cities spend more money on police than schools but didn’t say so — and emerged with their reputations unscathed.

That incentive structure to avoid being the “well, actually” guy is still very much with us and means that any kind of discourse could go wildly off the rails.

During Woke 1, I very much stuck my neck out with regard to Covid-19, but I was very careful about picking any other battles, and mostly did shut up about everything else. Indeed, I don’t say things I don’t believe, but on a number of fronts I still pick my battles and instead stay quiet.

Good Advice

These are two key lessons in spending:

When the price is too outrageous, you want to choke on it, to build good habits.

Focus on absolute price difference, not percentage price difference. Be willing to pay 10 times as much for 10% better, if that’s actually a better deal for you.

Early on you want to focus on lesson one, then later shift to lesson two. Then you strategically and selectively unlearn lesson one.

What’s the best way to take a break?

How I Write Clips: The 4 elements of an effective break according to Daniel Pink:

Motion beats sitting. A walk restores you more than a chair.

Outside beats inside.

Breaks [for writers] with people beat breaks alone, even for introverts.

Staring at your phone on your walk is not a break. Detach completely. “They’re part of our performance, not a deviation from the performance.”

Not at Lighthaven? That is unfortunate for you. You’ll need different norms.

Raye: you can tell how rationalist a subculture is based on how socially ok it is to just walk away from things / conversations / talks

brooke bowman: God it’s so nice I made a point of being weird like that in other spaces too though bc often ppl just don’t even realize it’s an option

I also do not recommend acting like you are with a bunch of Christian Conservatives, which will get you absolutely destroyed among most groups in blue states. There used to be a ‘one generic code’ you could fall back on, and largely be okay. Mostly now there isn’t, because part of the code of one color is reflective dismissal of the codes of a different color. Tricky.

When choosing careers,
Opportunity Knocks

You could instead be at Lighthaven soon.
Inkhaven 3 is coming

The University of Michigan robotics curriculum is on GitHub. A second away

While I Cannot Condone This

Know a guy who owns a truck. Then you can move things, or all the things. The cost is buying the pizza afterwards, plus helping out when it is your turn to help. The system works, and it makes everyone richer in a real sense and builds community, but lowers measured GDP. A lot of the story of vibecession and related topics, where economists say you are richer and poor people insist they are instead poorer, is explained by this

The account here, Nobunaga, has many similarly good stories about a particular American set of norms around community cooperation, reputation, honesty and virtuous norms. I do not take them to be literally true, but this is not important. They are fables in support of norms. Those that have such norms will vastly overperform measured GDP, and people will be happier

The norms are not always efficient, and can be taken too far. The electrician should not be impossible to reach. When you are in higher demand you should charge more, and so on. Growth and productivity rates suffer. I am generally a fan of more capitalism. But something important and valuable is being lost.

Astrology is a hell of a placebo, with people who read horoscopes exhibiting 0.2 standard deviations of self-reported personality movement towards their sign, whereas the effect size for others is exactly zero.

Good News, Everyone

If you want to ensure you can cancel your subscriptions, credit cards do offer some options. You can use X1, Rho or privacy.com to spin up a new card for each subscription. You can use Mercury, which allows you to easily block merchants

For Your Entertainment

Coyote vs. Acme is the third 5-star movie of 2026, matching 2024 and 2025 combined. Recommended for literal everyone of all ages

I agree with Tyler Cowen that it does seem like movies peaked in specifically 1999, as per the speech in The Matrix about that being the pinnacle of your civilization. Then movies got worse in key ways, including too many franchises wasting top budgets and talent. Now movies are getting better again. 2026 has been fantastic

My general thesis continues to be that it is better for shows to overstay their welcomes, and to sacrifice quality on the margin for quantity. It doesn’t have to get this bad, but unless the story has a clear fixed length, keep it going. Often the later parts that aren’t strictly ‘as good’ are still very good in their own way, and occasionally they age well once you’re over the initial disappointment.

We need movie theaters that show a wider variety of movies, and show things for longer.
Mike Drucker: Bring back cheap second run movie theaters. I don’t give a shit if it’s on streaming already. Charge $5 for the odyssey or spider-man in December and people would go just to kill time. Don’t ask me if it’s economically feasible became I don’t fucking know.

Or how about letting an individual choose the movie for some modest marginal cost? If on average you sell 5 tickets, and I am willing to buy 5 tickets a week in advance and want to put on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, do it and see if anyone else comes.

The addiction economy:
Henry Shevlin: One of these things is not like the others.
Brad Wilcox: We have a generation of young men trapped in the “addiction economy”—and the numbers are staggering:
☑️ 1-in-8 use porn, gamble & game daily
☑️ Almost 1-in-4 gamble daily
☑️ 1-in-4+ use porn daily

I continue to be a big fan of video games, in moderation or even somewhat more than moderation, provided they are ‘good’ games. None of the three things here are inherently bad. The problem is lack of moderation, or getting trapped in bad versions. The version on your phone will usually be the bad version of all three.

I did a Twitter poll (now lost to time) where I asked which of these three things was not like the others, and got defenders of all three.

Terminator 2 is a great move on entertainment alone, Jeffrey Ladish finally watched it and asks about how accurate it is on the AI front once you ignore the time travel and the Terminators. The answer is better than you would think, especially the emphasis that the dangerous thing was the computer that went into recursive self-improvement rather than the robots.

Please Review This Podcast

Many solid choices by Dean Ball. For me this splits into ‘things that I can confirm are very good’ and ‘things I have not listened to and thus it is hard to say but they have good company.’

Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game

I Was Promised Flying Self-Driving Cars

Human Progress: Swiss Re, one of the world’s leading reinsurers, found that Waymo's autonomous vehicles generated 88% fewer property damage claims and 92% fewer bodily injury claims than human-driven vehicles

Waymo once again expands its approved service area in Greater San Francisco as well as Los Angeles

Tesla asks for permits for 5,000 robotaxis in Las Vegas, was initially given 10 but has now been approved for the full 5,000. Waymo and Uber each got 1,000

There are some things self-driving cars probably won’t ever do for you.
Nate Silver: Robotaxis are very cool but there’s probably going to be a weird equilibrium where human drivers have some competitive advantage because they’re less strict about following speed limits and traffic laws.

*Waymo ‘nearly ran over’ a two-year old, said many. This is the framing people go with for ‘actual nothing happened and it was not close.’

SFist: A father in Noe Valley says a Waymo robotaxi stopped within 13 feet of his two-year-old daughter when she fell in the crosswalk, nearly running her over, but Waymo claims the car wouldn’t have hit her.*

*‘I literally don’t know what you want from me’ very much applies here. The Waymo did exactly what you would want it to do, complete with displaying ‘pedestrian yield,’ and the complaint seems to be that the father was worried that it might not do that?

Yes, I very much worry that one accident will ruin everything. Eventually there will be one accident.*

Government Working

Flock cameras plus AI is coming, while Flock demos things like ‘how to monitor a protest in real time.’ Have we considered not allowing the creation of a dystopian surveillance network for the government or others to hook up to their AIs?

Mamdani (Again) Fails Economics Forever

I will keep harping on the Mamdani NYC city-run grocery store fiasco, mainly because it is funny.

Catherine Rampell: Hear me out. What if instead of selling food below cost to all comers at taxpayer expense, and then using more taxpayer dollars to subsidize private companies that can’t compete with those prices, we had a program that targeted nutritional assistance just to the people who needed it, as a supplement? We could call it, I don’t know, supplemental nutritional assistance

They keep changing their story because there are zero ways to implement the thing they want that do not end in disaster.

Variously Effective Altruism

Remember what the benchmark is, in two parts.

Part 1:
The super rich do things like pay a specialty agency $100,000 per year with a $1 million spending minimum above that, and then spend absurd amounts of money on whims and momentary thrills, and most of all on getting exactly the things they want whenever they want them, and yes they are often jaded. Olivia Ferney, a travel specialist they hire, confirms, as we learn in How To Make A Killing, that you might want to think this means they are miserable, but actually the super rich are happy with the results, thank you very much.

I totally get it, especially the part where you have a person you can call that makes happen whatever you want to happen.

Part 2:
Yonan: Seth Rogen says his financial fear is dying with $10 million in the bank that he could have spent while he was alive.

This, on the other hand, feels completely insane, even if you have Too Much Money. Which Seth Rogen clearly does. Costs are not benefits, and the point of having money is partly to spend it but also to have the peace of mind that it is there when you need it

How Sarah Constantin thinks about evaluating grant applications, here condensed with a slight Zvi slant to the explanations, as we think highly similarly here. I endorse basically all of this.

A highly underrated charity strategy is Give Effective People Money, especially retroactive funding for things you loved, with no strings attached

A very clear case for Effective Altruism, especially from Patrick McKenzie:
Kelsey Piper: I'm an effective altruist because 1) I care a lot about how I can best use my money and time to achieve my goals in the world, and EAs wrote a lot of the stuff I found useful on that topic and 2) EA told me in the 2010s to worry about AI and pandemics, and they were right.
Patrick McKenzie: I wouldn't self-identify as an EA, and if one hypothetically read the Day 6 Vaccinate CA memo, one would find language in it which resonated with EAs and one would find language in it which resonated with Tolkien.
If I can be permitted to make personal empirical observations:
100% of funders who have expressed regret they did not fund VaccinateCA themselves self-identify as EA.
100% of funders who have contacted me post VaccinateCA offering to backfill money I personally donated the organization self-identify as EA.

The Lighter Side