A broad political coalition came together to reform electoral rules and remove ambiguities/weaknesses, fund Ukraine, and keep the government working, and it wasn't a huge story. All of it just worked. It was boring and functional and so good.
US Politics feels so normal right now. Democracy is basically functional. There's a bipartisan agreement to keep the government funded and debts paid that didn't require any brinksmanship. Both parties are cheering on the leader of a democracy fighting against a fascist state. "The United States" is a coherent entity that does things other than deadlock against itself and threaten to collapse. Stuff is basically working. I love it.
10 years ago a lot of AI Safety discussion turned on distilling humanity's meta-ethics into a machine-readable form. Today our most impressive AI's approximately reflect all the human content we could find for them, encoded in a semantically-meaningful way. We can convey intuitive preferences to the machines now. We can't guarantee that they'll actually optimize on those preferences, but the fact that the concepts are available seems under-discussed.
Built-in history logging in shells should be a lot more durable and include more metadata. I use a little PROMPT_COMMAND function to do this in bash, and it's super useful to go back and see what I did before. A coworker recently tweaked my function to work in zsh: https://www.jefftk.com/p/logging-shell-history-in-zsh
It's pretty cool that (1) there appears to be a meaningful electoral penalty for opposing democracy and (2) Congress is about to pass a law clarifying most of the ambiguities that could otherwise lead to a crisis in a disputed Presidential election. The 2024 Presidential Election may end up being much less important than the last few, and that would be a huge relief.
Bayesian inference is so cool. I wish causality was real. #WishICouldRememberWhereIFirstHeardThis