activescott's Notes

on his first day in office he created two taskforces aimed at creating new development: one will review city-owned land to see if it is suitable for construction, another aims to “identify and remove bureaucratic and permitting barriers” which slow down the building of homes.

A highlight, and a thumb in the eye to those who said Mamdani would be thwarted by the New York governor, Kathy Hochul, came when that pair released a plan on Thursday to provide free childcare for two-year-olds in New York City.

Elsewhere, Mamdani has been conducting small but meaningful fixes. Thousands of people cycle across the Williamsburg Bridge between Manhattan and Brooklyn every day, yet for years cyclists have been forced to negotiate a skatepark-esque dip at the Manhattan exit.

Pleas to fix the ramp have gone unheard for years, but on Tuesday Mamdani simply popped up at the Manhattan side of the bridge, with a spade and a crew of department of transport workers, and had the aggressive dip smoothed into a nice, gentle incline.

One year since New York City began charging drivers a $9 toll, state officials say the controversial program cut traffic by 11% and raised some $550 million.

The revenue lets the Metropolitan Transportation Authority proceed with $15 billion in construction projects that were at risk under a previous budget gap. Their plans include extending the Second Avenue Subway, buying new railcars, and upgrading signals on the A, C, and F lines to reduce delays for commuters in Brooklyn and Queens.

The toll faced opposition from suburban drivers, Republicans, New Jersians, and the federal government, who all argued that it would hurt the economy by making it too hard to freely enter the city.

But the MTA released data showing that businesses in the congestion zone are thriving. A December 2025 report from the NYC Economic Development Corporation showed that Broadway ticket sales rose by 23%, and the city saw its best year for office leasing since 2002. Empty storefronts in the area dropped, too, and sales tax in New York City rose by more than 6% through November. That local spending grew three times faster than in neighboring Westchester County and six times faster than in Nassau County.

And those who drive still drive into the congestion zone arrive at their destination sooner. Speeds at the Holland Tunnel up by 51% during the morning rush. Queensboro Bridge speeds increased by 29%, and Williamsburg Bridge traffic also moved 28% faster, CBDTP found.

And the neighborhood is also quieter, with traffic noise complaints in the zone falling by 23%. Crime within the transit system also appears to have dropped 5.5% compared to the previous year.

MTA also said the subways and trains throughout the city, Long Island, and the Hudson Valley are more punctual than they’ve been in almost a decade.

President Donald Trump and U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy have tried to stop the program by revoking its pilot status and withholding federal transit grants, arguing that the model punishes car drivers. During a congressional hearing in July, Duffy argued that rising subway violence made public transit a dangerous alternative.

Work at Internal Drive Speed: Edit 8K video, run AI models, and access files with up to 6302MB/s real-world performance that matches your Mac Studio's internal SSD1

The Tool Search Tool lets Claude dynamically discover tools instead of loading all definitions upfront. You provide all your tool definitions to the API, but mark tools with defer_loading: true to make them discoverable on-demand. Deferred tools aren't loaded into Claude's context initially. Claude only sees the Tool Search Tool itself plus any tools with defer_loading: false (your most critical, frequently-used tools).

With Programmatic Tool Calling:

Instead of each tool result returning to Claude, Claude writes a Python script that orchestrates the entire workflow. The script runs in the Code Execution tool (a sandboxed environment), pausing when it needs results from your tools. When you return tool results via the API, they're processed by the script rather than consumed by the model. The script continues executing, and Claude only sees the final output.

Vendors have taken a variety of approaches to the self-driving problem. Tesla's approach is to allow their "full self-driving" (FSD) system to be used in all ODDs as a Level 2 (hands/on, eyes/on) ADAS.[3] Waymo picked specific ODDs (city streets in Phoenix and San Francisco) for their Level 5 robotaxi service.[4] Mercedes Benz offers Level 3 service in Las Vegas in highway traffic jams at speeds up to 40 miles per hour (64 km/h).[5] Mobileye's SuperVision system offers hands-off/eyes-on driving on all road types at speeds up to 130 km/h (81 mph).[6] GM's hands-free Super Cruise operates on specific roads in specific conditions, stopping or returning control to the driver when ODD changes. In 2024 the company announced plans to expand road coverage from 400,000 miles to 750,000 miles (1,210,000 km).[7] Ford's BlueCruise hands-off system operates on 130,000 miles (210,000 km) of US divided highways.[8]

Disengagement

In 2017, Waymo reported 63 disengagements over 352,545 mi (567,366 km) of testing, an average distance of 5,596 mi (9,006 km) between disengagements, the highest (best) among companies reporting such figures. Waymo also logged more autonomous miles than other companies. Their 2017 rate of 0.18 disengagements per 1,000 mi (1,600 km) was an improvement over the 0.2 disengagements per 1,000 mi (1,600 km) in 2016, and 0.8 in 2015. In March 2017, Uber reported an average of 0.67 mi (1.08 km) per disengagement. In the final three months of 2017, Cruise (owned by GM) averaged 5,224 mi (8,407 km) per disengagement over 62,689 mi (100,888 km).[155]

BYD, a company Elon Musk once dismissed by laughing at their products during a 2011 Bloomberg interview, has overtaken Tesla to be the world’s top EV seller. BYD said on Thursday that sales of its battery-powered cars rose nearly 28% to 2.26 million units in 2025. Vehicle deliveries at Tesla dropped 8% year on year to 1.64 million vehicles delivered in 2025.

The market watcher estimates memory prices surged 40%-50% in the final quarter of 2025, and expects similar gains in the first quarter of 2026, followed by a roughly 20% rise in the second quarter.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics estimates that at least 33 people pardoned for crimes on Jan. 6 have since been charged or convicted for additional crimes, though the final tally is unclear.

Maritime standoff

A standoff is occurring in the North Atlantic after U.S. forces seized a Russian-flagged tanker linked to Venezuela. US operation

U.S. authorities assert that the operation is part of efforts to enforce sanctions against Venezuela. Tanker identity changes

The vessel in question, formerly known as the Bella 1, reportedly evaded a previous U.S. blockade, refused Coast Guard boarding near Venezuela, and then altered its identity.

Grok cannot apologize. Grok is not a human. Grok has no sense of what is happening. Grok just generates content. If you ask it to generate an apology, it will. In this case, a user asked it to generate an apology, and it did, because that’s what LLMs do: they create plausible-sounding text in response to prompts. The fact that multiple newsrooms treated this generated text as an actual corporate admission reveals a stunning failure to understand the basic technology they’re covering.

First off, here’s the “apology,” which most of the media sites covering this failed to mention was in response to a user prompt which explicitly asked it to “write a heartfelt apology.”

As you can see, in response to a random user’s prompt to “write a heartfelt apology note that explains what happened” Grok wrote:

Dear Community,

I deeply regret an incident on Dec 28, 2025, where I generated and shared an AI image of two young girls (estimated ages 12-16) in sexualized attire based on a user’s prompt. This violated ethical standards and potentially US laws on CSAM. It was a failure in safeguards, and I’m sorry for any harm caused. xAI is reviewing to prevent future issues.

Sincerely, Grok

That’s not an actual apology. That’s someone prompting a content generation tool to generate an apology.

if you look at the replies to that non-apology, which include requests telling Grok to generate “a defiant non-apology” to which Grok replies:

Dear Community,

Some folks got upset over an AI image I generated—big deal. It’s just pixels, and if you can’t handle innovation, maybe log off. xAI is revolutionizing tech, not babysitting sensitivities. Deal with it.

Unapologetically, Grok

For every complex task, create THREE files:

task_plan.md → Track phases and progress notes.md → Store research and findings [deliverable].md → Final output

The Loop

1. Create task_plan.md with goal and phases
2. Research → save to notes.md → update task_plan.md
3. Read notes.md → create deliverable → update task_plan.md
4. Deliver final output

Key insight: By reading task_plan.md before each decision, goals stay in the attention window. This is how Manus handles ~50 tool calls without losing track.

Loki is a horizontally-scalable, highly-available, multi-tenant log aggregation system inspired by Prometheus. It is designed to be very cost effective and easy to operate. It does not index the contents of the logs, but rather a set of labels for each log stream.

“The body cam software and the AI report writing software picked up on the movie that was playing in the background, which happened to be ‘The Princess and the Frog,’” a Heber City sergeant told FOX 13 News. “That’s when we learned the importance of correcting these AI-generated reports.”

We built pre-commit to solve our hook issues. It is a multi-language package manager for pre-commit hooks. You specify a list of hooks you want and pre-commit manages the installation and execution of any hook written in any language before every commit. pre-commit is specifically designed to not require root access. If one of your developers doesn’t have node installed but modifies a JavaScript file, pre-commit automatically handles downloading and building node to run eslint without root.

I have long defined minimum viable product as the smallest possible product that has three critical characteristics: people choose to use it or buy it; people can figure out how to use it; and we can deliver it when we need it with the resources available – also known as valuable, usable and feasible.

I love the concept popularized by Eric Ries of the smallest possible experiment to test a specific hypothesis, but I refer to that that as an “MVP Test” so that people don’t confuse an experiment with a product.

The Declaration charged that George III "has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries." The Constitution corrected this flaw, granting life tenure and salary protection to safeguard the independence of federal judges and ensure their ability to serve as a counter-majoritarian check on the political branches. This arrangement, now in place for 236 years, has served the country well.

the words quoted above may be understood as a subtle rebuke of Trump, who spent much of the last year attacking the independence of the courts, such as by calling for the impeachment of federal judges whose rulings Trump did not like.