Early in the first Trump administration, the legal journalist Benjamin Wittes coined one of the best descriptions of how President Donald Trump governs: “malevolence tempered by incompetence.” Trump, as Wittes originally wrote, often issued executive orders that were not vetted by lawyers or policy experts — and thus were vulnerable to lawsuits and often achieved […]

During Wednesday's game between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Milwaukee Brewers, umpire CB Bucknor took a foul ball to the mask and had to be helped off the field. It was the cap to what has been a particularly bad week for one of the most controversial umpires in baseball. It started with perhaps […]

Alex Harring / CNBC:
The CFTC sues Arizona, Connecticut, and Illinois over their actions against prediction markets, saying it has the “exclusive” authority to regulate such markets  —  A federal commission on Wednesday announced lawsuits against three states over its ability to exclusively regulate prediction markets.

Great roundup of links from Stephen Hackett:

The crew is made up of Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen. They are now on their way to the moon, set to return in 10 days. Their rocket may be the product of a hugely-flawed program, but right now, that doesn’t matter. They are getting us closer to returning to the lunar surface than we’ve been in 50 years. That’s worth celebrating.

Musings from Robin Sloan:

Most olive oil production at medium-or-greater scale depends on machines of this kind [over-the-row olive harvester]; they trundle over trees planted in long rows, almost like continuous hedges, and collect the fruit with vibrating fingers. Machine-harvested olives cost less to buy, and they arrive at the mill in better shape than olives harvested by hand.

The catch: most olives can’t be cultivated in this configuration; the trees don’t thrive so close together. Only a handful of varieties will tolerate it, so those handful have been planted in huge numbers, and the flavor of global olive oil has changed as a result.

AI enables us to do things faster, and sometimes better than we’ve been able to before. But it has its limits. And as we learn those limits, the work we do will shift to avoid them.

In a different section, the article dives into the limitations of the physical world.

The project cut across several different magic circles — Ruby code, quasi-governmental APIs, the rules and standards of the postal system — but/and it also broke out into the physical world of paper, printers, and post offices. The project required manipulations including but not limited to: folding, peeling, sticking … gnarly!!

It’s possible that an AI coding agent could have helped me with #1 above, and of course it could have advised me on the rest. But it’s impossible to imagine the AI agent handling #2-5 autonomously; it would require such a Rube Goldberg tangle of support that “autonomously” would no longer apply.

In our programming world, AI’s impact looks limitless. But once you drift outside the boundaries of software, it’s put into a different perspective.

If indeed AI automation does not flood fill the physical world, it will be because the humble paper jam stood in its way.