The Nightly Build.
Tuesday, July 28, 202657 min read
Parenting · Parenting Research

The trials built to catch sleep-training harm found none, and the benefit faded by six years

Salivary cortisol and the Strange Situation, the standard test of infant attachment, are what the trial built to catch harm actually measured, in infants ages 6 to 16 months.

15 min read11 sources
Daily Reading · Paper of the Day

Chain-of-thought prompting tripled the largest models' math scores, and made the smallest ones worse

Below roughly 100 billion parameters the technique is a wash or a liability, and the higher a model climbs past that line, the less its written reasoning reflects the computation that actually produced its answer.

14 min read8 sources
Current Affairs · Unbiased

Wisconsin Says a Bet on Your Own Election Can Cost You Your Vote. Kalshi Calls That Voter Suppression.

Wisconsin's 1849 election-betting law is one skirmish in a fight over whether a federal "swap" definition preempts state gambling law everywhere, and a divided federal appeals court has already split on the answer.

14 min read14 sources
Daily Reading · Current Events

The Trump administration tells the Supreme Court its own voter-list order isn't in effect yet

Solicitor General D. John Sauer's emergency application asks the justices to lift a First Circuit block on the federal voter-list order, arguing no agency has actually finalized anything yet.

6 min read14 sources
Daily Reading · Tech News

Nvidia backs Ilya Sutskever's SSI, and won't say how much

Bloomberg puts the investment at $5 billion, a number absent from Nvidia's own release announcing the partnership.

4 min read9 sources
Daily Reading · Word of the Day

Vidkun Quisling declared himself Norway's government and became a common noun

The Times of London had a word for Vidkun Quisling within ten days of the radio broadcast in which he claimed Norway's government for himself on the morning of the German invasion.

4 min read8 sources