Every year, vitamin A deficiency blinds 250,000 to 500,000 children. Half of them die within a year of losing their sight.

One third of children worldwide are deficient, roughly half of children in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia1. Deficiency weakens the immune system, so children are more likely to die from common infections like diarrhea or measles.

Rich countries solved this kind of problem by adding nutrients to staple foods. The United States adds iodine to most salt, and folic acid to flour to prevent birth defects.

Rice is a critical staple among the world’s poor, so scientists improved rice. They added beta-carotene, the thing that makes carrots orange and that the body turns into vitamin A. The new rice cooks and tastes the same, but it’s yellow. They called it Golden Rice and licensed it for free to any farmer earning under $10,000 a year.

It has been ready since the mid-2000s. Today it grows nowhere.

The reason is that it is a GMO. Environmental groups, led by Greenpeace, fought it in country after country for two decades.

As far as I can tell, no one has calculated the cost of that delay. I’ve spent the last few weeks doing so. My rough estimate is that the delay has killed about 110,000 children and left another 220,000 to 440,000 blind.2 Measured in healthy years of life lost, that is somewhere between 8 and 12 million.3 (My full calculations are here. I will update these figures as I receive more feedback.)

That works out to roughly fifteen children dying every single day, for twenty years, from a nutrient we already know how to add to food.

If a new disease were killing fifteen children a day, it would have an internationally-recognized name and a task force. Golden Rice got villified as one word instead: GMO.

“GMO”

Often, that word scares people. But we eat GMOs all the time. They are in about 70 percent of packaged American food, 96 percent of US soybeans, and 92 percent of US corn. Billions of people have eaten them every day for thirty years. No one has been harmed.

Golden Rice was different in one small way. Most GMO crops are changed in how they grow, so the part you eat is ordinary. In Golden Rice, the part you eat is the part that changed. That made it feel new.

Greenpeace framed it as dangerous, saying corporations were secretly behind it. They falsely claimed it was unproven and that it was unclear whether children could absorb the vitamin. Activists tore up test fields and filed lawsuits to block approval. Over a hundred Nobel laureates signed a letter asking Greenpeace to stop.

While Golden Rice sat blocked, other new GMO foods reached store shelves. One of them is a pink pineapple. It sells for about $10 in stores and up to $50 online. It uses the same chemistry as Golden Rice, run in the opposite direction. Golden Rice turns on the pathway that makes the vitamin children need. The pineapple turns it off, so the fruit stays a pretty pink.

The lifesaving technology is in the Western world, growing a nicer pineapple for parties.

I’m grateful for this pineapple. The pineapple has a company behind it that can afford to fight critics and build a market around modified foods. Golden Rice only had scientists and charities. It was a cheap crop for poor people, with no profit margin to help it defend itself.

In 2021, the Philippines became the first country to approve Golden Rice. Three years later, a court there revoked the approval after Greenpeace and a group of farmers sued.

Blocking a new crop is cheap. A single lawsuit claiming there is no scientific consensus on its safety can freeze it for years, even when consensus exists. Approving it is expensive because a government must be willing to spend political capital on people who cannot pay it back. Golden Rice’s beneficiaries were poor, scattered, and far from anyone in charge.

When one of these children dies, the cause is recorded as measles, diarrhea, or poverty, never as the campaign that kept the cure out of the field. A plane crash kills a few hundred people and leads to grounding fleets immediately. This killed more than a hundred thousand children over twenty years, with no wreckage to photograph and no single day it happened on.

That may be starting to change: the Global South is engineering crops of its own now, aimed at preventing harm, like pests and crop failure, rather than high margins or novelty. One is a cassava richer in iron and zinc. The more of these that become normal, the harder it gets to keep blocking the one that should have come first.

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As AI companies get ready to go public and we get a deeper look at their inner workings, it’s only natural to have questions about their finances, like “Do they make money?” and “How?” Here are a few examples to help the average layperson understand the business side of AI.

1. Acquiring one grape costs Alex $2 billion. Alex offers to sell Mike one grape a month for the next 12 months for $1 billion per grape. Alex asks for the full $12 billion up front and provides Mike with one grape for the first month. Alex makes a $10 billion profit this month; his ARR is $120 billion, and his profits are trending up at an infinite rate. The Wall Street Journal’s business editor moves into Alex’s house, having accepted a part-time position as Alex’s human footstool. He never asks to see the books.

2. Laura drives a taxi. Instead of charging her customers a fee for every ride, she charges them a $20/month subscription. Laura has 40 million paying customers, totaling roughly $13 billion in annual revenue. Laura spends $25 billion/year on gas. In a fit of late-capitalist bloodlust, hordes of tech and finance bros riot in the streets, firebombing every rideshare, bus, and pedicab they can find, declaring the transportation business officially “over.” Also, Laura’s taxi cost her $1 trillion to attain, and she’ll have to replace it in four to eight years.

3. Jenny owns a crematorium. John’s propane company gives her a $20 billion investment in return for 5 percent of her operation. Jenny throws $10 billion into the incinerator, then pays John $10 billion to buy propane to burn that money to ashes. John reports that his AI investments have generated $10 billion in revenue this quarter and that he owns 5 percent of a $100 billion business. A reporter from Forbes is assigned to profile John and Jenny, and over the course of his research, he becomes embroiled in a passionate but confusing three-way love affair with them, which eventually turns into a polyamorous common-law marriage. His profile is glowing, but light on financial details.

4. Benjamin owns a farm. He employs 100 workers plowing his fields. His total payroll is $10 million/year. One day, he buys a mule, which provides the worker who uses it with a modest 10 percent productivity gain. Benjamin fires 99 of his workers and purchases 99 mules, expecting a 1,000 percent productivity gain. The driverless mules cause plow damage to his property in excess of $50 million. Benjamin loses another $5 million due to the loss of productivity from his one remaining employee, who no longer guides a plow but instead spends 100 percent of his time shoveling mule shit. Goldman Sachs builds an altar to Benjamin in their lobby and cuts out the heart of a junior analyst on it every Friday. They call it “Blood Sacrifice Friday.” The name isn’t catchy, but the event becomes a management favorite nonetheless.

5. Xavier owns an apartment that he rents out at a loss of $1 billion/month. Seeing this success, he decides to make financial commitments to construct $850 billion in new apartments in places nobody wants them. He convinces Ted to leverage everything he owns to help him build the apartments, telling him that once they are built, every human being on Earth will live in them. Ted contributes $100 billion, part of which immediately goes toward paying off Xavier’s $1 billion/month loss. Forbes gives Xavier and Ted a cover feature, likening their building project to God creating the Heavens and the Earth. Many Fortune 500 CEOs take this comparison literally and establish a new religion around Ted and Xavier, with themselves as high priests. Soon, they start a Holy War with the pope, declaring “Ted and Xavier the One True Gods on Earth” and promising to “purge the nonbelievers” in an official press release. They annex, then subsequently demolish, Vatican City, committing another $900 billion dollars to build new apartments in its place. Forbes hails this as “disruptive,” though it’s not clear how Ted and Xavier plan to finance the project.

We hope these examples help clarify the inner workings of AI economics. But if you’re still confused, all you really need to know is that everything is totally working and everyone is making a lot of money, and you should just stop asking questions, luddite.

An ever-increasing volume of debug investigations, document writing, and code is written by robots. This has created a new etiquette question when working with a team - when is it OK to forward the output of an AI to another human to read?

On one hand, an AI with robust integration to internal code bases and documentation often produces genuinely¹ useful output.

On the other, as an increasing amount of a software engineer's day is spent reading AI text, a fatigue sets in. If I can have a robot say something, so can you. It reads as inconsiderate to post un-digested AI output as though it's your own writing.

I remember the first time I experienced this annoyance. I proposed a design, and a teammate prompted an AI to critique it. The teammate sent an AI document to me, with the disclaimer: "I didn't read this, so it might not be entirely accurate". My thought was, _if reading this wasn't worth your time, why is it worth mine?"

Therefore, I've adopted this principle in my work:

If you are requesting human attention, demonstrate human effort.

If useful, I send AI generated content to teammates. But when doing so, I take care to clearly label what is AI generated, and I add my own commentary alongside it. For human code review requests, I always review my AI-generated code first.

Attention was already a scarce resource before AI, and it is even more so now. Keeping AI generated content clearly labeled and demonstrating human effort helps show consideration for teammates, and keeps a touch of humanity alive in our work.

Footnotes​

1. I promise I wrote this (and all the words in this post) with my meat fingers! ↩

It can seem a bit silly to recommend a way to tie your shoes, but some knots are just more secure than others. For decades I have favored two specific shoelace knots: Ian’s Fast Knot and Ian’s Secure Shoelace Knot. Ian’s Fast Knot is done so effortlessly as to look like a magic trick, and Ian’s Secure Shoelace Knot has never failed me. 

But who is Ian? Ian Fieggen, who also goes by “Professor Shoelace,” is the guy who runs Ian’s Shoelace Site, the internet’s prime destination for learning how to tie your shoes. His website is simple, intentionally focusing on common vernacular over standardized knot terminology, and has been operating as a discrete section of his personal site since 2003. Ian’s Shoelace Site does not need to change; it is perfectly functional the way it is, and people have been discovering his many knots and lacing techniques for decades.

Ian’s Secure Shoelace Knot is a double slip knot, only marginally more complicated than the “bunny rabbit” style kids tend to be taught. Though Ian’s Secure Shoelace Knot can also be tied incorrectly, it is far more secure than the knot many people tie under most circumstances, which tends to fall apart when tied incorrectly.

Ian’s Secure Shoelace Knot is done by doing a standard left over right starting knot, creating two loops (bunny ears), crossing the loops right over left so that one sits over the other, looping both loops over each other and pulling them through the “hole” in center so the loops exit in opposite directions, and neatly tightening the resulting knot. It’s a wonderful compromise between security, convenience, and ease of execution. It does not require a sloppy double knot, which can get easily snarled, and it’s easy to untie with a single pull. There is no perfect knot, but Ian’s Secure Shoelace Knot has yet to fail me after over a decade of use.

“I try not to over-sell the merits of this knot,” Ian Fieggen told me over email, “as people have become complacent about every product on earth being touted as ‘the best.’ I reckon that those who blindly follow what they are told end up believing everything and knowing nothing. I'm therefore most pleased when people discover for themselves that the Secure Knot lives up to my claims, especially when (as in your case) it follows a lengthy period of usage.”

There are, of course, other knots. I have seen other people on YouTube and Reddit recommend the Berluti Knot. I have also seen many people who are fans of the Surgeon’s Knot. Ian’s pride and joy, which he claims to have invented and has a page documenting its history, is Ian’s Fast Shoelace Knot, also simply known as Ian’s Knot, which is so rapid that it makes you do a double take. But what makes Ian’s site truly great is not that it documents a few knots, but is a cornucopia of methods for tying and lacing your shoes. Ian’s Shoelace Site is from a different time on the internet, when people simply made websites that they were passionate about. 

The full breadth of Ian’s site is a marvel to behold given its simple subject material. Not only does he passionately cover every shoelace knot he knows, he also covers every factor of lacing: why knots get jammed, aglet repair, user knot ratings and the seemingly countless methods for lacing your shoes. Being a subsection of a personal site, Ian has written extensively about other topics including an history of his father, a computer programmer who passed away in 2022. 

People who know Ian’s Shoelace Site love it. But like all passion projects that seem eternal on the internet, even Ian’s site is vulnerable to the forces destroying the internet.

“Have you ever wondered,” Ian asked, “why websites like mine are disappearing from the Internet?”

He has his theories. The Shoelace Site is kept alive via fairly unobtrusive ads, but he says the rise of ad blockers has made that income precarious. He also claims that people copy the information on his site without attribution, both wholesale and to go viral. A quick search of YouTube and especially TikTok is rife with people doing Ian’s Fast Knot without either knowing or disclosing the source. “Around half the copycat videos on YouTube are tying it incorrectly as a granny knot, which comes loose,” Ian said. “This has given my knot the undeserved reputation of being faster at the expense of reliability!” To the extent that one can “own” a knot, Ian has been robbed.

Ian, more than many writers and publishers on the internet, sees with cold clarity the catastrophic effect of AI on the continued survival of an independent web. “Today, my website is constantly being harvested by AI bots,” he said. “That content is then reused, typically without giving credit, in what amounts to little more than wholesale computerised plagiarism.The search engines, which we previously tolerated showing snippets of our content because they brought people to our websites, are now showing AI generated versions ahead of those snippets. These can be sufficient for visitors to remain on the search website and never end up visiting. Generative AI already allows folks to ask for something – such as a diagram on how to lace shoes with stars – and again, never find my website filled with diagrams on which that AI diagram was based.”

For Ian, the cumulative effect of all of these factors is a deep sadness, a sinking feeling of exhaustion and futility. What is the point of adding value to the internet if it is only going to rob you? Why do research, make diagrams, and develop new knots?

“Why keep feeding the hungry beast that the internet has become?” Ian asked.

Ian says his site is OK for the foreseeable future, kept alive via the occasional donation, ad revenue for people who don’t use blockers, affiliate links, and kind words from strangers. But, like the site you are reading, content that you believe to be immutable and immortal on the internet is constantly in peril. These places only exist when the people investing their time and energy know that they are appreciated, credited, and supported. The whims of companies like Google seek to alter the deal that has kept much of the internet alive, threatening its basic foundations. This is true for blogs, for journalism and for the forum culture that the internet is built on. It even seeks to threaten and consume something as simple and necessary as tying your shoelaces.

As the SAT nears its 100th anniversary, here's a look at how the test has changed since 1926 and how scores on both the SAT and ACT have shifted over time.