Thursday assorted links

1. Why has ornament in architecture declined?

2. Patrick McKenzie on the Crowdstrike  failure.

3. David Brooks on AI (NYT).

4. I’ve already linked to this podcast with Julia La Roche, recorded before Biden left office.  In it I predicted Kamala Harris will be the next POTUS.

5. The physics of the emergence of life and assembly theory (NYT),

6. Information aggregation under (not so) naive learning.

7. A rare, funny econ + Olympics joke.

8. ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode, seven good examples.  I very much like it.

9. All good news on the U.S. productivity front, up 2.7 percent for the year (NYT).