Next Pandemic we should have Challenge Trials

Covid-19 is long enough away now that we should look at what happened and decide what we want to to next time there is a pandemic. One thing we could do is challenge trials of vaccines. This would have sped up vaccine deployment hugely and saved time and huge amounts of money.

Reading books like Vaxxers there were several vaccines ready for early testing in the first weeks of 2020. But it still took until December for the vaccine to be approved. This is because if you have tens of thousands of people in your vaccine trial but tiny amounts of the disease out there it takes a long time for enough people in the vaccinated and unvaccinated sides of the trial to get infected to be able to judge that the vaccine works. 

If instead after the initial testing on a small number of people just to make sure no reactions are common a challenge trial took place. Where after vaccination both arms of a larger phase 3 trial are deliberately infected with the virus you gather enough people in the vaccinated and unvaccinated groups to judge the effectiveness in a matter of weeks not months. 

These sorts of challenge trials are much more common now but it is the sort of thing that agreeing about now will make it much easier and more trustworthy when the challenge trial based vaccine experiments happen. 

Back of the envelope with these sorts of trials a vaccine could have been tested by the time lockdowns started to happen. Even if this was just for medical professionals initially. and rolled out to older people shortly afterward this could have avoided a huge number of issues

Why the 2026 World Cup Ball Has Deeper Seams

 In 2010 the South African World Cup had a terrible football, the Jabulani​

​It was too smooth resulting in serious problems. The football had a lot less seam which the technology at the time was not ready for

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Jabulani: eight thermally bonded panels, unusually short/shallow seams

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The 2010 ball had shallow thin seams

When you kick a football really fast a layer of air develops around it that reduces the drag. This is why golf balls have dimples. An amount of surface roughness can actually reduce drag.

At a certain point the air buffer leaves the football and it gets full drag. This is the critical speed.

Trionda: four panels, deeper seams and textured icons.

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​The Jabulani​ had a really high critical speed which means as soon as it got to 24 meters per second it started to slow down quickly. The Trionda's, this year's ball, seams are deeper allowing it to 'catch' air and avoid the critical speed of drag for longer. Also the surface of the ball itself is slightly bumpy in a way the ​Jabulani​'s were not.

Goalkeepers did not like this as they said it made the ball seem like a beach ball that did not have a predictable movement. But the ​number of goals at the World Cup were really low. So the goalkeeper discomfort at the weird ball paths were probably made up for by the ball going slower in a way that reduced goals.

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This book on the mathematics of the football and this article lead to this post 

I got my hands on one of the new balls. It has a groove down each of the panels. And finger print like dimples in the surface. 

Ireland goes majority Solar May 24th 2026

Green Collective solar farm only figure was a record %

At 2:30 today, Ireland’s solar share may have been about 51% of total electricity demand, once imports and domestic rooftop solar are included.

Calculation:

Solar = grid solar + solar imports + domestic solar
= 1.16 + 0.41 + 0.58 = 2.15 GW

Demand = grid demand + domestic solar
= 3.66 + 0.58 = 4.24 GW

Solar share = 2.15 / 4.24 = 50.7%

Domestic installed capacity is about 66% solar farms. But I have classed it as 50% as it is probably not as well sited here. 

Uk figures  for their exports (they are above 50% solar regularly.

Irish green collective figures

Irish grid at the time

UK grid at the time

Earlier post where i called 50% but with more optimistic assumptions

Should I get an attribution here?

I made a timeline of all the people in We Didn't Start the fire when Bridget Bardot passed away. It got popular and put in newspaper stories.

Then three weeks later Nathan Yau makes a timeline of all the people in We Didn't Start the Fire and uses the Bardot passing hook my graph had. But he never mentions my graph 

His graph has a few ideas I am going to take to improve my next version. And Yau wrote the first visualisation book I ever read so I do owe him a lot.


This is my previous post about all the news outlets that took the graph itself and never contacted me.

It is polite to reference 'this idea came from this graph' or to send a message to the originator of an idea and it did not happen in this case.

If an LLM is too expensive it won't be next year

AI can cost more than human workers now

This is an Axios headline but the tldr is that once an LLM can do your job it will undercut you the next year.

This is the article and it focuses on token and infrastructure costs. Not cleaning up messes or other times a person needs to be in the loop. For example "Uber's chief technology officer already blew through his full 2026 AI budget due to token costs"

Example of someone thinking tokens will stay expensive. 
No shade, it is just my belief they are wrong on this one claim. 

There is a 7 year and a 4 year trend of the price drop to 1/10th a year for a set quality of token. As in $1 million become $1 hundred cost in 4 years. This article looks at gpt 3.5 level tokens from late 2022 to late 2024

https:// and sees over 90% deflation a year

Example price decline in 2 years

But the deflation keeps going Qwen3.5 1.7B–2B is well above gpt 3.5 level in tests and in usage. This you can run really fast locally on any newish laptop or smartphone. Tokens at this quality level are now just electricity costs. That's less than 4 years data but gpt 2 level has followed the same trend for 7 years. 7 more years of the trend turns $10 million cost into $1. Lindy Effect says a reasonable first guess is if a trend has gone on for X length of time assume it will keep going for another X unless theres a good reason for it to stop. Coding and Video Image generation are still improving so fast there is not great reason to assume they will suddenly plateau yet. And the same for efforts to make smaller models smarter using big models. Teacher->pupil, chain of thought, distillation, pruning, low rank factorisation all keep getting better in a way that suggests that smaller models will keep getting better even if big ones plateau.

This is not an argument that LLMs in general will keep getting better though they will and that will help. Or that GPUs will keep improving though they will and that will help. Or that open weight models will stay about 9 months behind state of the art apis though they will and that will help a lot. Or that methods to condense smart models into smaller less demanding machines will improve though they will. It is that all these and a few other trends combined will work together to make a million tokens with a certain score on metrics and in a users opinion an order of magnitude cheaper every year.

Slop Tsunami comes down to the cost of tokens coming down.

The cost of tokens will come down. And at such a rate that it makes Moore's Law look tame. It won't go on forever but it is on a seven year trend with good reason to see it keeping going for at least 3 more years. At which point todays best current token will be 1/1000th the cost.

Irish Electricity Goes Majority Solar

 From Greencollective

I think this 29% figure (1207MW out of ) is actually close to 50% of the electricity in Ireland.

In Ireland small scale solar is shown as a fall in demand. the metrics measure solar farms and small scale production is used on site or locally and not shown in the full supply figures only in demand reductions.

"Of the cumulative solar capacity, 1,322 MW comes from utility-scale solar plants and 727 MW from distributed microgeneration. Total mini-generation and small-scale commercial are also growing, at 74 MW and 53 MW respectively"

Total hidden: ~854 MW or 65% of the solar farms capacity. That means if farms were producing 1207 smaller were probably around 784MW. 

Total imports at the time were 966MW all from the UK. The UK at the time was 43.4% Solar so thats 419.24MW

To add these up
Irish grid-scale solar=1223
Solar-originated imports=419
Hidden Irish embedded solar=784
Total~2,426 MW
Demand at the time was 4101 MW. 
So 4101+784 hidden demand= 4855 MW
2426/4855=50%


Domestic solar is not as well maintained or situated as farms so them being 65% of farms is probably optimistic. But if they are less that also reduces the hidden demand they satisfy so the total % does not drop fast. 

We are not in May yet which means we have a month and a half of natural increases in solar radiation to come. Which will move the calculation to barely getting to 50% with some optimistic figures well past it if the weather is good.

The annual near 30% increase in solar means that the output of a good weekend day in 2026 becomes a weekday in 2027, becomes an ok day in 2028. At which points grid batteries become the most important way to reduce usage of fossil fuels. 

Ireland is the likely the worst country in the world for solar. Which means if we are reaching this point not everyone else is in a potentially better situation. 

2 climate bets: Results are in China and World Coal in 2025

 I made a bet early in 2025 that China would reduce its coal usage for electricity in 2025.

The bet is here and I blogged about it before here

A bet has been accepted between u/TrueCryptographer982 and u/cavedave for $10. That according to Ember Energy statistics China will create less electricity from coal in 2025 than it did in 2024. David taking the prediction that it will be less. And we can settle when the results are in.'

The Ember energy data can back with 

Year Coal_TWh

2024 5851.81

2025 5781.19

Which is a tiny reduction but still meets the bets wording.

The other side of the bet said they would not pay the bet and got abusive.

The other bet made was that Coal usage in the entire world for electricity would drop from the previous year in any year 2025-2026

This happened last year according to ember energy statistics.

They also have refused to pay for the bet so far.

It seems strange to me to me not to pay your bets. 

There are 11064 Cars in Luxembourg

I was in Luxembourg recently and saw 4 cars when I was there. Their registration plates were 1396, 1871, 2383 and 8852

This made me wonder if I could estimate the total number of cars in Luxembourg. 

This is the German Tank problem where the British in WW2 found some serial numbers on German tanks in north Africa and wanted to use those to guess how many tanks had been produced. If you are sure the serial number on tanks goes up by one each time and they started with number 1. Then if you have seen the highest number 100 in looking at 3 tanks of after looking at 50 you can have a better estimate to the highest number of tank made.  Also if you see a tank with number 1000 you know at least 1000 have been made. 

A formula to estimate the total number based on seeing k serial (registration) numbers where m is the highest number seen is the MVUE (Minimum Variance Unbiased Estimator) N ≈ m + (m/k − 1)

Which gives an estimate of 11064 total cars in Luxembourg.

Ireland's response to the Strait of Hormuz being closed

What do we do about a huge amount of energy no longer flowing out of the Strait of Hormuz?

"Households urged to cut fuel use as Ireland braces for oil crisis"

Walking, cycling, putting on a jumper and keeping the heat lower are good ideas but on a global scale they won't effect the price of energy. And even on the Irish scale won't delay problems by a lot.

We can conserve joules and we can produce more joules on the island. 

But can we expand our energy supply quickly? China added 93gw of solar in May last year. 2 days of that would mean whenever it was sunny Ireland would have a huge excess of power.

This week we had 1.5 gw of solar at some points. And with that's 6gw addition it would have been over all our electricity. They added a GW of wind a day that month so 2 days of those additions would also help a lot here.

Adding solar is not a simple as buying some panels and waiting for them to arrive. Solar farms are easier to add GW to the grid fast. Industialised solar farm rollout happens now. Sending people up on roofs is less watts per worker per day then large numbers of panels being put onto a field. 

For it to be useful in this crises I think the government could allow

All wind farms to have permission to add solar to them. Wind is strongest on winter nights and solar on summer days. Having both in one place using a wire that's already there doesn't lose you that much power. Solar and Wind combined has planning issues in Ireland, but thats one thing the government do control.

The government could also give solar planning permission to fields within  a few km of a substation. If that rule is too free focus on those near cities. Already sometimes we cannot move electricity from the west to Dublin often 

This crisis could end tomorrow and what I will suggest take some time to work. Also it could go on years and it will not help in a dark windless fortnight in January 2027. But having a few extra GWh put into the Irish grid regularly is no small improvement. I think we do that with some small changes to our planning rules. 

6 months ago would have been a better time to install shed loads of more solar and wind here. But the second best time is today.

Ireland's Second City

Cities around the world follow Zipf's law. The second city is a certain percentage smaller, third smaller again etc.

With Dublin at 592,713, Zipf (α=1) predicts the second city should be around 296,000. Belfast is actually 348,005 — about 17% larger than the law would predict

Cork at 222,333 (rank 3) fits pretty well — Zipf predicts ~197k.

Fake People Everywhere

Soon you will only trust people you know.  

I have been learning a fun programming language called Gleam. And I wanted to read a book on it. 
The one book on it I could find was by someone called Julian Lornfield. Who has written over a dozen books in 2025 each on a different topic in computers. Theres no photo of them on the internet other then this amazon author photo. No linkedin. No youtube talks at conferences etc.

So baring some major mistake by me this is a bot churning out AI written books. It could be a real person but one without the usual trail we leave. A fake author would be odd but not something that unusual in 2025.

But to take a step up from these checks. What happens when fake reviews, linkedin accounts and these things I checked are much easier? If there was a linkedin, lots of reviews, better spacing of the release dates and even videos of talks would I have been fooled? Probably.

Making a fake account involves making photos, passing captchas, sending text back and forth between some other bots and some real people. All this is easily doable now. 

AI LLM arguments focus on the abilities at the extreme. Writing a new math proof or acing some test. But what happens when they get really good at stuff designed for normal people to easily do. Gmail wants you to get an email account. Amazon wants you to leave reviews. Emergency services want you to ring when your house is on fire. 

When LLMs get good enough at these tasks that Social media, reviews, email inboxes get flooded you will not trust anyone in the digital space you do not personally know. They pretty much are already on Twitter and facebook but other digital locations are next. The cost of an llm for the same level of intelligence decreases 10 fold per year. So if it is too expensive to build up 100 bot reviewers today it will be 1/1000th the cost in 3 years. 

For online review sites this is probably fairly obvious. But I do not think the effects on offline services are considered yet. 
999 services or dentists are not designed for 100 bots that sound like people ringing them.
Politicians and newspapers are not expecting 100 physical letters what have all been written by different bots.

If we get 100 fake ads from what looks like our bank we are likely to get one just when we are having a problem and at our most confused moment believe them.

LLMs are smart enough now to create and operate online accounts including making phone calls. The price of this will drop orders of magnitudes in a few years. The online and especially the offline world is not set up for when this happens. 

 

Off Patent Ozempic and the Summer of 2026

I predicted in 2024 that 10% of us would 6kg of bodyweight this year. Here is how an even bigger effect might happen.

GLP-1 drugs start going off patent in India, China, Turkey, Canada, Brazil March 2026

Usually when drugs go off patent the price drops dramatically (32% in one year 80% in 8 years)

And as price drops people take more of something. I am not sure how much 'importing from India' sort of stuff will happen after March. But imagine the Brazilian, or Indian population get a side hustle of bringing in generic Ozempic. Loads of people take botox injections from beauticians and that seems pretty outside the usual medical system so something similar already happens. Even just dental and baldness trips to Turkey are a big thing getting weightloss jabs while there are another potential route.

Like any drug, not everyone reacts well to these so some will try them and give them up. But what happens if a larger percentage suddenly starts taking them? Grocery spending on snacks goes down a lot. 6% reduction in total spend but most of that focused on the unhealthier foods.

But there is one effect that jumps out. Booze 

About half of booze is consumed by alcoholics or borderline alcoholics. Theres evidence that these drugs roughly half alcohol consumption in this group. If heavy drinkers take up Ozempic in a big way that will lead to a huge drop in alcohol sales. 

If the price of these drugs drops a lot the savings on alcohol will make up a significant chunk of the costs of the drug itself for this group. For example at 160 euro a month in Ireland. At 6 euro a pint in a pub here that add up to under a pint a day currently. If going off patent drops that drug price a lot these drugs could save a lot of money for heavy drinkers.

Younger people already drink less than their parents did at their age. And average drinking amounts have been falling for a quarter of a century. 

Combine the effects and its possible to imagine a huge swath of pubs closing fairly rapidly. A large cohort of the best customers reducing drinking rapidly. And general social trends showing this won't pick up in the future. Could make irelands pub culture disappear quite fast.

edit: March 31st 2026 'Sun Pharmaceutical, one of the top generics manufacturers in the world, on Saturday launched a generic semaglutide for as low as 750 rupees ($8) for a weekly injection,' that is a saving money as consumption falls price as in reduction of consumption of treats and booze would pay $8 a week. 'Snacks and soda took the brunt of reduced spending by consumers after GLP-1 treatment: snacks and confectionary (-52%), prepared baked goods (-47%), soda/sugary beverages (-28%), alcoholic beverages (-17%) ' 

Indian GLP-1 generics prices in April 2026 have already dropped to below 40 euro a month.

Jevon's Paradox and AI

 In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons observed that technological improvements that increased the efficiency of coal use led to the increased consumption of coal.  

As something gets more efficient more not less of it is used. This is going to happen to software. If a developer can produce more features and products witht he help of AI that will increase the demand for developers not reduce it.

Someone can reasonably ask but what if an AI is more efficient at all the aspects of making software. Designing specifications, testing the UX with customers, Unit testing, creating the backend code, the UI code, the security testing etc. Then the economics law of comparative advantage comes into play. Even if someone is better than me at everything we still produce more if I concentrate on the area they are less better than me at.

This does get into tricky areas as Moores law and software improvements means that as soon as software gets better than us at a a task it gets vastly better than us pretty soon afterward. The most recent stockfish 18 is about elo 4000. In 100 games the worlds best players would not even get one draw against it. Competitions between people and computers used to happen until fairly recently.

Henry Ford II: Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues?

Walter Reuther: Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?

St Brigid and Fair Division

 In Cogitosus’s Life of St Brigid the Virgin translation Liam de Paor St Brigid does a fair division into 3 equal parts. The algorithm used is not explained.

"[She divides a silver dish exactly into three]

Her miracles are great, but this one is especially admired.
Three lepers came, asking for alms of any kind, and she gave them a
silver dish. So that this would not cause discord and contention among
them when they came to share it out, she spoke to a certain person expert in

the weighing of gold and silver, and asked him to divide it among them in
three parts of equal weight. When he began to excuse himself, pointing
out that there was no way he could divide it up so that the three parts would
weigh exactly the same, the most blessed Brigid herself took the silver dish
and struck it against a stone, breaking it into three parts as she had wished.
Marvellous to tell, when the three parts were tested on the scales, not one
part was found to be heavier or lighter by a breath than any other. So the three
poor people left with their gift and there was no cause for envy or grudging
between them."

Gantt Chart Visualisations

I remember hearing years ago that real cheeseburgers could only happen after industrialisation, greenhouses and freezing as the ingredients. On the impracticality of a cheeseburger. This is also a tale of Malthusian constraints for example you would have killed cattle after they fattened over the summer. You could kill them anytime but hunger was so common the best time was nearly always picked. And because of that rennet to make cheese was only practically available then also.

I made a graph for cheeseburgers and put it on reddit where people shouted at me. We do not realise the time constraints (and malthusian ones) on food until very recently. And I think a Gantt chart is a good way to show them. That and just making a visualisation out of a Gantt chart I thought was an interesting idea.

If you know of someone else who made a visualisation out of a Gantt chart let me know as I doubt it is a new idea.

I also made one of Club Sandwiches and I think thats also an interesting story about nature and our food. The code and data are here
 

We Didn't Start the Fire Graph

I made a graph of when people in "We didn't start the fire" were born, did the act referenced in the song and died. Because Bridget Bardot died people found it interesting that only three people. Chubby checker, Bob Dylan and Bernie Goetz remain alive of those mentioned in the song.

The reddit post of the graph got popular and it was picked up by a few online newspapers.

People Magazine, The Poke, the Express, fox news and extra.ie  and the Irish star

Bonus points for a tabloid including my argument about Popperian epistemology in their quotes.

There were a few weird things I found out in this process. 
None of the journalists messaged me. My handle was in the image and you can message the creator of a post on reddit but none did. The poke messaged me when I was one of their 25 funny tweets of the week 4 years ago, so not doing that now about an entire article is a change.

I found a few of the authors of articles email addresses. This is hard now as how to contact a journalist now seems to be hidden. I messaged them a new version of the graph with some fixes in case they want to use that one instead, but none replied.

A fair few of the Articles using my picture I can't see as they are geo-blocked. It is a bit odd that they can take something I made and not talk to me and not let me see they thing they made from it.

and

and

My silly picture is not important. But on a bigger scale huge numbers of silly pictures and jokes have made the internet fun for the last several decades. And in my experience when one of these was yours in the past some amount of credit came back to you. It didn't pay any bills or anything. But it did feel in some way that you putting in an effort was recognised and at least part of a very large group of people making silly stuff to entertain people. If the incentives are now one way, where a news organisation can use something and you can't even see it that seems like the general internet bargain has become skewed.