How AI microsites reshape persuasion, urgency, and memory.

https://www.scrollthefuture.ai/

These AI microsites are not just web design trends. They are a new rhetorical genre: part research briefing, part activist playbook, part intellectual performance. They occupy an uneasy space between the slow caution of peer-reviewed science and the raw urgency of political campaigning. And because they are so visually polished, so editorially deliberate, they quietly shape what readers believe to be reasonable, probable, and inevitable.

In this essay, I want to trace the rise of the AI microsite. I will map its form and aesthetic. I will place it inside the wider patchwork of AI safety thinking where hard fact bleeds into forecasting, normative argument, and speculation. I will suggest that the microsite is not just how AI futures are explained: it is how AI futures are made plausible.

Finally, I will ask what it means for policy, for public discourse, and for memory itself when our most serious arguments are published not in journals or newspapers, but in artifacts as ephemeral, persuasive, and architected as these.

The Paperwork Reduction Act Created a Paperwork Explosion

https://reason.com/2025/04/16/the-paperwork-reduction-act-created-a-paperwork-explosion/

You might think that sharing stories about the positive, burden-reducing effects of user research would result in OIRA encouraging the practice. You might also think that demonstrating what's possible if burden reduction is really your goal—holistically considering and aligning all information collections, using wizards, thoughtfully reusing known information, ensuring systemwide address updates, and even better accounting for people's real names—would change how the PRA is implemented.

But it hasn't. A quiet attempt was made in 2014 to exempt "direct observation" from PRA authority, which changed no one's behavior. Ten years later, OIRA issued a memo, insisting it had been a fan of user research all along. But this memo is meaningless progress; you can see that agencies are still submitting user research plans for OIRA approval as of April 2025. This marks over a decade of internal battles for only one of the many improvements the PRA implementation desperately needs, with virtually no progress—and a great deal of harm—to show for it.

Changes from the inside didn't work. Chipping away at the margin didn't work. The PRA has to go.

Ultimately, Congress should repeal the PRA entirely. In the meantime, the current legislation includes pilot and delegated authority that would allow the OIRA administrator to declare that as long as agencies self-attest to testing their information collections with their end users, and streamlining information collection when possible—both of which the PRA's current implementation makes virtually impossible—then they are exempt from OIRA review.

There is tremendous danger right now that half the country views any activity in the current administration as something to fight against. This should not be one of them. The only proponent of the PRA is inertia.

On the faults of very online masculinity

https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1jzrtz7/both_sides_of_the_political_aisle/

The Town That Went Crazy for Crypto

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/28/business/rainbowex-crypto-ponzi-scheme.html

In San Pedro, Argentina, 16,000 people, a fifth of the population, signed up for a cryptocurrency exchange where everyone won. Until they didn’t.[...]

RainbowEx is a version of a scam that has popped up around the world, he said in a recent interview, using a nearly identical software platform each time. He’s found iterations in Africa, Europe, Asia and North America, where examples have surfaced in Alabama and Washington State. At least 200 versions are currently active, Mr. Eldritch said in a phone interview. Each has a different name and many have La China-like characters dispensing crypto instructions. In a now-expired variant in Italy, the La China persona was called Dolly.

War story: the hardest bug I ever debugged

https://www.clientserver.dev/p/war-story-the-hardest-bug-i-ever#footnote-anchor-1-159719261

All of a sudden, without any ostensible cause, Google Docs was flooded with errors. How it took me 2 days and a coworker to solve the hardest bug I ever debugged.

The Scammer’s Manual: How to Launder Money and Get Away With It

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/23/world/asia/cambodia-money-laundering-huione.html

Documents and insiders reveal how one of the world’s major money laundering networks operates.

How One Las Vegas ED Saved Hundreds of Lives After the Worst Mass Shooting in U.S. History

https://epmonthly.com/article/not-heroes-wear-capes-one-las-vegas-ed-saved-hundreds-lives-worst-mass-shooting-u-s-history/

The night that Stephen Paddock opened fire on thousands of people at a Las Vegas country music concert, nearby Sunrise Hospital received more than 200 penetrating gunshot wound victims. Dr. Kevin Menes was the attending in charge of the ED that night, and thanks to his experience supporting a local SWAT team, he’d thought ahead about how he might mobilize his department in the event of a mass casualty incident.