https://www.worseonpurpose.com/
Corporate autopsies on the brands you trust. Who bought them, who gutted them, and what's still worth buying.
Slack Feed
This is a very plain blog with quotes from and links to articles I found interesting, thought-provoking, or relevant to the times. Linking is neither endorsement nor condemnation. Run by http://willslack.com
02 September, 2026
11 August, 2026
07 August, 2026
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.
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.
‘Unique source’ blinded Dutch intelligence agencies to Putin’s invasion
In the days following the invasion, Ruslandhuis arrives at a devastating conclusion. The senior Russian security officials whose communications they had been monitoring for months turn out to have been just as blindsided by the war as they were. Only a tiny circle of confidants — perhaps ten people at most — knew about Putin’s war plans. It explains the mismatch with the Americans. The US intelligence agencies evidently had access to someone or something inside that innermost circle. [...]
Now they realise that some members of Russia’s Security Council had no idea at that moment that war was coming. There were even soldiers who marched into Ukraine believing they were on a training exercise in Belarus. ‘This war was prepared in a completely different way than you would expect based on Russian protocol,’ one official says.
u/Doc911 on influencer medicine
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1u69a1o/doctors_of_reddit_what_health_trend_is_becoming/orragzk/
I cannot fathom is how readily people trust, “I’m oBsEsSeD with this XYZ,” “my hair/skin/sleep has never been betterrrrr,” delivered in a haze of vocal fry by someone with a financial incentive, whose last obsession was 15 minutes ago and whose next one is already on deck being negotiated.
We routinely struggle to convince people with large, independently funded, multicentre, double-blind trials involving thousands of participants. As if all they hear is one person’s recommendation. Yet an N=1 anecdote from a stranger with a discount code and the speech affectation of an adolescent seeking belonging cuts straight through. Psychologists have known for decades that vivid stories are more persuasive than statistics, and that confidence often masquerades as competence. We are wired for anecdotes, not evidence. And for those who forego their logical brains and give in to that “wiring” as feels and vibes in some preferential fashion of a truth test, it can be absolutely exhausting to attempt to challenge their literally baseless pointless belief system.
I will admit, I understand how difficult it is. We spend countless hours teaching even medical residents how to critically appraise research. And to those without knowledge, complex machines and thoughts can appear as magic. But the growing rejection of the scientific method is deeply troubling. Science is not a belief system. It is a process designed to find the truth, test it, challenge it, replicate it, and keep testing it again.
A civilisation that loses faith in that process is not progressing. It is drifting back toward the dark ages, one influencer recommendation at a time with their cancel culture and attacks on science being no different that past inquisitions.
I cannot fathom is how readily people trust, “I’m oBsEsSeD with this XYZ,” “my hair/skin/sleep has never been betterrrrr,” delivered in a haze of vocal fry by someone with a financial incentive, whose last obsession was 15 minutes ago and whose next one is already on deck being negotiated.
We routinely struggle to convince people with large, independently funded, multicentre, double-blind trials involving thousands of participants. As if all they hear is one person’s recommendation. Yet an N=1 anecdote from a stranger with a discount code and the speech affectation of an adolescent seeking belonging cuts straight through. Psychologists have known for decades that vivid stories are more persuasive than statistics, and that confidence often masquerades as competence. We are wired for anecdotes, not evidence. And for those who forego their logical brains and give in to that “wiring” as feels and vibes in some preferential fashion of a truth test, it can be absolutely exhausting to attempt to challenge their literally baseless pointless belief system.
I will admit, I understand how difficult it is. We spend countless hours teaching even medical residents how to critically appraise research. And to those without knowledge, complex machines and thoughts can appear as magic. But the growing rejection of the scientific method is deeply troubling. Science is not a belief system. It is a process designed to find the truth, test it, challenge it, replicate it, and keep testing it again.
A civilisation that loses faith in that process is not progressing. It is drifting back toward the dark ages, one influencer recommendation at a time with their cancel culture and attacks on science being no different that past inquisitions.
06 August, 2026
'Night of the beating': details emerge of Riyadh Ritz-Carlton purge
The Ritz-Carlton detentions often started with a phone call, summoning targets for meetings with Prince Mohammed, or King Salman himself. In another case, two prominent businessmen said they were told to meet in a home and wait for a royal court adviser to join them. Instead, state security officials showed up, ushering them to a five-star prison, where guards and senior aides were waiting.
“On the first night, everyone was blindfolded and nearly everyone was subjected to what Egyptian intelligence calls the ‘night of the beating’”, said a source with intimate knowledge of what took place. “People were asked if they knew why they were there. No one did. Most were beaten, some of them badly. There were people tied to the walls, in stress positions. It went on for hours, and all of those doing the torturing were Saudis.
“It was designed to soften them up. And then the next day, the interrogators arrived.”
22 July, 2026
21 June, 2026
You Can Run
https://magazine.atavist.com/2026/mccann-cocaine-fugitives
When their parents ripped two young sisters from their privileged lives, gave them fake names, and took them on the lam, they thought it was because their father was in trouble with the IRS. It would be years before they learned the truth about his life of crime.
19 June, 2026
I Shipped a Facebook Feature So Fast Sheryl Sandberg Called an Emergency Meeting to Stop Me
What made it possible was a culture of ownership.
And this wasn’t superficial. It wasn’t people trying to get political points on a performance review. It was literally: if you own something you take full responsibility for every aspect of it, no excuses, no blaming. No “I didn’t know about this.” No “the servers crashed, let me ask another team to fix it for me.” If you truly owned something, then no one at Facebook would say no—even if your idea was terrible, even if it didn’t work—because you were the person carrying the weight of the consequences.
This environment empowered very young engineers, straight out of college, to swing for the fences. It’s the same culture that let junior teams build React and GraphQL—not because a manager handed down a spec sheet, but because they saw a problem, owned it completely, and grew it because they had the authority to do so.
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