216,000,000 Spy TVs | The LG Smart TV Problem

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IFVTcM28KA

Hugh Howey's Routine

https://hughhowey.com/my-routine/

The next mental framework to adopt is to leave behind any notion of three meals a day. You don’t burn the same amount of calories every day, so why are you eating the same amount? Listen to your body. Get hungry before every meal. If you aren’t hungry, don’t eat. Skipping meals is the easiest thing you can do to change your body, and you can start right now. I went to bed last night without eating dinner, because I never got hungry. I woke up hungry, so I had breakfast immediately. Most mornings I wake up without any hunger. I’ll have a protein shake with my workout (more on this later), and if I’m not hungry after that, my first meal will be at lunch. Only eating when you’re hungry will simplify your life, save you money, keep you fit, and reduce the amount of calories you need to burn to hit your target weight. All this, just by thinking differently.

WORSE ON PURPOSE

https://www.worseonpurpose.com/

Corporate autopsies on the brands you trust. Who bought them, who gutted them, and what's still worth buying.

Jazz Band Covers Nirvana On The Spot (Ft. Ulysses Owens Jr.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pYHCGYJbw0

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.

‘Unique source’ blinded Dutch intelligence agencies to Putin’s invasion

https://www.volkskrant.nl/kijkverder/v/2026/russia-ukraine-intelligence-netherlands-investigation~v3114923/

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.

'Night of the beating': details emerge of Riyadh Ritz-Carlton purge

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/19/saudi-accounts-emerge-of-ritz-carlton-night-of-the-beating

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.”

MTA Track Maps

https://www.vanshnookenraggen.com/_index/docs/NYC_full_trackmap.pdf

https://www.mta.info/map/5256

Jason Thrasher's one take of the Amy Ray band

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. 

 

I Shipped a Facebook Feature So Fast Sheryl Sandberg Called an Emergency Meeting to Stop Me

https://michaelnovati.substack.com/p/i-shipped-a-facebook-feature-so-fast

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.

The Merton Prayer

https://reflections.yale.edu/article/seize-day-vocation-calling-work/merton-prayer

My Lord God,

I have no idea where I am going.

I do not see the road ahead of me.

I cannot know for certain where it will end.

Nor do I really know myself,

and the fact that I think I am following your will

does not mean that I am actually doing so.

But I believe that the desire to please you

does in fact please you.

Andrelton Simmons was the best defender in baseball. Then he suddenly walked away.

https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7322869/2026/06/01/andrelton-simmons-angels-braves-mexico-defense/

 When he’s done playing, that may be the last baseball fans see of him. It may take him a few more years, he said, but unlike several ex-big leaguers in this league, not past 40. He has no desire to coach, and if the last few years are any indication, no desire to stay in the game in any public way.

“I want to enjoy retirement for real after,” he said.

The next day, Simmons was back in the lineup. Back to being under the radar, out of the public view, but out on the field taking grounders. Enjoying that baseball, even in this different form, is finally coming easy to him again.

My year as a degenerate gambler

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/04/online-sports-betting-app-addiction/686061/?gift=otEsSHbRYKNfFYMngVFweLsiO3CHpZFZmczY-kuVbN0&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

To humanity’s great thinkers and leaders, gambling was an impediment to an ethical life (Aristotle), an invention of the devil (Saint Augustine), and a tax on the ignorant (Warren Buffett). It fostered selfishness and a something-for-nothing ethos that was poisonous to the soul. George Washington went so far as to warn that “every possible evil” could be tied to gambling: “It is the child of avarice, the brother of inequity, and the father of mischief.”

How Russia’s War Machine Brutalizes and Exploits Its Own Soldiers

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/12/31/world/europe/russia-military-abuse-soldiers.html

In hundreds of official complaints, inadvertently posted online by the Russian government, soldiers and their loved ones describe a lawless and violent military apparatus that abuses its own troops to maintain its assault in Ukraine.

Norah Jones Is Playing Along with Harry Mack (Podcast Season 2 Episode 27)

https://youtu.be/F4gGroSuYWk?t=3710

Britain Should Have Read the Tweets First

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/12/starmer-abd-el-fattah/685469/

Starmer—and his Conservative predecessors—were right to call for Abd el-Fattah’s release. What was absurd, however, was to frame his arrival on British soil as an unalloyed blessing. Starmer was thinking like the procedure-obsessed human-rights lawyer he used to be, not the political and moral leader that Britain needs right now.

500 mile email limit

https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles

Here's a problem that *sounded* impossible...  I almost regret posting the story to a wide audience, because it makes a great tale over drinks at a conference. :-)  The story is slightly altered in order to protect the guilty, elide over irrelevant and boring details, and generally make the whole thing more entertaining.

I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago when I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department.

"We're having a problem sending email out of the department."

"What's the problem?" I asked.

"We can't send mail more than 500 miles," the chairman explained.

I choked on my latte.  "Come again?"

We Haven’t Seen the Worst of What Gambling and Prediction Markets Will Do to America

https://www.derekthompson.org/p/we-havent-seen-the-worst-of-what

I often find myself thinking about the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who argued in the introduction of After Virtue that modernity had destroyed the shared moral language once supplied by traditions and religion, leaving us with only the language of individual preference. Virtue did not disappear, I think, so much as it died and was reincarnated as the market. It is now the market that tells us what things are worth, what events matter, whose predictions are correct, who is winning, who counts. Money has, in a strange way, become the last moral arbiter standing—the final universal language that a pluralistic, distrustful, post-institutional society can use to communicate with itself.

As this moral vocabulary scales across culture, it also corrodes culture. In sports, when you have money on a game, you’re not rooting for a team. You’re rooting for a proposition. The social function of fandom—shared identity, inherited loyalty, something larger than yourself—dissolves into individual risk. In politics, I fear the consequences will be worse. Prediction markets can be useful for those who want to know the future, but their utility recruits participants into a relationship with the news cycle that is adversarial, and even misanthropic. A young man betting on a terrorist attack or a famine is not acting as a mere concerned citizen whose participation improves the efficiency of global prediction markets. He’s just a dude, on his phone, alone in a room, choosing to root for death.