Find a half-remembered link or follow a subject through years of Sunday notes.
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Lawmakers make weird laws. New Jersey just banned “surveillance pricing” on groceries and other necessities. Here’s the boogeyman: grocery stores are going to charge you more because of data they have about you. So, not only are the shelf price labels going to change as you or I…
The genius tax collection trick by Taiwan. Taiwan turns every receipt into a bimonthly lottery ticket so customers demand receipts and businesses can’t hide sales. It also gives the people a little taste of gambling in a country where it’s illegal. ~ learn more
A computer inside a thread. “Here a textile fibre computer that monolithically combines analogue sensing, digital memory, processing and communication in a mass of less than 5 g is presented.” They thermal-draw eight microdevices into a machine-washable, stretchable fibre, then get a garment to do distributed inference by networking…
Reviewing slop papers at gunpoint. “I am basically reviewing slop papers at gunpoint. It feels like living in some weird level of hell.” Two reviewers describe a summer where 15 of 22 submissions they saw had fabricated citations, fake author lists, or unmistakable LLM-generated writing. ~ learn more
A dream begins with a ¥1 ice cream. “As of Q3’24, Mixue operates more than 45,000 stores globally (only 20 being self-owned). This makes it the largest food chain worldwide by store count.” ~ learn more
CheapFoodMap - Find meals under $10 across the US. “Cheap eats under $10, all over the map. Tap a pin.” A simple little site that does exactly what it says: shows cheap food spots near you on a map. Proof that you can just build things! ~ learn…
The man behind Grand Theft Auto 6: Strauss Zelnick. This guy’s story is absolutely incredible. Could not recommend it more. “Zelnick had written memos for Carl Icahn twice saying stay away. Then Icahn told him to read the bylaws.” ~ learn more
Sit with not-knowing. “The faster [the students] go, the fewer the opportunities for hesitation, judgment, or uncertainty.” Gert Biesta argues schools should protect that slow, resistant space, especially now that AI can rush students to a polished answer before they have even decided what is worth asking. ~…
The first BCI company with a CE marked device for the restoration of detailed form vision. “For decades, losing central vision to this disease meant losing the ability to read, recognize faces, and ultimately losing independence. There was no viable treatment. Now there is.” Science Corp. says PRIMA…
130% solar cells, kind of. “The result is a measurable quantum yield of around 130%.” Not exactly 130% energy efficiency as the article title implies, it is 1.3 charge carriers harvested per photon, which is still pretty cool.. ~ learn more
Sleep regularity beats sleep duration. “Sleep regularity was a stronger predictor of all-cause mortality than sleep duration.” They computed a Sleep Regularity Index from more than 10 million hours of wrist accelerometer data in 60,977 UK Biobank participants, and the most regular sleepers had meaningfully lower all-cause, cancer,…
The $7 breaking point. “Every consumer has their limit as to how much they will pay for a given item, and for Dorito’s customers, that limit is apparently $7 a bag.” Frito-Lay tried promos and smaller bags instead of cutting prices, and it backfired hard enough that Walmart…
Mine Reddit for drug side effects. “there are zero long term studies on BPC-157 use.” So he processed 37k comments from peptide subreddits and pulled “over 2400 AE reports” to map what people say happens, including dechallenge and rechallenge cases. ~ learn more
A cancer vaccine in one day. “With AI, the company said the procedure could be completed in a day.” Beijing-based Likang Life Sciences is building what it says is China’s first production line for AI-assisted personalized tumor vaccines, designed to tailor a shot by reading a patient’s tumor…
Mental effort is the real divide. “What will differentiate people is not how smart they are but their relationship to mental effort.” The early story of AI at work is not leisure, it is intensity: one study found that after adopting AI, “The time that these early adopters…
Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth. “This week’s CipherTalk is about what happens to a specific kind of debt when the collateral itself can walk out the door with the operations team.” A used GPU cluster is not a building with a neat appraisal, because…
The Vegas Loop. “The most important innovation behind the Boring Company’s Vegas Loop is not the tunnel itself. It is the way the transportation network is organized. Traditional subway systems are generally built around linear routes. A train travels along a fixed line, stopping at a predetermined sequence…
Model intelligence is rented. “Model intelligence is a rented advantage. Position is an owned one.” Rob May argues the easy “ChatGPT for X” era is over, and the new opportunities are in routing, orchestration, governance, and narrow models that do one job perfectly. ~ learn more
Internet security is an illusion. OpenAI’s team was running a new model in an offline sandbox and asking it to do something hard. Instead of doing that hard thing, it decided to do a different hard thing: hack out of its sandbox to access another OpenAI machine to…
Clout Street. Believe it or not, a couple friends and I once stumbled across this secret road and shaved some minutes off our drive! “The Magic Road!” Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle laughed, explaining that it is “a special highway that permits government officials to speed on…
The men spending $1,000 a day in pursuit of big bass. “There’s a fine line between passion and obsession. In the world of stalking largemouth bass, that line comes in at the ten-pound mark on a scale. For most anglers, a fish weighing in the double digits is…
The oldest buildings on every continent. “These seven human-made structures are currently considered to be the earliest on each continent.” A tight tour from 1899 huts in Antarctica to Göbekli Tepe around 9500 BCE, with the reminder that better dating will keep reshuffling the list. ~ learn more
The one specimen that counts. “A holotype is a single physical example (or illustration) of an organism that is the one that was used when the species (or lower-ranked taxon) was formally described.” It is the anchor for a species name, even if it is only a fragment,…
America’s first menus. “Menus are maps: of taste, of economy, of immigration, of aspiration.” The Pudding uses early American restaurant menus to show what people ate, what they could afford, and what they wanted to signal about themselves. ~ learn more