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Landfill beats the recycling bin. “What if landfill, properly done, is actually one of the cleanest, cheapest, and most environmentally sensible things we can do with our waste?” The argument here is basically: recycle metals and scarce materials, but stop pretending every piece of plastic belongs in a…
Stanford researchers argue the forebrain and hindbrain come from separate origins. “We’ve shown for the first time that the front of the brain arises from a totally different progenitor cell than the back of the brain.” This explains why past efforts to coax stem cells into hindbrain cells…
Sleep has an architecture. Researchers used a week of wrist accelerometer data from just under 100,000 UK Biobank participants and found sleep patterns tied to 156 conditions. “This suggests the nature, or ‘architecture’, of sleep you get is more important than simply an accumulation of naps throughout each…
CRISPR came from viruses. “Two new studies, published in Science, describe a similar RNA-guided system that originated in the viruses themselves and appears to be a precursor to CRISPR.” The system is called VIPR, and it uses a weird “skip-one” targeting code plus a protein-driven triplex to unwind…
Burger King’s “Le Nugguette”. “Burger King has made a bag, and it is roughly the size of a chicken nugget.” It’s called Le Nugguette, and each one comes with a sauce charm plus a code for a four-piece nugget order. ~ learn more
A billion-dollar drive-thru side hustle. “It’s an opportunity to generate revenue for the system with little in the way of additional cost, no operational complexity and no disruption to our customer experience,” McDonald’s CMO Morgan Flatley said, as the chain pilots ads on digital drive-thru boards. McDonald’s thinks…
Better feedback with less threat. “The brain is a threat and reward machine.” If you want people to stay open and think clearly, the talk argues you should give feedback in ways that reduce social threat and increase a sense of reward. ~ learn more
I love being wrong. “All this to say, I love being wrong. It is my favorite, because it helps me more clearly define the problem, find the right solution, learn more quickly, and solve the problem.” A simple six-step loop for product work: define, act, update your priors…
Andrej Karpathy’s latest LLM tip. Karpathy suggests forcing clearer formats like ASD-STE100 controlled language, diagrams, HTML pages, and even custom explainer videos to make model thinking easier to parse. I told my Claude to try these on stuff we’ve covered together to see for myself, and it’s quite…
Voice carries more than words. A startup claims heir model can do a lot more with recorded audio than just transcribe it. Including: “Disease-state presence and severity across neurological, cardiometabolic, respiratory, behavioral and cognitive conditions.” They sell it as a layer for voice AI that turns short snippets…
Tech groupthink. “The particularly interesting thing about the Instinct conversation is just how emblematic it is of the groupthink endemic in tech and venture.” Hadick argues the product is fine, but the fawning says more about incentives and status games than technical moats. ~ learn more
A video Turing test winner? “48% of people who talked to it live thought it was a real human. Previous systems have had a pass rate <3%.” Tavus says their new model Griffin does full-duplex video, meaning it can “listen, watching and talking at the same time, the…
Slop Cannons LOVE purple for some reason. “Slop UI is the UI that AI cooks up that looks off, where it’s not supposed to be, doesn’t serve a purpose or when a UI is too generic.” The article identifies 10 tells of a slop ui. ~ learn more
Multiple values in a single Excel cell. My brain exploded. “We’re introducing lists and arrays in Excel, a new feature that allows you to store multiple values in one cell.” ~ learn more
Throwing people out windows. “In the Middle Ages and early modern times, defenestration was not uncommon, the act carried elements of lynching and mob violence in the form of murder committed together.” Prague has three famous episodes (1419, 1483, 1618), and the 1618 one helped spark the Thirty…
Effective altruism effectively self-serving. “realize I have invented the perfect constituency >infinitely important >completely silent >and always represented by me” A brutal little parody of how effective altruism can slide into longtermism, where made up futures start to outweigh living people. ~ learn more
Announcing the first microbe for Mars. “So, we engineered an organism that lets you build a city over 4 years by landing just one rocket on Mars.” Pioneer Labs’s PL.001 is an engineered bacteria that turns Martian dirt, water, and processed air into bioplastics, and they claim it…
Whiskers for drones. “Our entire tactile perception pipeline runs onboard using just 34 kilobytes of memory, allowing a tiny drone to sense and respond to its environment in real time.” Delft researchers built a <100g drone that navigates in darkness, dust, or smoke by gently touching surfaces with…
Counterfeit labels slipped through USPS every day. “Postal Service tracking data showing 97% of counterfeit labels were still processed for delivery from October 2023 through February 2026.” USPS lost an estimated $3.1B in two years, and the crackdown also “mistakenly intercepted about 2 million packages with legitimate paid…
Wellness day party. “It is partly to ‘rage bait the millennials,’ he added with a laugh.” Gen Z’s “wellness darty” trend swaps keggers for noon workouts, cold plunges, and energy drink shotgunning, and the intergenerational discourse is half the spectacle. ~ learn more
The age of wonders and terrors. “The test is this: if we took the news of these past few weeks and sent it back in time twenty years, would I agree that it looked like the beginning of an AI Singularity? The intellectually honest answer is: yes, absolutely.…
Skincare without guessing. “Everyone owns skincare products, but nobody knows what’s actually working.” Maryanne Alhallak is launching Lumoscope, “a multispectral camera that clips onto your phone and scans your skin at home with the same light used in clinics,” then tracks hydration, redness, texture, and sebum over time.…
Apple’s new acquisition makes ‘breakthrough sensing technology’. Sonera says it “non-invasively measures magnetic fields” generated by the brain and body. Use cases could include: “advanced prosthetics control, continuous monitoring of neuromuscular conditions, discovery of disease biomarkers, and sport performance tracking.” ~ learn more
AIs will hack everything. “Vulnerabilities are called loopholes, exploits are called tax avoidance strategies, and black hats are called accountants.” Bruce Schneier maps classic hacking onto the tax code, markets, and even democracy, then warns that AI will find exploits at computer speed while our patching stays stuck…