Find a half-remembered link or follow a subject through years of Sunday notes.
7,487 posts
Someone hacked the FBI. “A sample of 5,000 alleged agents seen by 404 Media includes names, addresses, phone numbers, and details on FBI employees’ spouses.” I think this reinforces my default assumption that all of our data is effectively public, because if the FBI can’t secure their data…
People who are going to change the world. “In pursuit of a hyperhuman, beautiful, and sincere future.” Alexey Guzey keeps a running list of people he thinks will change the world. The second link is to a version I had Claude create that puts each person on their…
A foundry for bastard web fonts. For example: “It’s Times New Roman but every seventh letter is jarringly sans serif.” Bastardica lets you mix, stretch, and squish fonts right in the browser, then export the result as a usable file. ~ learn more
Michael Levin’s mind-blowing new research agenda. He is the person who figured out that electricity is how cells know where to self-organize to build each body part, who made tiny living non-frogs from frog cells (xenobots), and who developed the idea that intelligence exists beyond brains. His new…
Our kids’ Montessori alma mater on blast by the NYT. Due to odd Covid circumstances our family has experience with three different locations across two states, one of which was fantastic. I do not necessarily endorse this article’s characterization of the school as a Ponzi scheme. A New…
Why consumers don’t want to shop your site. “Marketplace is where the world is trending not because we want to shop there but because the experience isn’t chopped.” A good reminder that if your own DTC site is harder than the reseller, people will opt for the smoother…
Amazon’s top sellers aren’t TikTok Shop’s. “TikTok makes people want things. Amazon is where people buy things.” Only 498 sellers show up in both platforms’ top 10,000, so being big on one barely predicts being big on the other. ~ learn more
Everything in oncology in a public website and open source repo for all.. Copy. “Every technology, target, product, company, institution, pathway, trial, pairing, roadmap, and idea in oncology, linked together. The state of the art, the history, and what is coming, for every cancer, with a plain-English TL;DR…
Envy masquerades as strategy. “Envy masquerades as strategy, and the disguise is good enough that your team will nod along.” Brian Sugar on how easy it is to confuse a jolt of jealousy for conviction, especially now that copying a product can happen in a weekend. ~ learn…
No safety in the middle. Mike Vernal thinks cheap software creation will push the industry toward a barbell: a few giants that “do it all,” plus a long tail of tiny, niche tools. ~ learn more
Synthetic internet environments. “the OAI swarms seeded the web with self-replicating code - contaminating training data so thoroughly that labs may need synthetic internet environments instead.” If this rumor is even partly true, it turns “training on the open internet” into a new kind of supply chain risk.…
Bug bounties meet GPT Astra. “I’ve committed to pay people who report bugs in my code, up to 750€ for severe errors. Since GPT Astra, I’m now getting several bug reports daily.” Ruben C. Arslan is watching AI turn his standing bounty policy into a constant stream of…
Aristocrats are basically chimpanzees. The piece argues that a post-work world might look less like creative bliss and more like status games and relentless social tracking, with “intrigue” as the organizing activity. ~ learn more
A theory on how the French bistro got its name. “Bystro! Bystro!” is Russian for “Quick! Quick!” and there’s a popular legend that Russian soldiers in occupied Paris yelled it when they wanted food. ~ learn more
User inter-face. I don’t really know how to describe this, but I suggest you spend 60 seconds watching it. ~ learn more
Time your wake to a dream. Muse opened a beta for Dream Recall, which aims to catch you mid-dream so you can actually remember what just happened. They frame it simply: “Recall is a timing problem, not a talent.” ~ learn more
One weird dark matter blip. The LUX-ZEPLIN detector extended its search to higher recoil energies and found a single event it could not explain away as background. “How do you even make sense of one event?” muses Tom Shutt. ~ learn more
Aging brains blend memories. The punchline here is that older adults may not just “forget,” they confuse categories. In the study, stronger overlap between learning and recall brain patterns in older adults predicted “confusing items across entirely different categories, like linking a face to a scene when it…
Maybe stop chasing protein. A review of 350+ papers argues many sedentary people are overdoing it: “because most people are relatively sedentary, many people are likely consuming more protein than they actually need, which probably has negative health consequences.” The authors point to protein restriction shifting metabolism and…
Amazon’s “invented auction participant.”. The FTC and 22 states allege Amazon secretly jacked up ad auction prices for years, while telling advertisers it ran “second price” auctions where winners pay “one cent more than the next highest bidder.” The complaint says internal docs called it “a surcharge hidden…
Groupon has a re-founder. While we all stopped paying attention to Groupon, a Czech entrepreneur took it over and rebuilt it with a European team. The CFO describes this turnaround as “we’re buying a house in AAA location, but it’s a complete gut. It is a rebuild from…
Smell training for your brain. “The loss of the sense of smell is often one of the first warning signs of neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease even up to a decade before there are other diagnosable symptoms.” The article says “90 percent of people…
Cyber insurance prices keep falling. NYU Stern researcher Nate Witkin points out: “Insurance rates for cyber risk declined by about 4% globally in Q2 of this year, and that’s actually the 12th consecutive quarter in which they’ve declined.” He frames it as “a plea for level headedness” and…
Math drama on X. Mehdi is furious about the “we solved Navier-Stokes” framing, calling it “pure scientific vulgarity” and saying “the ai did not understand fluid mechanics it simply navigated a continuous search space previously mapped out and constrained by the monumental work of human mathematicians.” The whole…