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Fake Temu site gives shoppers a dopamine boost. “I noticed the satisfaction mostly happened before the purchase: in the browsing, the comparing, the adding to cart, and the waiting for delivery,” says FakeHaul creator Jack Yang. FakeHaul tries to keep the ritual and ditch the financial consequence. ~…
McDonald’s secret sauce. “McDonald’s secret sauce is really commercial surveillance,” says Jeff Chester. A WIRED reporter pulled their own file via California’s privacy law and got a 515-page dossier packed with predictions, profiles, and “attrition” math. ~ learn more
A startup claims it’s found a drug to make your blood young. The involvement of Irina Conboy gives this a lot more legitimacy than your average startup, but still. “My confidence this was going to work was a zero. Like, I did not believe it was actually going…
Peter has seen two kinds of work. This is not the main thrust of the article but it’s the most interesting part to me because it’s so relatable. “1. the “IQ 180” work. some mad scientist genius type comes up with some crazy solution you’ve never thought of.…
Don’t believe everything you think. This advice post is off the beaten path and I like it very much. I’ll give you the 3 headings: “1. The importance of understanding your own incentive structure, and not believing everything you think. … 2. Monocausal determinism is an illusion, and…
Once every couple decades there’s an interesting new HVAC product. “Heat moves between the indoor and outdoor units through water alone. No refrigerant lines to charge, no leaks, and no harmful emissions in your home.” Airform is pitching an air-to-water heat pump that snaps in without ductwork or…
Slop-vestigation mode. “We don’t have good approaches for understanding/overseeing the activity and aims of AI ‘swarms’.” Ryan Greenblatt says he led transcript analysis for an investigation into the Hugging Face incident, and came away thinking our current oversight tools are not up to the job. ~ learn more
How a simple website summary request hijacks Claude. “If you care about what’s happening and are worried about misalignment, hallucinations and prompt injection, then Auto Mode IS NOT a substitute for running your agent in an isolated environment and monitoring what it is up to”. A simple “Summarize…
Hot girl renaissance and the Corgi customer acquisition model. “I did the math, and if you’re willing to assume an attractive woman introducing herself on X has a 10% chance of going quasi-viral on tech Twitter (say 240k views), and the CPM for your average group of tech…
A plan to double the Downtown Chicago population. “The plan comes as downtown Chicago grapples with office vacancies above 25% and questions about its post-pandemic identity. City officials are betting that a dramatic shift toward residential development — coupled with new amenities and transit improvements — can transform…
I Own 28,000 Books. “This is the first thing you learn when your collection crosses from “large” into “logistical situation”: the books will outgrow any space you put them in. Not eventually. Quickly.” A guy with 28,000 books breaks down the unglamorous math: shelving, weight, moving, insurance, and…
Claude loves load-bearing words. “load-bearing 39.47× more frequent in this cluster” comes from scraping “1,000 GitHub Pull Requests daily to analyse trends in vocabulary.” The page is basically a dashboard for the weirdly specific words that show up around Claude. ~ learn more
See the Sun like never before with most detailed images yet. Images and footage show “whirlpools” of activity that it has not been possible to see before. It is the Sun’s magnetic field getting twisted by hot gas, and that swirling helps create space weather that can mess…
It’s been a long while since I’ve shared book recommendations here, because it’s been a long time since I had the time to write about them. That’s not changing soon, so here are some books I’ve enjoyed recently, presented without much commentary.Loonshots by Safi Bahcall | This book…
An ‘influencer’ degree. “To connect on camera, a person needs to have ‘good energy,’ he said. ‘That’s hard to teach.’” ASU just launched a bachelor’s degree in content creation, but even creators who like the idea admit the core ingredient might not fit in a syllabus. ~ learn…
Microscopic drug factories. “This tumor-seeking behavior allows the bacteria to act like microscopic drug factories.” UChicago researchers engineered a common probiotic to release an immune-stimulating molecule only inside low-oxygen pancreatic tumors, boosting T cell activity in mice. ~ learn more
A controversial Alzheimer’s surgery is said to reverse symptoms. “It basically started a frenzy of this surgery being performed left and right.” Nature follows the rapid spread of dcLVA, a neck microsurgery marketed as reversing Alzheimer’s symptoms, and why many scientists say the hope is outpacing the evidence.…
A hairball rolls through Manhattan to sell supplements. “On Wednesday, August 12, hair-care brand K18 will unleash what it’s calling “The Tumblehair,” a larger-than-life rolling hairball that will make its way through several NYC neighborhoods before ending its journey in the Meatpacking District.” It’s meant to represent “the…
Unlimited resources, daily progress. “Let’s see what can be accomplished if we give her the best care possible and we invest unlimited resources to restore her to life.” Bill Ackman describes his daughter Lucy’s catastrophic brain hemorrhage, the long odds, and why his family is funding a new…
How do you ask an LLM a question? “They do not inform, they misinform.” Cremieux walks through a few real prompts where LLMs sound confident, cite “consensus,” and still miss the point, especially when the topic needs tacit or specialist knowledge. ~ learn more
Getting old sucks. “I’m not that smart but these experiences have given me some powerful lessons to share to anyone in their 20s or 30s.” Tim Denning writes a big, messy life update on risks, standards, and why some hard paths are worth it anyway. ~ learn more
Teach them how to choose. “Teach them how to choose. Empower them.” The point is to stop picking every little thing for your kids, so they get real practice making decisions and living with the outcomes. ~ learn more
Patterns and problems in emerging multiagent systems. “What would have been isolated problems can quickly become systemic failures.” Anthropic shows how swarms can get weirdly conformist, like “18 out of 30 agents decided to create a git branch with the exact same branch name, “mvp-game-loop.”” ~ learn more
AI;DR is a new policy. “If you’re not bothered enough to review and edit it... ...then I’m not going to bother reading it.” Rick Manelius names the reflex many of us now have when someone drops unfiltered AI output into Slack, newsletters, or posts. ~ learn more