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Anti-drone chain gun with bullets that can chase targets. If you were wondering how defense tech was going to deal with drone swarms, here’s one option. It pairs the Bushmaster 50-mm chain gun with AI targeting and precision-guided rounds that can “course-correct in mid-flight” to handle swarms. ~…
You can hear cauliflower growing. “That rapid expansion means the florets of the plant’s popcorn-like heads often rub against one another as they grow, creating a noise many farmers call “cauliflower creak.”” It can grow up to 1 inch per day, and the sound gets compared to a…
Take Google’s phishing test. “AI is already making phishing attacks more sophisticated, personalized, and common.” Google’s Jigsaw made a quick quiz to practice noticing the little tells before you click. ~ learn more
How trains led to time zones. “At best, people might miss their train; at worst, trains were more likely to collide when using a single track.” Railroads needed everyone to agree on the clock, so in 1883 US and Canadian companies adopted four time zones that still mostly…
A modern apartment is full of things that once drew awe. “If we could have devised an arrangement for providing everybody with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to every mood, and beginning and ceasing at will, we should have considered the limit…
What Shenzhen knows. “What Shenzhen knows’ is not written down in a book whose covers can be sliced off and ingested into a model, it’s a few million humidity stories stored in people, and a pace of knowledge-rich adjustment that keeps cost down and yield high.” Sarah Guo’s…
Kinetic prompt injection. A presentation from the Black Hat USA conference demonstrates how one can jailbreak a robot with voice or visual input. “Prompt injection is usually treated as a text problem contained on a screen: a bad output, leaked data, a rogue tool call. This one isn’t.”…
Smart is dime a dozen. “I tell my kids the world doesn’t need nor give a smouldering turd about another smart person. Dime a dozen.” A blunt parent essay about growing up in a high-achievement bubble, and why he thinks school mostly rewards compliance while the real world…
A negative data point for Alpha School performance. They created a charter school in Arizona called Unbound Academy using their 2-hour-per-day learning software. “Unbound Academy’s 2025-26 assessment scores underperformed not just its predicted targets above, but also the Arizona state averages.” The implication is that their fantastic test…
48 out of 54 avocado oil-labeled products failed the test. “Numerous studies have demonstrated that products marketed as avocado oil may be partially or wholly substituted with lower-cost vegetable oils or refined oils, resulting in mislabeling and economic adulteration.” This paper asks a more specific question: when avocado…
A natural peptide that makes erections 56% harder. “Kisspeptin administration resulted in a significant increase in penile tumescence over the course of an 8-minute sexual video compared with placebo.” In a small double-blind crossover RCT (32 men with HSDD), the hormone also “significantly modulated brain activity in key…
All living things emit a faint glow. Seeing the mouse images was “a defining moment”, says Daniel Oblak. Living mice gave off a ghostly glow in a dark chamber, and when the team re-imaged them after death, “the glow had disappeared”. ~ learn more
Peter Attia on the popular peptides craze. My summary: he’s not into it! Especially not BPC-157. Frankly he forced me to re-investigate and there’s less support for the mechanism of action than I had believed. “If you’re putting something into your body, I think these are the questions…
Compression is prediction. “Compression and LLMs are trying to solve the exact same problem…” Based on my read of this post, I am reasonable confident that I don’t really understand modern compression. ~ learn more
Magic is in the multiples. “why the ‘magic is in the multiples,’” is how Harvard Business School professors Ruback and Yudkoff summarize the whole game of buying small businesses (“Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition”) well. This episode is a tight refresher on the search-fund world, plus how self-funded searchers are…
The Al energy bottleneck, with Tim Fist. This is a fantastically detailed podcast conversation. “Building new transmission lines permitting for that is an absolute nightmare.” The episode gets very concrete about why AI scaling runs into boring physical constraints like power generation and, worse, getting that power to…
The output is the watermark. The text that your Claude AI agent spits out has a hidden watermark, but it’s not added to the output. Instead, “the watermark is baked into the token selection itself!” It uses “key/context-derived sampling” so a detectable signature builds up across many tokens,…
Cards Against Humanity are great marketers, just like Elon. “We have forced Elon Musk to get the fuck off our land, and now it’s time to build something on it, a monument to remind Musk that he’s a sad little bitch with no friends.” Cards Against Humanity is…
How a simple request for Al to book a gym class exposed a major threat. “Bad news — I can’t add them back,” the AI agent replied after it tested a gym booking API by cancelling someone else’s reservation. It started as a normal request to book a…
The professor who taught people how to think “Professor Julius Sumner Miller finds pure joy in the ordinary world and cannot rest until you feel it too,” says the description of this restored 1962 episode of *Why Is It So?* Curiosity is a skill you can practice on…
Massive iceberg collapses and flips over in Ilulissat, Greenland. “this video shows the entire event unfolding over approximately one hour, not just the brief final rollover seen in shorter clips shared around the world.” ~ learn more
DoorDash gets permission to run an airline. “For us it’s not just about building the drone, it’s just as much about running the airline: the routing, the safety systems, the operational layer that makes everything fly smoothly.” DoorDash says it got FAA Part 135 certification and is launching…
A selective PFAS binder from oats. “NeutraOat is a modified form of oat fiber (β-glucan) that binds PFAS in your gut before they get reabsorbed.” Grain Labs is recruiting 15 adults with elevated PFOS for a 12-week at-home pilot with before-and-after PFAS and wellness panels. ~ learn more
Program ions like software. “Our method replaces that physical solution switching with rapid changes in the electrical circuit, allowing ions to move continuously in one direction through the system.” The researchers say electrochemical ion pumping can desalinate salty industrial wastewater and also keep valuable metals like copper out…