Latest Webb telescope image shows the grand-design spiral galaxy

I think ambient intents are going to be a big deal. There are so many intentions we have that would make our lives better, but the cost of surfacing them to a market it too high, so they never become legible to the world. You want a better job, you want to swap your couch, you would apartment-swap with someone in your web-of-trust, you would upgrade from a two-bedroom to a three-bedroom if there were some graceful way to find the person who wants to size down, and you would love to sublet you place in New York without posting on Instagram and making 95% of you friends read a logistical errand that has nothing to do with them. Right now, the cost of expressing these intents is high. You have to remember the want, decide it is worth acting on, find the right channel, phrase it socially, tolerate the inbound, filter for trust, negotiate details, and then keep the whole thing alive in your head. So most of the long tail dies. Agents change this because they can keep the low-grade, half-formed wants running in the background. They know your calendar, your travel plans, your music, your reading, your friends, your constraints, and maybe your willingness to be interrupted. You listen to a band on repeat on Spotify and your agent notices they are playing 20 minutes from where you will be in California next month. You highlight a book you love in Readwise and it tells you that your friend is reading it too, and you will both be at the same dinner next week. You mention wanting Berlin in June and it quietly checks whether any trusted people from there want to apartment swap in New York then. The magic is lowering the cost of noticing, holding, matching, and negotiating these things. It will feel like a higher level of serendipity. This will require a web-of-trust that has yet to be built because there is an important privacy aspect to this. The dystopian version is "AI companies capture your intentions and auction them to whoever wants to manipulate you." The useful version is user-owned intents, where your agent can prove enough to match or negotiate without dumping your private life into a marketplace. Some of this already has been solved in cryptography: private set intersection for finding overlaps without revealing all non-matches, secure multiparty computation / homomorphic encryption for computing matches or scores over private inputs, zero-knowledge credentials for proving things like membership, attendance, reputation, or trust path without exposing everything underneath. If this works, a lot of modern life gets more liquid. Idea sharing, couches, apartments, reading groups, dinner plans, travel overlaps, introductions, tiny labor exchanges, borrowing a camera, finding the one person at an event who cares about the same weird thing. All the stuff that currently relies on posting into the void and hoping the right person happens to see it. The hard parts are real: consent, spam, weird incentives, agent loyalty, social context, and making sure this becomes a tool for people rather than a new ad exchange with better vibes. But I increasingly think the big unlock is giving our unexpressed intentions a safe place to live, and giving our agents permission to help them find each other. I know of @indexnetwork_ working on this. Anyone else?

Effectively all growth in corn production over the last 20 years is for ethanol. ~20 million acres of conservation land, grassland, and soybean rotation was turned into corn monoculture that effectively strip mines the topsoil. Meanwhile it’s the most fertilizer dependent crop with only a 40% uptake rate. So ~1.7 million tons of nitrogen runoff flows into the Mississippi basin annually while also polluting their own water supplies. This runoff ends up expanding the Gulf deadzone, which is also where 40% of domestic seafood comes from. It’s hard to find a worse way to create fuel, with a wicked level of waste and downstream consequences.

The Batman effect. A female experimenter, appearing pregnant, boarded the train. In the experimental condition, an additional experimenter dressed as Batman entered from another door. Passengers were significantly more likely to offer their seat when Batman was present (67.21% vs. 37.66%). [Francesco Pagnini et al.,"Unexpected events and prosocial behavior: the Batman effect", Nature, 2025]

Super slow takeoff

Sorta kinda crazy how prescient this ended up being

Here's my update to the broader community about the ongoing incident investigation. I want to give you the rundown of the situation directly. A Vercel employee got compromised via the breach of an AI platform customer called Context.ai that he was using. The details are being fully investigated. Through a series of maneuvers that escalated from our colleague’s compromised Vercel Google Workspace account, the attacker got further access to Vercel environments. Vercel stores all customer environment variables fully encrypted at rest. We have numerous defense-in-depth mechanisms to protect core systems and customer data. We do have a capability however to designate environment variables as “non-sensitive”. Unfortunately, the attacker got further access through their enumeration. We believe the attacking group to be highly sophisticated and, I strongly suspect, significantly accelerated by AI. They moved with surprising velocity and in-depth understanding of Vercel. At the moment, we believe the number of customers with security impact to be quite limited. We’ve reached out with utmost priority to the ones we have concerns about. All of our focus right now is on investigation, communication to customers, enhancement of security measures, and sanitization of our environments. We’ve deployed extensive protection measures and monitoring. We’ve analyzed our supply chain, ensuring Next.js, Turbopack, and our many open source projects remain safe for our community. The recommendation for all Vercel customers is to follow the Security Bulletin closely (vercel.com/kb/bulletin/verce…). My advice to everyone is to follow the best practices of security response: secret rotation, monitoring access to your Vercel environments and linked services, and ensuring the proper use of the sensitive env variables feature. In response to this, and to aid in the improvement of all of our customers’ security postures, we’ve already rolled out new capabilities in the dashboard, including an overview page of environment variables, and a better user interface for sensitive env var creation and management. As always, I’m totally open to your feedback. We’re working with elite cybersecurity firms, industry peers, and law enforcement. We’ve reached out to Context to assist in understanding the full scale of the incident, in an effort to protect other organizations and the broader internet. I also want to thank the Google Mandiant team for their active engagement and assistance. It’s my mission to turn this attack into the most formidable security response imaginable. It’s always been a top priority for me. Vercel employs some of the most dedicated security researchers and security-minded engineers in the world. I commit to keeping you updated and rolling out extensive improvements and defenses so you, our customers and community, can have the peace of mind that Vercel always has your back.

研究によると、マーモットがキャベツを丁重にお断りする様子を見ることでストレスレベルが最大65%低下することが示されているらしい

Crazy to think that this was taken with a regular DSLR and is sitting on one of the astronauts' camera roll. On a normal memory card. Not some special exterior mounted NASA camera. They just pointed the lens out the window and snapped this. Makes it even more real somehow.

“We found that Mythos Preview is capable of identifying and then exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in every major operating system and every major web browser” (1/n)