How many "tabs" are "open" in your brain at any one time? We talk about AI ROI and cloud costs, but we rarely consider the "Open Tab Tax." Once we lose focus, it is hard to get it back again. For this Saturday Strategy session, I’m looking at the unit economics of attention. If we treated focus like we treat capital expenditure, how would our leadership change? Research suggests that the hidden cost of context switching and digital distraction averages roughly $15,000 per person, every single year. In a world of infinite pings, focus is becoming the most expensive asset an organisation owns. - Context switching is a productivity thief. - Focus is a finite resource, not a bottomless well. - True leadership requires protecting your team's cognitive bandwidth. It’s time to move beyond basic time management and start building attention infrastructure. Read the full breakdown on the unit economics of focus here: jenstirrup.com/2026/06/13/sa… Source: jenstirrup.com/2026/06/13/sa…

🐑 Exciting news! The first guest blog on Guarding the Flock will be published later this week. One of my aims for the blog has always been to create space for different voices, perspectives, and experiences from across safeguarding, faith, governance, and survivor communities. If you've ever thought, "I've got something to say about that," I'd love to hear from you. Guest contributions are very welcome. Watch this space... #Safeguarding #GuestBlog #ChurchLeadership #Governance #Accountability #GuardingTheFlock🐑

In 1999, Apple made an ad joking that the Power Mac G4 was so powerful the DoD classified it as a weapon. This week, the government blocked the Anthropic Fable AI release Apple was ahead of its time. So was the punchline!

🦔Community protests have blocked $130 billion in data center projects so far this year. Q1 2026 produced the most blocked and delayed projects on record. Nashville collected 180,000 petition signatures in days. Charlotte voted on a moratorium. My Take These companies committed hundreds of billions in capex and filed IPOs on the assumption the data centers would get built. $130 billion of them didn't. Communities across the country figured out how to organize against these projects before the developers could lock in permits. The industry built its financial models around infrastructure that doesn't have permission to exist yet, at least not on the timeline the IPOs need. Hedgie🤗

Mission: @SpaceX. Objective: Make life multiplanetary. Exchange: @NasdaqExchange. Status: Initial Public Offering. $SPCX

Yann Lecun published the most heretical AI paper of the year. He opens by arguing Magnus Carlsen isn't good at chess and only gets more unhinged from there. The Turing Award winner and his co-authors dropped a paper demanding the AI industry abandon its biggest obsession, AGI. Right now, everyone from Silicon Valley CEOs to politicians assumes AGI is the ultimate goal. A machine that can do everything a human can do. LeCun argues that this entire concept is a biological illusion. Humans do not possess "general" intelligence. We are highly specialized biological machines, tuned by evolution simply to survive in the physical world. We only think our intelligence is "general" because we are completely blind to the millions of cognitive tasks we are incapable of comprehending. Which brings us to the chess argument. Magnus Carlsen is the greatest human chess player in history. But compared to a modern computer? He is fundamentally terrible. Our belief that Carlsen is "good" at chess is pure human-centric bias. He isn't objectively good. He's just better than the rest of us, who are biologically awful at it. LeCun says we need to stop building AI to mimic human generality. Instead, he proposes a new North Star: SAI. Superhuman Adaptable Intelligence. Instead of trying to build a machine that mimics our flawed, biologically-limited brains, we need to embrace extreme specialization. SAI is about the speed of adaptation. It is an intelligence that can learn to exceed humans at any specific, economically important task. More importantly, it is designed to fill the vast skill gaps where humans are fundamentally incapable. Things like managing global energy grids in real-time. Or predicting complex molecular structures. The entire AI industry is obsessed with building a digital reflection in our own image. LeCun's paper is a brutal wake-up call.

'Sloppenheimer:' Amazon Employees Mock the Company’s AI on Slack 404media.co/sloppenheimer-am…

They’re backing down. It’s over.

More AI-generated code doesn't make your team faster. It might actually slow you down.

A self-taught Irish schoolteacher wrote a book in 1854 that almost nobody read for 80 years, until a 21-year-old MIT student picked it up and realized it could be used to design every computer in human history. His name was George Boole. The book is called An Investigation of the Laws of Thought. Boole was born in 1815 in Lincoln, England. His family was poor. He left school at 16 to support them. He taught himself Latin, Greek, French, German, and Italian. Then he taught himself mathematics. By 19 he had opened his own school. By 24 he was publishing original papers in the Cambridge Mathematical Journal, competing with men who had spent decades inside the best universities in Britain. He never had a degree. He never had a mentor. In 1849, Queen's College in Cork hired him as a professor anyway. In 1854, he published his masterwork. What he built inside it was something nobody had attempted before at this scale. He turned logic into algebra. Before Boole, logic was philosophy. You argued in sentences. You reasoned in paragraphs. It was powerful and completely impossible to automate, because there was no formal system underneath it, just language. Boole stripped it down to arithmetic. He showed that every act of human reasoning could be reduced to operations on two values. True or false. One or zero. AND, OR, NOT. If both conditions are true, the result is true. If neither is, the result is false. Every judgment a human mind makes, every decision, every deduction, could be written as an equation following those rules. Logicians read it. They found it interesting. Engineers building machines had never heard of it. For 83 years, the book sat there. Then in 1937, a 21-year-old MIT master's student named Claude Shannon was working on a thesis about electrical relay circuits. Switches that could be open or closed. Current that either flowed or didn't. He read Boole and understood something nobody had connected before. An open switch is a zero. A closed switch is a one. A circuit with two switches in series only carries current when both are closed. That is AND. A circuit with two switches in parallel carries current when either is closed. That is OR. Shannon proved that every possible logical relationship Boole had described could be physically built using wire and switches. That single insight is the foundation of every computer ever made. After Shannon, chip designers stopped thinking about electricity and started thinking about logic. Every transistor on every processor running right now is implementing a Boolean operation. Every if-statement in every codebase is Boolean logic. Every database query using AND or OR. Every neural network threshold that fires or doesn't fire. All of it is running the algebra of a self-taught schoolteacher from Lincoln who died 160 years ago. The strangest part is what happened to Boole at the end. He was walking to class in November 1864 when he got caught in a rainstorm. He lectured for hours in wet clothes. He went home sick. His wife, Mary, believed in homeopathic medicine and thought the cure should mirror the cause. She wrapped him in wet sheets and poured cold water over him repeatedly. He died a few days later. He was 49. He never saw a transistor. He never saw a circuit. He never saw a single physical machine run a single one of his rules. His book is in the public domain. Free to download. Most engineers use the word Boolean dozens of times a week. Almost none of them know who they are saying. The man whose logic runs inside every phone, every server, and every AI model on Earth died soaking wet in a small Irish town, 83 years before anyone figured out what he had actually built.

🦔Leonardo is a $17 billion defense contractor. It built a system called SignalTrace that clips sensors onto the license plate readers already mounted on street poles, overpasses, and police cars across the US. Every time you drive past one, the sensor grabs the Bluetooth and WiFi signals from every device in your car, ties them to your plate, and logs the time and location. Your phone, your AirPods, your kid's tablet. All of it goes into the same file. A friend rides with you once and their devices are linked to your plate. Leonardo has sold this to police departments since at least 2023. There is no federal law covering it, no opt-out, and no warrant requirement. My Take None of the pieces here are new. Your phone has always broadcast a signal. The license plate cameras were already there. Leonardo just connected them and found a buyer. Nobody had to break a law or build anything from scratch. They assembled a surveillance system from parts already in place and sold it before anyone noticed. Most people found out this week from a 404 Media investigation. Leonardo received the patent in 2024. By the time you hear about something like this, the deals are done and the sensors are on the poles. That's how it works now. Hedgie🤗 404media.co/this-company-wil…

🦔50,000 followers. I don't even know what to say. I started this in March 2025 posting to basically nobody. I just wanted to talk about the financial side of things in a way that didn't make people feel stupid for not knowing it already. I figured a few hundred people might find it useful. 50,000 of you found it. Every one of you is here because someone shared a post or you stumbled on a thread and stuck around. That means a lot to me. More than I'll probably ever say well. I read your replies. I read your DMs. Some of you have told me a post helped you understand something about your money for the first time, or helped you explain something to your kid or your partner. Those messages are why I do this. Thank you. Seriously. This little hedgehog is incredibly grateful. Hedgie🤗

🦔One in five boys aged 12 to 16 is in or knows someone in a romantic relationship with an AI chatbot, according to a Male Allies UK study of over 1,000 boys across 37 UK schools. 85% have talked to chatbots and 26% prefer the attention to human connections. The top companion apps have tens of millions of users and let children design an AI "girlfriend" in under five minutes, then charge for virtual gifts and explicit content. The apps advertise on YouTube and online games. There is no minimum age law for AI companions. Age verification is a checkbox. My Take I've seen this business model before in credit cards, BNPL, and token billing. Find a vulnerability and build a product around it. These apps found the most vulnerable market available and built the easiest money grab I've come across. A 13-year-old spends £5 here and £10 there on virtual gifts for an AI character he thinks understands him, and his mother finds out when the charges hit her phone bill. Fifty million downloads, and a big chunk of the customer base can't legally consent to the product. The apps look like games from the outside, which is by design, because no regulatory framework covers standalone AI companions and Ofcom can't touch them. There's no minimum age and the only age check is a box the user clicks. The companies built it that way because lonely teenagers with phones are the most reliable revenue source they've found. Hedgie🤗 telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05…

The UK is getting its own Sovereign Frontier AI Model! It is being trained on Isambard-AI and will run with no dependence on foreign infrastructure. The model, Lumen Sovereign, is being built by @CosineAI, one of the companies selected by the UK Government for its £500m Sovereign AI programme. The startup is working with leading big companies (such as Babcock, BT, Lloyds LSEG, NatWest Group, PwC) to help design it. Cosine was founded by @AlistairPullen and @yangli_ and its models have outperformed OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, and DeepSeek on independent coding benchmarks for two consecutive years. The model will be trained using compute provided by @UKSovereignAI! Amazing stuff @Jameswise, @SuzanneAshman, @KanishkaNarayan.

Helpful tool for improvement. It’s just physics thinking in the limit.

Thank you to the person who put my blog on their mailchimp newsletter. I have no idea who you are, but please do let me know so I can thank you for the referrals.

How a logical fallacy, weaponized for two centuries, is turning the planet into a digital Alcatraz.

iOS app releases are up about 80% since agentic AI coding tools became widely used. Over the same period, app reviews dropped and the share of apps with meaningful usage stayed flat. The tools made it cheap to build and submit software. They did not make it any easier to get people to download an app, keep using it, or leave a review. Those problems have nothing to do with how fast you can produce code, and AI did not touch them. The result is a flood of new releases that almost nobody uses. More apps are getting made and roughly the same number are finding an audience. Cheaper production raised the volume of output, not the amount of software people actually want.