History's first trillionaire is a guy who catches rockets out of the sky with chopsticks and beams internet to every dead zone on the planet. Same guy ships cars that drive themselves, humanoid robots for the factory floor, brain chips that let paralyzed people move a cursor with pure thought, and an AI running on a supercomputer his team stood up in months instead of years. And the people crashing out about his net worth are doing it on the app he owns. The same app governments spent years trying to censor. You cannot legislate a rocket into orbit.

I've watched a ton of people vibe code internal tooling only to realize: "I am now the admin for something that basically does the same thing as the software we used to use " And go back to using that software. It turns out 10% more customization isn't really worth it at all

*Scene 232, some time in 2025* APPLE: Can we release Siri AI? EC: Sure, if you want to get fined under the DMA APPLE: How can we comply with the DMA? EC: Give third-parties access to all the private data on Apple phones so that they can compete with you. APPLE: But we can't do that, it would invade our users' privacy, and it's a violation of our brand promise. EC: Then Siri AI won't be compliant with the DMA. APPLE: How about if we give them access to a "Trusted System Agent", middleware that would allow competing virtual assistants to safely access the same features and capabilities as Siri AI? EC: That's not equal access to everything you have access to, we want you to share everything, for free, that's what we think the DMA demands. APPLE: I'm not sure that's what the text says, are you sure we can't talk about this? We don't even know if that's technically possible. We designed Siri AI to work with our systems, our private cloud, and on-device processing, we don't know how to provide the same access to third-parties from the jump. It's going to take time. EC: That's fine, you can take your time, but if you launch in Europe we'll fine you. APPLE: Can we start with the Trusted System Agent, and then figure out how to give you everything you want, that is technically possible, and in a privacy preserving way, over the next 18 months? EC: Nope. EU law is non-negotiable. APPLE: Really? That sucks, we don't want to Abandon our European users. EC: That's Apple's decision, and Apple's only.

AI customer support is a security nightmare

The EU is soon to come

I’m making a show about buildings. The concept is simple: do for the man-made world what Planet Earth did for the natural world. But, when I pitched the idea, the answer was that nobody would watch it. So I released a pilot episode on YouTube. It’s got 5.4 million views, 379k likes, and 23k comments. People are interested, and now it’s time to make the full show. Six episodes, filming in the UK, France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and the USA, and releasing on a streaming service like HBO, Netflix, or Prime. Why does this show matter? First: we’re surrounded by buildings all the time. Look around yourself, right now… what do you see? Buildings are the logical conclusion of everything a society believes in. That’s the real focus of this show: not the buildings themselves, but what they say about us. Second: there’s global dissatisfaction with modern architecture. This feeling gets written about online, but nobody’s given a voice to it on film or TV. That’s what this show will be. But this isn’t just about criticising modernity. That’s easy. This is about learning from the past in order to understand and improve the present, for everybody. Third: there’s a drought of high-quality culture shows. When I spoke to film executives they said that only documentaries about sports, music, or true crime get funded. That’s a colossal missed opportunity. Galleries are always full, content about architecture goes viral online all the time, and people spend their precious holidays visiting beautiful cities. Why no shows about architecture, then? Tourists flock in their millions to see (for example) the buildings of Antoni Gaudí in Barcelona. But, if you asked those same people if they’re interested in “architecture”, they’d probably say no. To put that another way: not many people want to watch “a show about architecture”, but lots of people want to watch a show that illuminates the real world they’re living in, each and every day. What will the show be like? Six episodes, going chronologically through history and arriving at the present, each focussing on the architecture and design of a specific period: 1. Middle Ages 2. Renaissance 3. Enlightenment 4. The Nineteenth Century 5. Art Nouveau & Art Deco 6. Present Day But, in each case, the point isn’t just to learn about that era; the point is to learn about our modern world through those eras and what they’ve left behind. If you watch the pilot episode (included below) you’ll see what I mean. So the show’s not really “about” the past; it’s about the twenty-first century. That’s why it’s called The Modern World. When you think of a typical history show there are loads of interviews, stock footage, archive photos, historical recreations, and graphics. We’re doing none of that. Everything will be filmed on location, because we’re telling our story only through the real world that exists right now. And, rather than going to the most obvious places, we’ll focus on buildings that aren’t well-known but should be more famous. But that’s all big picture; what will it be like on screen? Buildings used to look different in every country, and now they look the same. Why? Because the weather is different everywhere, and buildings were always a way of dealing with that weather, using local materials. Now we have air conditioning and we ship concrete around the world, so we don’t need to design our buildings with regard to local weather or rely on local materials. Look at really old clocks and you’ll notice something: they don’t have a second hand… because it was only invented 300 years ago! Then you look at the present and you realise we’re surrounded by timers, by seconds ticking down and ticking up relentlessly. If we’re looking for a cause of our anxiety-inducing culture, that might be it. When you spend time with the sun-softened bricks and time-warped timbers of old cities you notice that synthetic materials like plastic have taken over. When we’re surrounded by things that feel temporary, how do you think it makes us feel? It’s only by seeing 19th century train stations, designed like cathedrals, that you realise tradition and technology aren’t enemies. New things don’t have to look boring: if the Victorians had designed AI data centres, they’d look like Medieval castles. In the 1920s, at the zenith of Art Deco, people believed technology would uplift humanity. That’s why they decorated their buildings with statues inspired by electricity. Only by seeing their enthusiasm can we realise our own cynicism, and perhaps begin to fix it. All of that… and much, much more. But, above all else, this show is about a way of seeing. If you want to understand any society then you need to look at what it creates, not what it says about itself. There’s a worldview in every single object; our skyscrapers are designed the same way as our phones. Learn to look at this world, to notice its details, and everything else starts to make sense. What now? I’ve been quiet online recently because I’ve been researching and working on scripts for six full-length episodes. Production begins when we’ve raised the funding. The Modern World is coming.

what if your operating system was rendered using AI?

Neat

“Wokeness was an inability to have any kind of open debate because the very existence of that debate seemed too much like conflict, and conflict had to be suppressed.”

ok actually insane paper published yesterday a research group in Korea built a gene switch you can control wirelessly using electromagnetic fields they exposed mice to 60 hz EMF (same frequency as your wall outlet) using a pair of large coils that generate a uniform magnetic field around the animal, for cyclic 3-day on / 4-day off pulses they showed this could: - activate OSK to do epigenetic reprogramming in progeroid and aged mice, extending lifespan and reversing aging markers across multiple tissues - conditionally switch on mutant amyloid genes only in aged mouse brains, letting them separate aging effects from amyloid effects to study AD biology in a way previous models couldn't no drugs, no impacts, just a magnetic field from outside the body

A crazy amount of cyberattacks targeting Western governments and multinational conglomerates, exfiltrating terabytes of data, have taken place since the start of 2026. It's become so widespread that media isn't paying attention anymore. But we should. ringmast4r.substack.com/p/we…

Have you ever wondered why rainbow flags are everywhere yet feel social life getting harsher and more punitive? There’s a concept that explains the contradiction. Herbert Marcuse, a popular Marxists philosopher, called it repressive tolerance.

Wild statistic

AI high agency = you’ll go far

Chloe woke up at 6:45am and immediately felt proud of herself. She had, after all, not eaten a single animal product in four years. The planet was healing. She could feel it. 6:52am - Applied her morning SPF. The SPF contains beeswax. Chloe does not know this. Moving on. 7:10am - Breakfast: a smoothie containing avocado. The avocado was grown in Michoacán, Mexico, on land where a pine forest was until 2019. It required approximately 320 litres of water to produce. It was flown to the UK. Chloe sprinkled hemp seeds on top. The hemp seeds came from China. Chloe felt connected to the earth. 8:00am - Got dressed. Polyester leggings, derived from crude oil. A bamboo top that was processed using carbon disulphide in a Taiwanese chemical plant. Trainers with a recycled plastic upper that sheds microplastics into waterways with every wash. Chloe's outfit today had a higher carbon footprint than a ribeye steak. Chloe does not know this either. 9:30am - Posted on Instagram about choosing compassion. The phone was manufactured in a Shenzhen factory using cobalt from the DRC, where mining operations have displaced local communities and killed an unknowable number of small mammals, reptiles, and insects. The algorithm served Chloe an ad for oat milk. Chloe liked it. 12:00pm - Lunch: tofu stir-fry. The soy was grown in Brazil. Brazil produces more soy than almost any country on earth. The primary reason is soybean oil: one of the most widely used industrial and culinary oils on the planet. The soymeal left over after oil extraction is fed to livestock as a byproduct. Chloe is aware of the livestock connection and finds it outrageous. She has not looked into why the soy was grown in the first place. The answer is the oil. The oil is in her salad dressing. 1:30pm - Drove to the garden centre. The car runs on petrol. Chloe has a Just Stop Oil sticker on the bumper. This is not being commented on further. 3:00pm - Bought a monstera. The monstera was grown in a Dutch greenhouse using natural gas heating. Chloe put it next to the pothos that is slowly poisoning the neighbourhood cats. 6:00pm - Dinner: pasta with cashew cream sauce. The cashews were processed in Vietnam, often by workers in conditions that would prompt significant commentary if they were in an abattoir. 8:00pm - Watched a documentary about factory farming. Wept. Posted about it. Caption: "We have to do better." Chloe is, by every measure she has chosen to measure by, doing brilliantly. By some of the others, the picture is more complicated. Chloe has not chosen to measure by those.

Back when I used to use Wikipedia, I often noticed the unmistakable slant of many, especially politics-adjacent, articles. Recently, however, in a rare moment of institutional accountability, a prolific pro-Islamist editor was banned sitewide. Many more of such interventions are needed if WP hopes to regain credibility among non-extreme left users.

McKinsey mentioned; time to sell

This is awesome lol