The Origins of Our Misguided Hatred for Pigeons
Perhaps the problem with those “rats with wings” lies with us, not them.
Scams upon scams: The data-driven advertising grift
Digital advertising is a scam from top to bottom. In fact, it’s several scams stacked on top of each other, wearing a trenchcoat, and some of the foundations of fibs are so effective that oth…
"VC qanon" and the radicalization of the tech tycoons - Anil Dash
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
The Man Who Broke Bowling
Jason Belmonte’s two-handed technique made him an outcast. Then it made him the greatest—and changed the sport forever.
New study finds an unstructured 5-minute break can help restore attention
Researchers from University of Sydney set out to discover which common attention hacks really work. They found a 5-minute break from thinking is all you need to get your concentration back. There is no ...
The First Year of AI College Ends in Ruin
There’s an arms race on campus, and professors are losing.
Discord, or the Death of Lore
I chose the life, it didn’t choose me. I could have walked away from it a long time ago, and I’ve certainly shifted my focus over the years. But I still hold the heft and halter, the on…
Wonky
An exploration of rhythm and grooves that break the rules
Gold bars and Google: The harebrained adtech heist that went spectacularly wrong
An employee at an advertising company exploited a loophole in its payment systems to steal $9 million — which he used to attempt to buy gold bars.
Sahil Bloom on Twitter
My wife and I recently started a monthly check-in ritual. It’s been incredible for our relationship. The Life Dinner:
Honestly, it's probably the phones - by Noah Smith
The most plausible explanation for teenage unhappiness.
The Teen Mental Illness Epidemic Began Around 2012
This is not just “Kids these days”
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The revenge of the pop-up
How did one of the most hated elements of web design make a comeback?
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How Google tried to fix the web — by taking it over
“Accelerated Mobile Pages” succeeded in speeding up publishers’ mistrust of the search giant.
We’re Knot Friends
It’s April Cools again. For a few summers in high school and undergrad, I was a day camp counselor. I’ve written before about how it helped me develop storytelling skills, but recently …
The Cause of Depression Is Probably Not What You Think | Quanta Magazine
Depression has often been blamed on low levels of serotonin in the brain. That answer is insufficient, but alternatives are coming into view and changing our understanding of the disease.
An eternally looping 7 day art broadcast.
Once all of KRILLER's 6300 audiovisual “cassettes” have been fabricated the project will settle into its final form: an eternally looping weeklong software art broadcast for all to freely enjoy.
Testing a new encrypted messaging app's extraordinary claims
How I breached a nonexistent database and found every private key in a 'state-of-the-art' encrypted messenger.
The Tinder car heist was a mess — and the revenge plot even messier
He swiped right, they swiped his car, and then, he tried to get even.
The Billion-Dollar Ponzi Scheme That Hooked Warren Buffett and the U.S. Treasury
How a small-town auto mechanic peddling a green-energy breakthrough pulled off a massive scam
The California Problem
greetings! this is a very long post about video games and capitalism. feel free to take breaks if you need them. make sure to stick around t...
Awesome Music Theory
An "awesome music theory" kinda wiki. Contribute to vpavlenko/study-music development by creating an account on GitHub.
Tag Systems
I’ve tried to write a blog post on tag systems for years now. Literally years, I think I first started drafting it out in 2018 or so? The problem is that...
Substack CEO Chris Best Doesn’t Realize He’s Just Become The Nazi Bar
I get it. I totally get it. Every tech dude comes along and has this thought: “hey, we’ll be the free speech social media site. We won’t do any moderation beyond what’s required.” Even Twitter init…
The Swipe Files Strategy for Part Time Creators
Swipe Files are underrated, passively compounding sources of personal leverage for your creator journey.
Tracking the Fake GitHub Star Black Market with Dagster, dbt and BigQuery | Dagster Blog
It's easy for an open-source project to buy fake GitHub stars. We share two approaches for detecting them.
Inside an Epic Hotel Room Hacking Spree
A vulnerability in hotel keycard locks was a security disaster—and the opportunity of a lifetime for one burglar.
Lavender's Game: Silexan For Anxiety
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My Recent Divorce, and/or Dior Homme Intense
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And then we went back to California, gave it another shot, and it didn’t work out, and my reality ruptured again, the foreignness returned. Even my own body was foreign, being that it was so strangely un-held and un-kissed.
It is always the moment just before death but sometimes it especially feels that way.
In May in Silverlake, the jasmine blooms enormous, and its thick glamorous treacliness, along with its armpitty undertones, cradle you while you saunter amongst the hot people and overpriced real estate. Guard dog urine and puffs of weed accompany the jasmine, and the sun sweeps clean through you, animating colors so vivid that your meagre awareness feels unable to hold it all, like it might spill over at any time.
Make Up a Guy - Charlie's Diary
These are never mistakes. The stakes are too high for that good faith first assumption of innocent error to hold up. The purpose of a system is what it does.