The New York Times: The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day of the Week Researchers at the Wharton School spent six years finding that the only personality trait that consistently predicts a leader’s objection to remote and hybrid work isn’t distrust of employees or a love of being around people — it’s narcissism. […]
links: 21.06.2026
LSM: Turning all of Pārdaugava into one big Victory Square? An interview with researcher Skaidrīte Lasmane Skaidrīte Lasmane — an emeritus professor, philosopher and historian at the University of Latvia — discusses the history of Riga’s Victory Square (Uzvaras laukums) and the grandiose construction planned under Kārlis Ulmanis, which was deliberately turned into a nationwide volunteer effort, a […]
links: 20.06.2026
PBS / PolitiFact: Comparing the mood of America’s 250th anniversary with its 200th in 1976 As the US approaches its 250th anniversary, historians compare the national mood with the bicentennial of 1976 and see eerie parallels — international conflict, high inflation and gas prices, culture wars and low presidential approval. The key difference: society is far more polarised […]
links: 19.06.2026
Wired: How the Peter Thiel-Linked Dialog Club Secretly Ranks Its Members WIRED has obtained internal data from Dialog, the private club co-founded by Peter Thiel — dossiers on nearly 200 prominent people, complete with home addresses, private phone numbers, dates of birth and even food allergies. It turns out the club secretly grades its members by wealth and […]
links: 18.06.2026
Wired: Silicon Valley’s Elite Financial Advisers Say This Era of Wealth Is Different WIRED talks to two wealth advisers serving Silicon Valley’s high-net-worth tech clients about how the new generation of tech millionaires handles its sudden fortune as SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic head toward liquidity events. The very scale of wealth has shifted — the average client is […]
links: 17.06.2026
NYT: The Cloud Has Sound: The Unrelenting and Unseen Cost of A.I. Data Centers The “heartbeat” of the AI economy is a low-frequency vibration produced by the giant cooling fans and diesel generators of data centers. The US already has more than 3,000 of them; some residents living nearby, whose health and homes are being wrecked by the […]
links: 16.06.2026
WIRED: Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth Admits the Company’s AI Reorg Was ‘Atrocious’ Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, in an internal memo to staff, admitted the company did an “atrocious” job rolling out its new artificial-intelligence division — after WIRED revealed widespread discontent inside the roughly 6,500-strong “Applied AI” unit (one worker called it “a gulag”). Bosworth promised more stability, […]
links: 15.06.2026
TechCrunch: The AI layoff wave is becoming a powder keg Last month the tech sector cut more jobs than in any month in two years — nearly 40,000 — and for the third month running AI was the most-cited reason. Yet a growing chorus argues AI is merely a convenient excuse, and the real cause is pandemic-era overhiring […]
links: 14.06.2026
LSM: President Čakste’s daughter who feigned insanity in Siberia for her children’s sake. The story of Maiga Šīrone’s self-sacrifice Pianist Maiga Šīrone, a daughter of Latvia’s first president Jānis Čakste, was deported to Siberia with her two children in 1941. Realising that her children could only be sent home if she herself were declared legally incapacitated, she deliberately […]
links: 13.06.2026
TechCrunch: Meta’s months-old AI unit is a soul-crushing gulag, say the engineers stuck inside it Meta’s newly formed Applied AI unit — roughly 6,500 employees “drafted” with no real choice — generates puzzles and coding problems to train models, and many call the work a “gulag” and soul-crushing. Wired reports simmering rage, including a livestreamed meltdown at a […]