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: 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: 11.06.2026
Le Monde: ‘The egalitarianism of hunter-gatherer societies has often been exaggerated’ An opinion piece on new anthropology research suggesting the egalitarianism of hunter-gatherer societies has often been exaggerated: resource sharing in them is driven not by innate altruism but by social pressure and the preservation of status, and human nature aspires more to autonomy and respect than to […]
Mythos light: Fable 5
Didzis sent me a message on Matrix about Anthropic releasing a new model that’s supposedly almost Mythos. I went to check. First TechCrunch — there it is! I open the company’s page — and there’s a banner: “Fable 5: Our most capable model yet”. I had been preparing for this moment for a long time — ever since […]