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Do something for yourself. L.A. burglaries. Caller plays harmonica. Greater works than God? Marilyn R Thrower on white neighborhood. More historical heroes.
Sylvia Turner, affectionately known to generations of Lafayette families as “Ms. T,” joins Discover Lafayette to reflect upon a remarkable life of teaching, music, faith, and service to others. For more than five decades, beginning in 1972, Sylvia taught children and adults to swim in the backyard pool of her Lafayette home. But anyone fortunate enough to have taken lessons from Ms. T knows she taught much more than swimming. She taught safety. She taught respect. She taught children to encourage one another, to follow rules, to appreciate their parents, and perhaps most importantly, to believe they could do things that initially frightened them. “One of my greatest compliments was when people would say, ‘You don't just teach swimming, do you?'” Sylvia recalls. “I said, ‘No, I don't. I teach everything I can while I can.'” Two Lives: Ms. T and Sylvia the Singer Many Lafayette residents knew Sylvia exclusively as Ms. T, the swim teacher who could spend long summer days in the pool working with one class after another. Others knew an entirely different Sylvia Turner, a classically trained singer whose musical life was intertwined with that of her late husband, John Turner. Sylvia grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, and came to Lafayette with John, who taught voice at UL for 34 years. Sylvia later received an opera scholarship, and the couple performed opera together as well as singing at university commencement ceremonies. She also became a fixture at the Order of Troubadours ball, serving as the opening soloist for “Make Believe” for 40 years. The separation between her two worlds occasionally created funny moments. Sylvia remembers singing at a commencement ceremony when a family approached her afterward, looking puzzled. “Ms. T, is that you? Did you sing?” “Yes,” she answered. “In the singing world, a lot of people didn't know that I taught swimming,” Sylvia says. “And then in the swimming world, a lot of people didn't know that I sang.” Sylvia Turner is an active member of Chorale Acadienne. She is pictured fourth from left in the photo. A Fear of Water Leads to a Lifetime in the Pool It is fitting that Sylvia ultimately devoted so much of her life to teaching people to be comfortable in the water, because she did not learn to swim herself until she was 11 years old. Her mother, Lucille, had nearly drowned at age 18. The experience was so traumatic that Sylvia grew up repeatedly hearing, “Don't go near the water.” Eventually, her mother enrolled her in Red Cross swimming lessons at a park pool. Sylvia loved the water immediately. At the end of the lessons, the instructor announced a swim meet. Sylvia entered, won a red ribbon for second place, and, as she puts it, “I was hooked.” Her mother began allowing her to spend time at the pool, where Sylvia became fascinated by a group of young men who were accomplished divers. She simply asked them if they would teach her. They did. Before long, Sylvia was diving from the three-meter board and later competed as a diver when she was 13 and 14 years old. Eventually, voice training began competing with diving for her attention, but her love of the water never disappeared. The Pool That Started It All Sylvia's path to becoming one of Lafayette's best-known swim instructors began with a frustrating afternoon at Riverside pool. Sylvia and her husband, John, were living in River's Bend with their three children when, on a beautiful sunny day, the lifeguard announced everyone had to leave the pool because he needed to take a test and there was no one qualified to substitute for him. Sylvia was not pleased. “I went home and I said to my husband, ‘You know, if I had a lifesaving badge, I could have gotten up on the stand and we could have kept the pool open.'” John's response was simple: go get it. Sylvia and a friend took a lifesaving class at Girard Park. At the conclusion of the course, the instructor assigned Sylvia two women from a mothers' swimming program to teach. “My ladies did beautifully,” she remembers. “And so I was further hooked.” As Sylvia and John prepared to build their new home, she began thinking about adding a swimming pool. The price gave her pause, particularly when they realized it would effectively double their house payment. Sylvia had an answer. “Oh, John, if I paid for it, could we do it?” How would she pay for it? “I could teach.” And that is exactly what she did. Sylvia began teaching swimming lessons in 1972. Her first student was a young man she met through the grocery store who was preparing to get married. His future wife could swim, he could not, and he did not want to be the person sitting on the beach while everyone else enjoyed the water. Sylvia taught him to swim. Years later, he returned with his children. It was the beginning of generations of Lafayette families learning from Ms, T. Safety Came First Before any child entered Sylvia's pool, there were rules. “Children like to know boundaries,” she says. Students first sat on the deck while Sylvia sat at their eye level and talked about safety. Then she walked them around the pool. Nothing was taken for granted. She showed them the skimmers. She explained the drain. She taught them what the various parts of the pool did and addressed fears children might be reluctant to express. That lesson came partly from the children themselves. One little boy looked across the pool at the dark opening of a skimmer and asked Sylvia, “Is that where you keep Jaws?” From that point forward, Sylvia opened the skimmers so the children could look inside. “I learned the children are great teachers,” she says. “I learned a lot from children.” Only after the rules and pool orientation were complete did everyone get into the water. Teaching Children to Respect One Another Ms. T in a photo taken by Jan Swift when she taught Kelly Swift, Jan’s daughter, to swim and dive….circa 2009. Sylvia's lessons were intentionally positive. “I had the children applaud each other all the time,” she says. “We applauded for everything. We didn't just applaud for excellence. We applauded for effort.” Criticism was not allowed unless it was constructive. Older swimmers were taught how to watch one another perform a stroke and offer feedback, beginning with something the swimmer had done well. Sylvia traces much of that philosophy to her mother, who was an exceptionally positive person, and to the instructor who taught Sylvia lifesaving at Girard Park. “She made you feel like you were the most special person in the world.” Sylvia wanted children in her pool to feel the same way. One experience still moves her. A little girl had missed the first day of lessons and joined the class on the second day. When it was her turn to get onto the diving board, she hesitated. Finally, she turned to Sylvia and asked, “Do they have to watch?” Before Sylvia could say anything, every child waiting nearby turned his or her back. “I can't tell that story without getting emotional,” Sylvia says. The children understood that their classmate needed to try something difficult without an audience. “A lot of times we have to do things without people watching.” “Are You the Boss of This Pool?” Boundaries mattered because safety mattered. During one family swim, a visiting child began running around the pool and jumping too close to other swimmers. Sylvia called him over and explained that the pool had rules. The boy looked at her and asked, “Are you the boss of this pool?” “Yes, I am.” “Oh.” That was the end of the problem. “Children want to know who's in charge,” Sylvia says. “And they want somebody to be in charge.” Those lessons stayed with her students long after class ended. One mother called Sylvia after taking her children to another pool. Her four-year-old son Nicholas noticed another little boy breaking pool safety rules and corrected him. The boy replied that his daddy owned the pool and he could do anything he wanted. He added that he took swimming lessons. Nicholas had an answer: “Well, obviously you don't take from Ms. T because you don't know the rules.” Relaxation and Rhythm For Sylvia, learning to swim rested on two fundamental principles. “The two most important things in swimming are relaxation and rhythm.” Relaxation came first. A tense body does not float well. Students learned to float before progressing incrementally through kicking, strokes, diving and more advanced skills. “You do it by stages,” Sylvia says. “And that's how you learn anything really, by little increments.” The same principle applied to diving. Sylvia never forced a frightened child from the diving board. Students progressed from a knee dive close to the water, to a falling dive, then standing, springing, and eventually diving from the board. Her goal was not simply for a child to acquire a skill. The child needed confidence in that skill. “If you have a skill without confidence, it's not really productive.” Teaching Adults and Overcoming Fear Although Ms, T is best remembered for teaching children, Sylvia loved teaching adults, particularly because, as she says, “They always have baggage.” Some carried a fear of water for decades. She taught men, women and couples, including two women who were 71 years old. But no adult student meant more to Sylvia than her own mother. Lucille's near drowning at age 18 had shaped Sylvia's childhood and her mother's lifelong relationship with water. Then, on her 70th birthday, Lucille surprised Sylvia by announcing a goal for the coming year. “I've decided I'm going to learn to swim.” Sylvia was stunned. Her mother continued: “I've decided that if anybody can teach me, it's you.” Sylvia responded, “Well, you'll never have to give me another compliment in your whole life.” Lucille was unable to make the trip to Lafayette that year, but the following year she came and took lessons from her daughter. By the end of the week, she could swim across the pool without assistance. Sylvia later asked whether she had finally lost her fear. Her mother answered, “I don't know, but I loved being in the water.” Sylvia thought that was enough. Of all the adults she taught, she describes teaching her mother as perhaps the most gratifying experience of all. Generations of Lafayette Families Sylvia never kept count of how many people she taught during her decades in the pool, particularly because so many students returned year after year and eventually brought another generation back with them. Her classes grew largely through word of mouth. Her youngest daughter attended Broadmoor Elementary, where Sylvia was heavily involved in the PTA. The principal, himself the father of seven children whom Sylvia eventually taught along with his wife, allowed her to distribute information about her lessons through the school. “And then word spread.” For younger children, particularly three and four year olds, Sylvia limited classes to six students and had another adult in the water with her. Older, accomplished swimmers could be taught in somewhat larger groups. Sylvia also encouraged parents to observe lessons so they understood what their children were learning and could reinforce those lessons away from the pool. The lessons often carried into everyday family life: respect your parents, appreciate what they do for you, respect other people, encourage others, follow the rules, and understand that safety is never something to take casually. The Teacher Who Never Taught School When asked how she defines herself after a lifetime encompassing swimming, opera, church music, family and community, Sylvia returns to teaching. “Every teacher I ever had told me that I was destined to be a teacher.” Yet she never became a traditional classroom teacher. “I taught Sunday school. I taught junior choir. I taught swimming. I'm an inveterate teacher.” She also remains a singer, grounded in the classical and religious music that has been part of her life since childhood. Sylvia grew up in the church. Her mother sang in the choir, her father was a deacon, and Sylvia herself began singing in choir at age 12. Faith remained a constant through the joyful times and the difficult ones. And that may help explain the extraordinary positivity so many people associate with Ms. T. Asked how she manages to remain positive, Sylvia acknowledges that it requires intention. “You have to work at it, I think, because it's easy to be negative.” Even in the hardest times, she says, there is something to hold onto. “Even in those darkest days, you have to find something. And gratitude is part of it.” Sylvia looks back on her life with gratitude for the people, experiences and opportunities she has been given, while acknowledging that her life has included hardship like anyone else's. “I've had some hard knocks, as everybody does during my life. I'm here to say that I overcame them.” Then she adds the foundation beneath it all: “With the help of my Lord.” For generations of Lafayette families, Ms. T will always be the woman who taught their children to swim. But her legacy reaches well beyond the pool. She taught children to be safe without being afraid, to respect rules and one another, to applaud effort rather than simply excellence, and to gain confidence one small step at a time. And she taught it all while making each child feel that, at that moment, they mattered.
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Original Air Date: 8/1/2026 Episode Number: 470Episode SummaryThree topics this week. Dan opens with a paint science segment answering a listener question about urethane and enamel -- two words that appear constantly on paint labels and mean different things than most people assume. Then a full two-segment deep dive on moss and lichen: first, how to safely remove them from different types of siding, and then a step-by-step walkthrough of how Dan cleaned his own roof, what products he used, and what the warnings are. He closes with a quick listener question about painting over old glossy trim in a pre-1978 home.Timestamps[00:00] -- Show Intro and Promises[02:28] -- Paint Science: Urethane vs. Enamel[07:38] -- Choosing the Right Paint[09:56] -- Moss and Lichen Overview[10:35] -- Siding Segment Setup[11:06] -- What Moss and Lichen Are[12:43] -- Cleaning Brick and Masonry[15:09] -- Cleaning Wood Safely[16:56] -- Vinyl, Stucco, and Pressure Tips[18:27] -- Protecting Plants[19:22] -- Roof Segment Begins[20:02] -- Why Remove Roof Growth[20:14] -- Roof Damage Explained[21:52] -- Dan's Roof Wake-Up Call[23:48] -- Kill It, Don't Scrape It[24:12] -- Hire Out or DIY?[25:03] -- Best Cleaners Compared[29:20] -- Prep and Protect Plants[30:53] -- Rinse, Brush, and Apply[33:58] -- Results and Safety Warnings[36:41] -- Listener Q: Glossy Trim[37:57] -- Lead, Adhesion, and Primer[39:40] -- Wrap UpUrethane vs. Enamel: A Plain-English Explanation [02:28]A listener wrote in puzzled by the word urethane showing up everywhere -- waterborne urethanes, urethane-modified acrylics, polyurethanes -- and wanted to know whether it means something specific or just marketing. He also asked which is more durable, urethane or enamel, and which he should be reaching for.The short answer: urethane and enamel are not competing terms. They describe different things entirely.Paint basics. Every can contains pigment (color and hiding), liquid (what lets you apply it), and resin -- the binder. As paint dries and the liquid leaves, the resin and pigment form the paint film. The resin has enormous influence over how the finished coating behaves: hardness, flexibility, adhesion, resistance to moisture, cleaning, and abrasion.What urethane means. Urethane isn't an extra scoop of durability added to the can. It's a type of chemical connection that can be built into the resin structure itself. When a resin contains many of those connections, it's called a polyurethane. That chemistry is associated with toughness, abrasion resistance, and resistance to cleaners -- which is why you see the word on products for cabinets, doors, railings, and floors.What enamel means. Traditionally, enamel meant an oil-based product with a hard, smooth, glossy finish -- the go-to for doors, trim, and metal. Today it's used more broadly. You can buy acrylic enamels, waterborne enamels, and urethane enamels. An enamel can absolutely use urethane chemistry. They're not opposites.The analogy. Asking which is more durable, a urethane or an enamel, is like asking whether a pickup truck is better than a diesel engine. One describes the vehicle type. The other describes the technology inside. You can have a diesel pickup, just like you can have a urethane enamel.The practical takeaway. For an ordinary bedroom wall, don't hunt for urethane -- just get good washability and the right sheen. For cabinets, doors, or railings, an enamel built for those surfaces makes sense, and it may well use urethane chemistry. For a wood floor, get a polyurethane specifically designed for foot traffic. For exterior siding, hardness isn't even the main priority -- flexibility, adhesion, and weather resistance matter more. The product's intended use matters more than the words on the label. Stop into any RepcoLite, tell them what you're painting and what kind of abuse it'll take, and they'll sort it out.Moss vs. Lichen: What You're Actually Looking At [11:06]Before cleaning anything, it helps to know what you're dealing with, because moss and lichen behave differently from the algae and mildew covered last week -- and they have to be handled differently as a result.Moss is the green fuzzy stuff -- little soft pillows of growth, kinda charming, definitely not good for your house or roof. It grips whatever it's growing on and holds moisture against the surface.Lichen is stranger and tougher. It looks almost painted or glued on -- flat, crusty patches or small leafy, ruffled growths. It can be gray-green, orange, chalky white. Lichen is actually two organisms living together: a fungus that builds the structure and grips the surface, and an algae that makes the food. Together they can live almost anywhere and attach with a grip that's very hard to break. That's the core reason they need their own conversation -- algae and mildew are essentially films sitting on the surface. Moss and lichen are anchored into the surface, into the pores of brick, the grain of wood, down into mortar. Removing them incorrectly can cause more damage than leaving them.Cleaning Moss and Lichen Off Siding [12:43]Brick and masonry. Gently knock off the thickest mounded moss first -- but gently is the word. Plastic scraper, wooden edge, or a stiff-but-not-metal brush. No wire brushes on brick, especially older or softer brick. Nothing mounted on a power tool. Working through the harder outer face of the brick exposes the softer material underneath, which holds moisture longer and becomes even more vulnerable to freeze-thaw damage. You can create next year's problem while cleaning up this year's.After removing loose material, treat remaining moss and lichen with a cleaner labeled for both the growth type and the surface. Wet & Forget is a popular spray-and-leave option -- apply it, leave it alone, and rain carries away the dead material over weeks or months. Make sure whatever you use is designed to kill moss and lichen, not just clean the surface.Wood. Be careful with straight chlorine bleach on bare or weathered wood -- it breaks down lignin, the natural binder in the wood fibers, and can leave cedar blotchy and damaged in ways that don't reverse. Sodium percarbonate (oxygenated bleach -- essentially OxiClean) is gentler on wood and on nearby plants. Soft brush, go with the grain, low pressure, no wire brush.Vinyl and aluminum. More forgiving -- growth doesn't anchor as deep on non-porous surfaces. Soft nylon brush or cloth with a cleaner labeled for that siding type, let it sit, gentle scrub, rinse. Don't spray upward under the laps.Fiber cement. Check the manufacturer's guidance. Keep it gentle and low pressure.Stucco and EIFS. Porous and on the brittle side -- soft wash, right cleaner, low pressure. Older synthetic stucco (EIFS) is especially risky; aggressive washing can force water behind cracks and joints. If the surface is already cracked or failing, call a professional.Plants. Wet down all landscaping before starting. Cover sensitive plants with light plastic, but get it off quickly -- they'll cook under it. Rinse everything again when you're done.Why You Can't Leave Roof Moss and Lichen Alone [20:02]Moss growing thicker around the edges of shingles interferes with drainage and can cause shingles to lift or deteriorate -- creating openings for water to get in. That alone is a good enough reason to deal with it.Lichen is worse on a roof than on siding because it attaches directly to the protective granules on the shingles and can cause irreversible damage as it grips and eventually pulls them loose. There's also a curb appeal issue: moss and lichen-covered roofs read as neglected or failing, whether or not that's actually true.Dan put off dealing with his own roof growth for a couple of years, telling himself it wasn't a big deal. A roofer from Sheriff Goslin Roofing -- who came out to assess the roof's lifespan -- pointed out that the moss and lichen were actively taking years off the roof by pulling granules and giving moisture more places to work. That's what finally prompted action.Hire Out or DIY? [24:12]Before getting into the process, Dan makes the case for hiring it out -- because for a lot of people, that's the right answer. There are companies that specialize in roof and exterior cleaning. If the roof is steep, high, difficult to access, or if heights aren't your thing, hiring a professional is absolutely the right call. A fall is a lot worse than a moss problem.If you're still planning to do it yourself, read on.Cleaner Options for Moss and Lichen on Roofs [25:03]Wet & Forget. Apply per label directions and leave it. The treatment kills growth over time, and rain carries the dead material away over the following weeks and months. No rinsing, no aggressive follow-up. Depending on your roof pitch and setup, you may be able to apply most of it from a ladder or even the ground -- though you have to be very careful not to force water up under shingles at the wrong angle. Dan's roofer confirmed his customers have had good results with it.Oxygenated bleach / sodium percarbonate (essentially OxiClean). This is what Dan used. Mix approximately one pound of oxygenated bleach per two gallons of water. Apply with a pump-up garden sprayer. This is gentler on plants and on...
Justin throws a four-pack of ObservFours at Dan: football concerns, basketball predictions, favorite trivia topics and ice cream treats. Topics for this episode include:* important Grubserver information* Dan promises a Who's Older supercut* lingering questions about Auburn's 2026 roster and schedule* caveats and disclaimers galore* positions where Auburn is practically starting over* good news and bad news about Byrum Brown* everything's coming up Mantas* another Ella Langley Billboard update* The Guys list some of their esoteric interests* a bombshell from Dan during the sweet treat chatYou can cast your votes for this year's Grubserver Awards by using the button below or clicking this link.If you're receiving this free podcast episode and would like to upgrade to a paid subscription that gives you access to all stories and premium podcast episodes, subscribe using the button below or clicking this link.Follow Dan (@dnpck) and Justin (@JFergusonAU) on Twitter. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.auburnobserver.com/subscribe
Send us Fan MailAging gracefully isn't limited to what we see on the outside. Older adults are better at setting boundaries, have more freedom and emotional intelligence and fewer stressors, plus they're able to focus on what's truly meaningful. Gayle Ayers, D.O., is a geriatric psychiatrist with Texas Tech Physicians and also is with the TTUHSC Garrison Institute in Aging Memory Clinic. She clarifies for us some misconceptions we might have about aging and older adults and how that contributes to agism, tells us the benefits of growing older and therefore wiser, and reminds us that we are all going to age, so we should just embrace it.Previous episode with Dr. Ayers:How Social Isolation Affects Older Adults
In the years since the pandemic, many of us have found ourselves deeply fatigued- not only physically and emotionally, but spiritually. The wellness world that once felt hopeful has become crowded with endless advice, conflicting opinions, and relentless marketing, leaving many people questioning who and what they can trust. As wellness has become increasingly commodified, it has also become harder to distinguish between what is truly nourishing and what simply captures our attention. Many are stepping back from the noise, longing for a slower, more grounded relationship with health. And yet, the desire to feel well has not disappeared. If anything, it has become more sincere. If you've ever felt disillusioned by wellness culture but still deeply long to be well, this one's for you. An off-the-cuff solo episode, I share musings on our collective loss of trust in the wellness industry, where that leaves me as the host of this podcast, and what has remained steady and true for me in the midst of ever-collapsing paradigms. Tell me your thoughts on Substack Girls trip this November Mythic Medicine herb shop
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RAVING RITUAL - 07.27.2026 - #961 BestPodcastintheMetaverse.com Canary Cry News Talk #961 - 07.27.2026 - Recorded Live to 1s and 0s Deconstructing World Events from a Biblical Worldview Declaring Jesus as Lord amidst the Fifth Generation War! CageRattlerCoffee.com SD/TC email Ike for discount https://CanaryCry.Support Send address and shirt size updates to canarycrysupplydrop@gmail.com Join the Canary Cry Roundtable This Episode was Produced By: Executive Producers Sir LX Protocol Baron of the Berrean Protocol*** Dame Madelyn*** Christine S*** Dame Sarah of the Shadows*** Tabitha K*** Producers of TREASURE (CanaryCry.Support) William M, Parker N, Nicole C, Rebecca T, Monica K, Patrick M, Cage Rattler Coffee Producers of TIME Timestampers: Jade Bouncerson, Morgan E Clankoniphius Links: JAM SIR IKE MEGA BOX GIVEAWAY - Rating/Review, screenshot, send to Sir Ike CanaryCrySupplyDrop@gmail.com SEWER SURVEILLANCE 7:46 Missouri Education Mandatory Sewer Surveillance BEAST SYSTEM 26:58 Selective Service System wants to wargame the draft (Military Times) Trailer for "Who Blew Up the Guidestones? (Apple podcasts) (texted from 678) EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS 47:59 RE-ENCHANTMENT/WOMEN RULE 1:40:32 Older women and the "Ceremony" of Raving (Guardian) TRAINS 2:15:23 This train is making grown men cry (WSJ) TRUMP 2:23:31 Clip: Trump on magnets Clip: Trump 2028 trolling MSM Trump saves George Washington with time travel AI posting spree (Indy UK) → Trump with JFK AI image → Trump, more images with AI END 3:04:28
Topics covered in this episode: Some more things about Django I've been enjoying Who cleans up after the vibe-coding party? Where Did All Your AI Tokens Go? AgentsView to the rescue! Careful with phishing all Extras Joke Watch on YouTube About the show Sponsored by us! Support our work through: Our courses at Talk Python Consulting from Six Feet Up Connect with the hosts Michael: Mastodon / BlueSky / X / LinkedIn Calvin: Mastodon / BlueSky / X / LinkedIn Show: Mastodon / BlueSky / X Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Tuesday at 7am PT. Older video versions available there too. Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to our friends of the show list, we'll never share it. Calvin #1: Some more things about Django I've been enjoying Julia Evans is learning "2010-style" web dev (Django + SQL + server-rendered HTML) after years of Go backends and JS-heavy frontends Query builders: likes defining custom QuerySet classes with chainable filter methods (.approved().future().with_tags()) — more readable than raw SQL Template filters: highlights urlize, linebreaksbr, json_script, and especially querystring for building/modifying query-string links in templates Migrations: still loves Django's auto-generated migrations — 19 and counting on her project Skips inheritance for class-based views; prefers function-based views for sharing code, though fine using Django's own mixins/interfaces Performance surprise: CPU profiling (via py-spy) — not slow DB queries — revealed the culprit; she'd accidentally disabled the cached template loader, and re-enabling it took throughput from ~2-3 req/s to ~12 req/s on a $10/mo VM Michael #2: Who cleans up after the vibe-coding party? FT Magazine piece by Sam Learner (July 11) on AI coding tools overwhelming open source maintainers - sent in by listener Dylan McConnell, whose main point was that this ran in the Financial Times, not a dev blog. cURL as the case study - Daniel Stenberg has been the only full-time person on it for years; libcurl has been installed an estimated 20+ billion times with 3,000+ listed contributors. Bug bounty killed - cURL ended its paid security bounty program in January, citing an "explosion of AI slop reports" that take real time to debunk and drain morale. Extractive contributions - authoring a PR is now nearly free, reviewing one still costs a human; tldraw's Steve Ruiz closed outside contributions entirely, asking why he'd want someone else writing the easy part. Guido weighs in - van Rossum says projects are holding emergency meetings over the slop flow, and notes LLM patches tend to touch unrelated parts of a file, making review more tedious. "Vibe Coding Kills Open Source" - paper from Miklós Koren's group: packages frequently recommended by coding models saw big download jumps with no matching engagement, breaking the reputation loop that sustains maintainers. Stack Overflow flatlined - over 100,000 questions a month before ChatGPT, under 1,500 last month, with the response rate cut roughly in half; the public archive is now stale training data. The course-creator angle - Josh Comeau's newest web dev course launched at about a third of prior enrollment, and he worries about devs who never learn which questions to ask. But the most interesting portion is what was omitted. Focused on: The end of the curl bug-bounty Omitted: High-Quality Chaos Why the omission is interesting It fits a narrative. The FT piece is a maintenance-and-decline story, and January-Stenberg is a perfect witness for it. April-Stenberg complicates it - same person, same project, better data, opposite direction on the specific claim being used. The tell is already in the article. Learner quotes Stenberg saying AI tools are much better at finding problems than fixing them. That's the April thesis in one line, and it goes undeveloped. Reason for the shift is process, not vibes. Killing the bounty removed the cash incentive and the venue change filtered the rest. Worth saying out loud, because "AI reports got better" isn't quite it - "no bounty plus a real triage platform" is closer. Joke too: Sarah O'Connor wrote a related piece (is this just before skynet launches?) Calvin #3: Where Did All Your AI Tokens Go? AgentsView to the rescue! Local-first desktop/web app for browsing, searching, and analyzing your past AI coding agent sessions (Claude Code, Codex, Copilot, Cursor, Gemini, Aider, and dozens more) Auto-discovers session files on your machine — no config needed; everything stored locally in SQLite, no cloud/accounts agentsview usage is a drop-in ccusage alternative — reads from pre-indexed SQLite, reports run 80–220× faster on large histories New Activity dashboard shows peak concurrency, active vs. idle time, agent-minutes, and cost — filterable by project/agent/machine, with a -json CLI report too Full-text + optional semantic search across every session; also imports Claude.ai/ChatGPT chat exports Install via pip install agentsview, uvx agentsview, brew install --cask agentsview, or download desktop binaries from GitHub Releases Michael #4: Careful with phishing all The situation I pass this along because it was a pretty sneaky bit of targeted phishing, and happened to play off an old interaction in bandit's repo. As usual with phishing scams there are a bunch of tells that this isn't legitimate, but just enough plausibility that I could see falling for it in a weak moment. Relative nobodies like me haven't historically been worth the effort to hit with scams this specific. Agents change the game though :-/. Be careful out there folks! Original message From: "Patrick (Blacktrace)" [HTML_REMOVED] To: LISTENER EMAIL Subject: Your Bandit #1350 (B105 NextToken false positive) -- just fixed that exact case Date: Wednesday, July 15, 2026 12:02 AM Hi AJ, Saw your Bandit issue #1350 -- the B105 hardcoded-password false positive on the string NextToken. I build a deterministic gate that filters that class of Bandit noise, and #1350 was literally the case I just fixed: NextToken / next_token / page_token / nextPageToken now stay quiet, while a genuine hardcoded token like api_token="sk-live-..." still fires. Verified against your exact case. 30-second paste: https://blacktrace.co/noise-eraser Where it still trips, published: https://blacktrace.co/kruc Curious whether it clears what you hit -- and if it trips on something of yours, that's the more useful reply. Patrick, Blacktrace I asked Claude for some analysis too. It was pretty good at finding them. The message name-drops enough real detail to feel legit, but the structure is pure phishing - everything in it exists to get AJ onto blacktrace.co. The strongest ones: Freemail sender, corporate signoff. Signs as "Patrick, Blacktrace" but sends from emailpjv@gmail.com. Real company outreach comes from the company domain, not a personal Gmail - and there's no last name. Over-specific targeting. It mirrors AJ's exact public activity - issue #1350, the B105 rule, the NextToken false positive, even the token variants. That's the "just enough plausibility" AJ flagged, and it's exactly what agents make cheap: scrape a GitHub issue, auto-generate tailored bait. Legit cold outreach rarely reads your history back to you this precisely. The entire payload is two links. Strip the technical flattery and the message is just "paste here" plus "see results here." When the whole point of an email is the click, that's the tell. "30-second paste." Low-friction urgency, and "paste" most likely means paste your source into their tool - handing your code to a stranger's site. Exfiltration dressed as convenience. Brand-new, no-reputation domain. blacktrace.co has no track record, and the name is doing some ominous work. The /kruc slug is random noise, not how real product pages get named. Precise-sounding jargon that's actually vague. "Deterministic gate," "noise-eraser" - impressive, empty. Bolted onto correct real details (B105 is the Bandit hardcoded-password test, sk-live- is a Stripe live-key prefix) to borrow credibility. The disarming close. "if it trips on something of yours, that's the more useful reply" - engineered humility that flatters your expertise and baits a response. Makes engaging feel like you're doing them a favor, which drops your guard. Extras Calvin: DjangoCon US 2026 is rapidly approaching, August 24-28, Chicago Ruff v0.16.0 massively expands its default rule set Ruff now enables 413 rules by default, up from 59 https://astral.sh/blog/ruff-v0.16.0 Michael: Completely redesigned the home page. Try /insights in Claude Code (terminal) Joke: We're Safe
PODCAST EPISODE | An Analog Brain In A Digital Age With Marco Ciappelli Fifteen years ago, Rose Ross brought a client an idea for an awards program built specifically for enterprise tech startups. The client passed. She built it herself — and the Tech Trailblazers have been running ever since, independent, judged by practitioners, and open for entries until 3 September.
In today's interview, Spencer Dalke talks with Charissa Garcia, editorial assistant at WORLD Digital, about the challenges facing Christian singles in today's “dating recession” and the often-overlooked role the church can play in helping people pursue marriage and meaningful relationships. Drawing from her own experiences and conversations with other young adults, Garcia explores how social media, risk aversion, unrealistic expectations, and shifting cultural norms have made dating more difficult for many Christians. She argues that while there is no shortage of potential spouses, many young adults lack practical guidance on navigating relationships, taking healthy risks, and building connections within the church. The conversation also highlights the important role older believers can play by mentoring, encouraging, and creating opportunities for fellowship, while challenging singles to engage more intentionally in the life of the church. Ultimately, Garcia offers a hopeful vision of intergenerational community, where wisdom, friendship, and mutual care help believers flourish whether they are single, dating, married, or discerning God's calling for the future. Featured work: “Singles in the Church need help” Connect with Charissa Garcia on LinkedIn and Instagram. For more faith-filled, Gospel-centered content, download the Pilgrim Radio app today on Google Play and Apple, or stream at PilgrimRadio.com.
Neurosis's Steve Von Till reveals how the band secretly rebuilt itself, creating a career-defining album and making future plans for the Neurosis victory-lap that few thought possible. Topics Include: The Secret recording of An Undying Love for a Burning World Neurosis walked away seven years ago under uncertain circumstances Four remaining members reunited quietly at end of 2024 Aaron Turner brought in to help complete the musical puzzle Reunion tied to Firekeeper Alliance, a suicide-prevention nonprofit Heavy music framed as protective factor for indigenous mental health Steve reflects on tribal rhythms and humanity's forgotten earth connection Band knew instantly the new material had to be Neurosis Reunion forced confrontation with ego, identity, and aging as musicians Firekeeper Alliance's Fire in the Mountains offer pushed them forward Album written and recorded in secret across three studio sessions Secrecy maintained even among close friends touring together in Australia Fan reaction described as unexpectedly emotional, healing, and hope-filled Steve discusses reduced stigma around vulnerability in heavy music today Vinyl pressing strategy explained: budget-driven first run, quick sellout Running Neurot Recordings on a teacher's salary, tight cash flow Multiple color variants pressed across regional distributors and mail orders Debate over black vs. clear vinyl sound quality explored Steve's approach to buying vinyl: music over pressing obsession Talk turns to Melvins, Hazel Meyer, and DIY label camaraderie Where the line sits between fan service and variant exploitation Vinyl side-length considerations shaped decision to make a double LP Aaron Turner's artwork process detailed, sketched live in the studio Album title changed at the last minute, forcing new artwork Neurosis' visual style rooted in myth, symbolism, and Jungian archetypes Older catalog rights partly held by Relapse and other labels Steve wants a "forever version" repress of the band's earliest albums Original master tapes and artwork found corrupted or lost to time Talk closes on solo tour plans and hopes for Australia High resolution version of this podcast is available at: www.Patreon.com/VinylGuide Apple: https://tinyurl.com/tvg-ios Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/tvg-spot Amazon Music: https://tinyurl.com/tvg-amazon Support the show at Patreon.com/VinylGuide
Welcome to Catholic Apologetics, led by Dr. Jim Dobbins, Author of Take My Hand: A Personal Retreat Companion. Just finished an RCIA program? This is the next stop on your faith journey. In these classes, we look at the different truths of Catholic doctrine and why we know they are true. We also discuss apologetics, spiritual growth, examine the liturgy of the Catholic Mass, and do scripture studies. Please encourage your friends to listen. I also encourage you to leave a comment about our podcasts. If you want the slides or any other documents for any class, just e-mail me at jhdphd@gmail.com and I will reply with the documents attached. If you wish, I will also add you to the class materials distribution list so that each time I send anything out for the class you will get it. If you are getting the podcast files from iTunes and would like to see the full set of available classes for download, you can see and download them all at http://yorked.podomatic.com. Older podcasts are now stored at a free podcast site at Podcast.com. The link to the podcasts there is: http://poddirectory.com/podcast/86506/dr-james-dobbins-catholic-apologetics We ask you to also consider going to http://yorked.podomatic.com and becoming a subscriber. It is free, helps our ratings, and thus helps us reach and help more people. This session is part of our second discussion series of the Gospel of Matthew. Please also let me know if there is a particular topic you would like to see addressed. skvEapm1rLLW8foJsII1
In this episode of The First Day from The Fund Raising School, Bill Stanczykiewicz, Ed.D., welcomes back Rick Dunham, founder and chairman of Dunham & Company, to unpack the firm's latest annual survey of donors. One of the biggest findings is a disconnect between donors' personal finances and their perceptions of the broader economy. Donors reported feeling less financially stressed personally, yet more pessimistic about economic conditions, and roughly 25% said that pessimism could cause them to reduce their giving. Rick's advice to fundraisers is not to pretend those concerns do not exist, but to meet donors with empathy while keeping the “why” front and center. Show what a gift makes possible, tell stories that demonstrate real impact, and maintain a steady cadence of communication. In uncertain times, donors need to know that nonprofit leaders understand the world they are living in, and that their generosity still matters. The conversation then turns to a fundraising tool that apparently refuses to retire: direct mail. Despite occasional declarations that the mailbox belongs somewhere between the rotary phone and the fax machine, more than 80% of donors say they respond to direct mail. Even more striking, 93% of Gen Z donors report responding to it, and 80% say they would like to receive monthly mail from organizations they support. Rick calls this the “mailbox advantage”: while digital inboxes are overflowing, the physical mailbox is often far less crowded. But the real lesson is that direct mail and digital giving are not competing channels. Nearly half of donors who receive direct mail prefer to complete their gift online, compared with about 20% who respond through the mail itself. Rick shares one client example in which online revenue tied indirectly to mailed appeals was consistently two to two-and-a-half times the revenue returned through the mail. The warning for fundraisers is clear: measure the whole donor journey, or you may dramatically underestimate what your direct mail program is actually producing. That donor journey has to work once someone reaches the website, too. One in five donors said they have abandoned an online donation because the process was too difficult. Older donors tend to worry more about security, while younger donors place a premium on simplicity, so nonprofits need both a seamless giving experience and visible signals that transactions are secure. Bill and Rick also emphasize that a website should do more than provide information; it should make a compelling case for support. Donors frequently cite an organization's website as a major influence on their decision to give online, and person-to-person requests remain an important driver of digital donations as well. Dunham & Company included non-donors in the survey for the first time and found a notably higher level of distrust toward charities among that group. Rick recommends building trust through impact stories, financial transparency, board visibility, and especially donor testimonials; letting current supporters explain why they believe the organization is worthy of support. Bill and Rick close by looking at two areas with major implications for the future: tax policy and Gen Z. Many donors remain unaware of newer charitable tax provisions, including the Universal Charitable Deduction, even though Rick notes that about 67% of donors likely take the standard deduction. That creates an opportunity for nonprofits to educate supporters through receipts, newsletters, and simple “did you know?” messages. Meanwhile, Gen Z continues to challenge assumptions about younger donors. Rick points to survey data showing that 40% of Gen Z respondents attend religious services almost every week, and he connects that engagement with charitable behavior. The takeaway for fundraisers is to keep one eye on the coming transfer of wealth while refusing to ignore the donors already coming up behind it.
Spiritual Amnesia: Remembering God's Faithfulness That Fuels Praise Sam Choi Download I want to say the saints of All Peoples Church greet you. We were sent out eight years ago from Cities Church, and it's a joy to serve you this morning. We're going to be going through all of Psalm 105. There's 45 verses, and so we're going to pick it apart in chunks instead of me reading the whole passage at one time. I want to start off with Psalm 105:1-5, and I want to invite you to have your Bibles out if you have a paper Bible. If not, use your phones. We're going to go through the text together.Most of you don't know me. That's okay, but I love you, and I've been praying that the Lord would give me a heart to see you as my people, even though you're not my people. That He would give me a heart to feel towards you what He feels towards you, and that I would be faithful to serve you this morning. I'm grateful for my family to be here. Just want to honor them. They're sitting there, and I love them, and I love to do life with them. So we're in Psalm 105:1-5.And if you have an ESV Bible, or you can click on it in your phones, would you read this out loud with me?Psalm 105:1-5, “Oh give thanks to the Lord; call upon his name; make known his deeds among the peoples!2 Sing to him, sing praises to him; tell of all his wondrous works!3 Glory in his holy name; let the hearts of those who seek the Lord rejoice!4 Seek the Lord and his strength; seek his presence continually!5 Remember the wondrous works that he has done, his miracles, and the judgments he uttered.”Psalms like this have been historically hard for me because it's calling me to do that which I don't feel like often doing. What do you do when the psalmist calls you to praise God, remember His works, and tell of His wondrous works, and seek His face and His presence continually, and you're like, “But I don't feel like it”?Have you ever been in that situation where you got a worship leader, a very peppy worship leader, he's like, “Come on, God's people, let's praise the Lord.” And you're like, “I don't want to.”And so you're in a dilemma. What do you do? Do you fake it? Some of you know how to fake it, like you know the right things to do. E minor plays, you put your hands up because it's the time. The drums are going. You've been conditioned by church. You just know how to go through it, right? Or you're just like, “No, I'm authentic. I'm not going to praise if I don't feel like it.” Right? There's a spectrum in here. The psalmist is calling us to do something that isn't normal. It isn't natural to praise another. It's not. You aren't born with a desire to praise others and thank others. We are born with an inward bent, and so what do we do?Spiritual AmnesiaI want to show you the key to this passage that will free your lips, free your hearts. See, the key to this passage is in verse five. Verses 1-4 give us 10 commands. Sing praises, give thanks, over and over again. And I'm not going to throw law on you, “Hey, guys, have you given thanks this week? Try this week now. If you've only done 5 out of 10, let's go to 6 out of 10, church this week.” Because that won't last. Now, we can shame you, we can guilt you, we can rile you up to have a week of doing it, but you'll forget eventually, and I forget. So what's the key? The key is verse five. “Remember the wondrous works that He has done, His miracles and the judgments He uttered.”Remember, remember, remember.It's repeated a few times throughout the psalm. This is the key that unlocks the rest.The reason why our praise is sparse, our hearts can be full of grumbling rather than gratitude, is because we've forgotten. We have spiritual amnesia.Do you remember what 2021 was like? We were just coming out of the throes of COVID, and my family and I, we live five blocks from George Floyd Square. We just had a contentious election. And on top of that, we had a new church, and one of my good friends was trying to get me removed as a pastor. It was the lowest moment of our life, by far. And my wife and I were brought low. One of my children woke up in the middle of the night regularly with night terrors because there were fires around our home and marches coming around us. Do you remember this time? Something about living here, just this happens a lot, right? You guys are in the news.And during that time, I got a text from a family that I didn't really even know, and they said, “Hey, we'd like to give you $1,000 of spending money, fly you to Anna Marie Island, give you a giant Airbnb that we can no longer use, and bless you.” And that trip was the greatest vacation of all time.My wife and I wept regularly with our Bibles open, worshiping, saying, “God, you see us. You know us. Oh God, you care about us. We're not forgotten. Even though we feel forgotten, we're not forgotten.” And I made some declarations during that time. “God, I'll never forget this. You provide for us. You see us. You know us. You don't forget us.”And guess what I've done?I forgot about that.Have any of you guys been like that where God provides in a supernatural way, and it's so sweet, and you're like, “God, I'll never doubt you again!” Anyone? And then we forget, and then we're anxious again.He provides for you over and over again, and then we forget. This is kind of a problem with God's people: we forget what He has done. What the psalmist is going to try to do is ground our praise in memory, to remember, remember.What do we need to remember? Well, let's look at the next verse, verse 6,“O offspring of Abraham, his servant, children of Jacob, his chosen ones!7 He is the Lord our God; his judgments are in all the earth.8 He remembers his covenant forever, the word that he commanded, for a thousand generations,9 the covenant that he made with Abraham, his sworn promise to Isaac,10 which he confirmed to Jacob as a statute, to Israel as an everlasting covenant,”What do we need to remember? We need to remember the Lord. And what do you need to first remember about the Lord? It's that although you may have forgotten him this week, He has not forgotten you.The psalmist calls us to remember, but what do we remember first? Verse 8:“He remembers…”We all forget. We all can be fickle.The Lord isn't. The Lord, He is our God, and He remembers you, church. He remembers you even when you have forgotten Him, and even go further than forgotten, forsaken Him. He remembers you. That is the ground, that is the foundation, that is the security, you can have this morning. It's not that your memory is like an elephant. I will never forget you, Lord. It's just like Peter's grandpa. Peter's grandpa could forget at times, with dementia, but the Lord did not forget him. And I hope that encourages you this morning because some of us here are going through circumstances that are so painful. There are unmet longings or unanswered prayers where you feel, “Certainly, God, you have forgotten me. You have forgotten me. I don't believe this here. Yeah, maybe it's true for so and so, but not for me. You've forgotten me.” And God wants every one of you people this morning to remember He remembers you. He knows every prayer you've prayed. He knows every trial you've gone through. He knows every unmet longing of your hearts. He knows the anxieties. He knows everything. And you need to know that He remembers you, and He's near to you this morning.So what the psalmist is going to do is he's going to go back into history. David is going to remind us of what God has done through several different acts in Israel's history. Something that is important for you to know is that there's not a single person who was hearing this psalm originally who was at the original events. Why is that significant for you?Because a lot of times when we read God's Word, we can feel like it's distant from us, it's sterile. “Yeah, God, you did that back then, but what are you doing now?”See, when David is speaking to his people, and the context is actually in Chronicles. David is bringing the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem, and he says these words, you can see it in Chronicles. And it's a reminder that the stories from the past are our stories.See, nobody was there alive when we were going to read about Moses. No one was there, and none of you were there either. And we can often be like, “Well, yeah, that was just for them.” But one of the biggest burdens I have for you this morning, church, is for you to walk away saying, “That's my God.”Those stories are your stories. Remember Galatians 3. If you are in Christ, all the promises that you are an heir of Abraham's line. Yes, you may be Scandinavian, and you may be a Midwesterner here, and you're not ethnically Jewish, but the same God who walked with Moses and Abraham and rescued His people, that's your God. So as we go through these portraits, if you grew up in church, and you know the Father Abraham and all that kind of stuff, the temptation is you're going to be like, "Yeah, I know." But that is your God.Oh, church, fight for your heart this morning. Be like, “Wow, He did that? He did that? That's my God?” That's what I'm going to try to model for you as we go and exalt over each of these stories. And so what I'm going to do is what David tries to do. He tries to remind a forgotten people what God has done and who He is, and who He is for us. So the first one we're going to look at is that God is a fierce protector, if you're a note-taker, from verses 12-15.1. God is a fierce protector.Verse 12,“When they were few in number, of little account, and sojourners in it,13 wandering from nation to nation, from one kingdom to another people,14 he allowed no one to oppress them; he rebuked kings on their account,15 saying, ‘Touch not my anointed ones, do my prophets no harm!'”Okay. So we see a lot of things in this passage, and I don't want to oversimplify, but God is a fierce protector over his people. Think about God's people at this time. They are small. They're vulnerable. They're a remnant. They're barely a blip, and they're traveling through foreign territory. They don't have an army, really. They're cooked. They have no hope of making it as a nation, as a people, and yet God jealously fights for his people. He fiercely protects his people.Think about Abraham and Jacob, or Abraham and Isaac, with Abimelech and Pharaoh. God is able to stop the abuse of Sarah. It doesn't matter how powerful the person is, God is greater still. He fiercely protects his people, and some of you need to be reminded of that. We're exiles, church. Don't forget, this world is not our home. If you feel like you're an exile, you're a remnant, you're a sojourner … good!You're remembering one of your identities. And so when we're here and we have these protesters outside and the world who doesn't love Christ and obey him pushes against us, this is a reminder this is not our home, and yet we have a fierce protector over us.Any of you parents here, you guys are fierce protectors of your children, right? You know that any desire you have to protect your kids is just a shadow of how God feels towards his kids?You care about protection because God cares about protection. Being made in the image of God, you are just reflecting what he's like. And so if you think that you care about your kids, infinitely more your Heavenly Father cares about you, church. He's a fierce protector. Oh, church, put your hope in him afresh, that you are protected by him!One of my children recently said to me, “Dad, do we need to live here? It's hard to live here. It doesn't feel safe.”And that's heartbreaking to hear that from your child. But you know the safest place is to be in God's will, no matter what happens. You can move out into the boonies, in the most safe, conservative area with the most amount of cops, and die if you're out of the will of the Lord. And you could be right in the firestorm of everything, and you are untouchable until the Lord says, “It's time to go home, son.”Do you believe the Lord is a fierce protector over you? Or are you anxiously trying to control and protect your life in a perfect way where you actually don't need him? Remember the Lord, he's a fierce protector. Now, how does he protect? The next portrait we want to see of God is that he's sovereign over all things, even hard and evil things.2. God is sovereign over all things.Let's look at verses 16-25:“When he summoned afamine on the land and broke all supply of bread,17 he had sent a man ahead of them, Joseph, who was sold as a slave.18 His feet were hurt with fetters; his neck was put in a collar of iron;19 until what he had said came to pass, the word of the Lord tested him.20 The king sent and released him; the ruler of the peoples set him free;21 he made him lord of his house and ruler of all his possessions,22 to bind his princes at his pleasure and to teach his elders wisdom.”Let's stop right there. We'll continue in a moment.This is an amazing reversal. Think about it. This is the superpower of the world, and you've got a guy (Joseph) who gets betrayed by his brothers, and God sends him ahead of time through great evil and trial so that he could bring salvation to the rest of the world when a famine is coming. This is amazing. He goes and he starts as a slave, goes to prison after a little psych-out where it looked like he was going to be good, and then over years of languishing in a prison, when you think he probably said, “God, have you forgotten me? I'm in a prison. I didn't do anything wrong. Yeah, I was annoying to my brothers and a little arrogant, but I don't deserve prison. Oh, Lord, have you forgotten me?”And the Lord elevates him in due season to be at the right hand of Pharaoh so he could bring salvation to his people when the famine hits. And there's a lot to learn there, because remember: what his brothers did to him was evil, was wrong, and that's why when Joseph meets his brothers, what does he say? He says, “What you meant for evil, God meant for good.”And I want to remind you of that. There's a lot of evil done towards us and evil we do, and God is working it for good. And oftentimes, I think when we hear stories like this, we think super American individualistic. What I mean by that is like, yeah, yeah, this situation is bad, and somehow he's going to work it good for my life. Yes and amen, but so much more than that. God is never doing one thing. Your suffering isn't meaningless. He's actually working in that great evil against you to bring about good, not just for you, but beyond you.He's writing a greater story, a grander story, for all kinds of people, not just you. So your suffering isn't meaningless. Joseph probably thought this was meaningless, but God had purposes to save the entire world through this. This is amazing. What a reversal. But then let's keep reading, because then it gets crazy…Verse 24,“And the Lord made his people very fruitful and made them stronger than their foes.25 He turned their hearts to hate his people, to deal craftily with his servants.”Okay, let's talk about this just for a moment. I'm not going to, in a few moments, try to explain how God's sovereignty over all things harmonizes with human free choices, but let me say a few things and then for the rest you can email me at jonathan@citieschurch.com. He's on vacation, you could flood him with really hard questions. Don't do that. So oftentimes in scripture, we have two different lenses when we see things that happen. So we have on the ground. On the ground, Egypt is nervous and scared and anxious about this people group that is growing among them. “Maybe they'll turn against us.” Those are all normal human thoughts that they thought until Pharaoh was like, “Okay, let's subject these people, because they could turn against us, and that's not going to be good.” So Pharaoh wanted to subject Israel, God's people, the Hebrews.But then sometimes in scripture, like Psalm 105, you kind of zoom out 30,000 feet and you get God's divine perspective. He was working in that without violating Pharaoh's desires or the Egyptians. They wanted to subject them in an evil way, and yet God is somehow sovereign over that. That's a mystery that many have spilled much ink over. But both are true in scripture. And so in Psalm 105, we are looking at the larger view. Whenever you confuse those views, that's where a lot of times problems come. But I want you to notice that even in doing that, God is setting up something greater. Because if he didn't set that up, his people wouldn't be able to plunder the Egyptians and leave with great triumph and bring judgment on a very wicked world. And let me make this point now. I said that God is sovereign over all things, even evil things. And you know who has a problem with evil things? Not just you. God does. Any sense of justice you have is just a mere echo of God's divine wrath and righteous anger towards wickedness and injustice. And so make no mistake. Yes, God is sovereign in all things … but the next section, God is a righteous judge. Let's look at verses 26-36.3. God is a righteous judge.Verses 26:“He sent Moses, his servant, and Aaron, whom he had chosen.27 They performed his signs among them and miracles in the land of Ham.”Let's stop there. I'm not going to read the rest of that section because it's a little longer, but why don't you just look at it briefly. What is he doing here? He's turning waters into blood. He's throwing frogs at them … like crazy. Flies, gnats, hail, lightning, and it all culminates in the striking down, in verse 36, of the firstborn. Egypt was a wicked nation. They were a wicked nation, and they oppressed peoples greatly. They subjugated God's people for 400 years. God is not okay with that. And Egypt put a lot of hope and trust in their different gods. They had gods for this, gods for that, and what Yahweh is doing, God is systematically going down the line and showing that, “I reign over that. I reign over frogs. I reign over water. I reign over every single thing.” He puts them in their place because God will have no other gods. He will not share his throne with another. And so let this give you hope when you feel like there's injustice done. Who is making it right? Know that the Lord is a righteous judge. Yes, the timing may not be what you would choose, but if you saw his perspective, you would understand his timing. The Lord is a righteous judge.Church, you don't need to be the judge. You don't need to retaliate. You don't need to have vengeance. The moment you take it in your hands, you are forgetting that the Lord is a righteous judge.Someone needs to remember that. Someone has wronged you greatly, and you feel the burden of taking it into your own hands, or you feel the burden that you can't forgive them because if you forgive them, they're going to get away with it. Don't forget the Lord is a righteous judge.But he doesn't just judge Egypt. He's seen 400 years of unmet prayers and longings from his people. 400 years, generations without wages and without provision. So the next portrait we see is that God is a lavish provider.4. God is a lavish provider.Not just a provider, a lavish provider. Look at verse 37. “Then he brought out Israel with silver and gold, and there was none among his tribes who stumbled.38 Egypt was glad when they departed, for dread of them had fallen upon it.39 He spread a cloud for a covering, and fire to give light by night.40 They asked, and he brought quail, and gave them bread from heaven in abundance.41 He opened the rock, and water gushed out; it flowed through the desert like a river.42 For he remembered his holy promise, and Abraham, his servant.”Church, have you let this become a fairy tale for you? Have any of you guys been in the desert or in a desolate place?And can you imagine if we were hiking together and all thirsty, and I'm like, “Hey, guys, watch this.” And I just hit a rock and water came out. That would be insane. That'd be the craziest thing you ever saw in your life. And yet we see that and we're like, “Yeah. That's cool. That happened. I saw it in Prince of Egypt. It's a good movie.” Right? That's your God! He did that!They were starving and God gave them manna. Just appears on the ground, they got to collect. They wanted protein, because they didn't want to be vegans, and God sends them quail.That's crazy, church. That's our God. He provided for them. That's your God. He covered them at night. He led them through the day. That's your God.Why do I keep saying that's your God? Because sometimes we forget that that same God who did that is the same God who knows you intimately and walks with you right now. Those stories are your stories, church. That's your story. That's your God. That'‘s your great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, whatever grandfather. They went through that. That's your family lineage. That's your heritage. And so some of you, your bank account is low. You're in massive debt up to your eyeballs. You're struggling with so many anxieties and pressures, and you're worrying, and you're wondering. God is a lavish provider. Oh, Church, put your hope in Him. Put your trust in Him. If He could provide then, He can infinitely provide more for you now. Amen? Amen. Now, God needs to provide a lot of things. We have things that we need, and He cares about them. But there's something that we need most, and let's look at this last portrait, the singing Savior. 5. God is a singing Savior.Look at verse 43,“So he brought his people out with joy, his chosen ones with singing.”Now, what we see in Exodus is that when the peoples were delivered from Egypt, Miriam led God's people with a tambourine and a song she wrote, and people were singing, right? But the Hebrew right here is ambiguous about who's actually singing.And when I hear this language, it reminds me of another passage. Would you turn with me to Zephaniah 3:17? If you're not familiar with your Bible yet, it's in the end of the Old Testament. It's one of the sweetest passages, and I want you to hear the parallel language that you hear here. One thing I want to remind you is that anything that we do on this side of eternity that's from the will of God, it's just a shadow and echo of God's heart and what's going on in heaven. When you see someone come to faith and you rejoice, what's going on in heaven? There's a party. It's an echo. So as Israel is rejoicing, what they don't know is that there is another one rejoicing, too. Read with me if you have your Bibles right now, Zephaniah 3:17,“The Lord your God is in your midst. A mighty one who will save. He will rejoice over you with gladness. He will quiet you by his love. He will exult over you with loud singing.”Write that on a note card, tape it on your mirror, and brush your teeth every morning. And stare at that. The Lord sings over you like an embarrassing father who delights in his children.The Lord doesn't just save begrudgingly. He delights to save. It brings him great joy. Yes, God is a righteous judge, but he does not delight in the death of the wicked. But God delights to save. He sings. He's a singing Savior. So the greatest need that we have is met in Christ, that Christ saved us. Christ Jesus died for us, and He delights to save His people. Remember that. He delights to save you. It wasn't a duty. It wasn't begrudging. It was His joy, and He sings over you. For some of you, the reason why you don't praise is because you've forgotten that He delights over you, and so this whole Christian thing is just so regimented and so just religious and going through traditions. The Lord sings over you, church. Now, I want you to notice something. The next verse. The next verse is another thing that He provides for us richly, and it's also connected to verse 11.“And he gave them the lands of the nations, and they took possession of the fruit of the people's toil." So the Lord provides for His people not just a temporary residence, but in Christ, if you are in Christ, church, you get to inherit the entire world. And the ultimate rest that we have is that we get Jesus. Oh, if you're weary, if you feel displaced, if you're longing and you feel like this earth is not your home, something's wrong, nothing's satisfied, your ultimate destination is Jesus forever on this redeemed world. And Israel gets it in parts, but not in its full. But for us who are in Christ, one day we'll inherit everything, and the greatest inheritance is that we get Jesus. It's the greatest need we have. So if you feel like, man, this world is just not enough, it's not cutting it, it's because you were made for another. You were made for the land that has Christ at the center. Now, if God's people are saved, set apart, rescued, what should be the result of that? Let's look at verse 45,“that they might keep his statutes and observe his laws.Praise the Lord!”This is so important. If you haven't been listening, please hear me right now. This order is super important. What comes first, obeying or saving? What comes first, obeying or saving? I'm not trying to trick you. Saving. No, it's obeying. Just kidding. No, it's saving. Saving is first!He brought them out of Egypt. He brought his people out of slavery so that they may obey. That order is the difference between Christianity and not. You are not saved because you obey, but because you are saved, you will obey. This is important here. Another sign of our spiritual amnesia is that you don't obey because you forgot what the Lord has done, and some of you, you don't obey because you're not saved yet. So I just want to say this to you. I don't know you. I only know a few of you. If your life is not one where you're progressively becoming more like Jesus and obeying him more and more in all the stuff of life, then you should have insecurity if you are actually his. And if that's you, come, pray with someone today. Wrestle with it. Examine your heart. Do I actually know the Savior? Because you can't know the Savior and the Savior not change you. You can't. It's impossible. There is no category in scripture, except the category that we have in the West, that you can know Christ and stay the same. Will it be perfect? No. Will you stumble? Yes. Will you still sin? Yes. But over time, will it be true? Yes. Not fully, but truly, over time, Christ will transform you. So if you are not obeying Jesus in every area of your life, oh church, remember the Lord who saved you. Remember the Lord who loves you and sings over you. Don't forget the order. You're saved and set apart to obey. And what does God want to do when we obey? What is he trying to do? Because when we obey, Jesus is taking us by the hand and showing us how to truly live the life he wants us to live, truly be human, truly live the life of abundance he's called us to live. And when we do that, we reflect his heart and his character to the nations, to our neighbors, to our coworkers. God is calling you to show what he's like in your obedience. He has purpose behind him setting you apart to be his.Tell of His Wondrous WorksSo we've gone through the whole psalm, and I want to end with a few points … Look at your life. Is your life characterized by one of praise and gratitude and seeking his presence and his face continually? Ask your friends, ask your spouse, ask your kids, ask people who know you. Does that sound like me? Or am I slow to speak of the things of the Lord? This is something that can be cultivated over time. So I want to challenge you, Cities Church, to practice this habit. Practice it for those who have families, fathers and mothers.Practice telling of his wondrous works to each other. It's not something that can always be natural, but you can grow in it.My wife has us set aside a jar every November to write down things that God has done this last year, and then we read it out loud the week of Thanksgiving and praise the Lord. That's a little simple habit you can try to bring into your life.For those of you who are in community groups, and I hope all of you are in community groups, don't turn this building into just a service where you come and you're like, "Feed me, ah," and you just get your goods and then you go and you leave to do something you want to do. Cities Church is a family to belong to, and Sunday services are absolutely essential, but they're not sufficient for full formation to follow Jesus and become like him. So fight to be in a community group if you're not. And if you're in a community group, regularly have times where you can take time to say, “What has God done? Let's tell of his wondrous works.”And you know how sweet it is to be part of a community who does this? Because check this out. There will be seasons where your heart is cold and someone else is buzzing because God has done great works. And they share, and you hear, and your heart gets warmed, and you're like, "Oh, yeah, the Lord!" You know what that's like? And guess what? Maybe a season or two later, you guys switch spots. This happens a lot of times in marriages.And this person who used to be burning hot have gone through some fiery trials, and they're struggling, they're languishing. And then you're like, "Brother, do you remember?" "Sister, do you remember what he did for you?" You can remind people of his wondrous works and how he worked in their life, and how he worked in your life. How sweet would it be to be part of a church family where you could do that for each other? Older saints in here, go out of your way to share: "Hey, son, come here. Let me tell you something about what the Lord has done.”Younger saints, talk to older saints. Tell me stories of God's faithfulness. Stir up my faith. Build my faith. I want to exhort you that today, over lunch, share of something the Lord has done in his wondrous works. Stir each other's faith. And if you're like, “I can't remember anything”, pray. We planted a church this last year, and they're going through this discipleship curriculum. One of the first things that they do is they do an inventory of three moments where God really showed up in your life, to write it down, so that you can share it with others. And the whole group was like, "I don't know." But then when they actually sat down and were quiet, they're like, "Oh my goodness, God has done great works." We forget, don't we? Church, you have a treasure trove of stories of God's faithfulness for you, but we forget. So write them down. Rehearse them, share it with your kids. Tell it with your neighbors. Tell it with your coworkers. May the Lord open up our mouths and share.And so church, it's been good to be with you, and I want to remind you, the Lord has not forgotten you.You may have forgotten him, and I forget him too, but the Lord has not forgotten you. And that is the great confidence you have.Remember, you have been saved. That leads to obeying. You don't obey to get saved. Remember that the Lord is a fierce protector over you, and that even in the hardest moments of your life, he is sovereign even over that thing.God is a righteous judge and he will redeem and make all things new, and he will right every wrong.And that God is a lavish provider. He can redeem the years the locusts have stolen in your life, no matter how painful or how impossible. He is the God who can give you water out of a rock.That is your God, church. That's your God. Don't you sleep on that. That's your God. And he's the God who saves you with joy and gladly sings over you. And if you don't know this savior, oh, would you talk to someone this morning? Would you not leave if you don't know the sweetness of this savior who delights to save? The righteous judge who judged himself so that you could stand free. Would you come? I'd love to pray with you, and I know there's a number of people here who would love to talk with you. Let's pray.Father, thank you for who you are. And Lord, we confess many of us have forgotten you have been far kinder and better to us than we remember. Sometimes our hearts can be filled with grumbling and amnesia where we forget. And so God, we recenter our hearts, and we look back at your faithfulness, not just to God's people from all generations, but our own lives. I pray for a special gifting over Cities Church that we would grow to be able to tell of his wondrous works. That you would loose our tongues to be able to share. So many in this room have great stories of your grace and your kindness, but they forget it or they're timid, and would you loose their tongues so that this whole church will be full of praise and thanksgiving and gratitude. Oh, God, may we seek your face continually, seek your strength continually. Oh, God, we need you. And Father, if there's anything that I said that was in error, either in manner or in content, would you please correct me and let no one here remember. But God, all that is actually from above, that is from your Word, let it deeply shape us. Let the Word do its work in our hearts. And God, as we transition to the Lord's Supper, help us be freshly reminded that this table is a reminder that you are the Savior, and you delight in us. And you save us, not because we obey, but that it leads to obedience.Let everyone be freshly reminded of the sweetness of the gospel of grace. In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen.
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.auburnobserver.comJustin and Dan discuss players who got serious summer buzz at SEC Media Days this week in Tampa and play some more Who's Older? Topics for this subscribers-only episode include:* A Pirate Looks at The Rest of the Secondary* Golesh's enthusiasm for the tight end room* potential starters on the offensive line* Byrum Brown's effectiveness in the red zone* Grubserver news* Justin tried one of Dan's favorite pizza places* a six-pack of Who's Older?* the end of this episode is a backdoor pilot for future spinoff podcast “Chart Chat: Fellas talkin' Ella”This is a premium podcast for Observer subscribers only. You can join by clicking the button below or going to this link.Follow Dan (@dnpck) and Justin (@JFergusonAU) on Twitter.
Can a church remain strong when its founding generation is gone?https://takingthelandpodcast.comPreaching at The Potter’s House in Chandler, Arizona, Pastor Adam Dragoon challenges older and younger believers to reject generational mistrust and work together to carry the Gospel forward.PREMIUM SUBSCRIPTION for WORLD EVANGELISM:• NO ADS, Early releases, Full-Length Testimony Tuesdays• Subscribe for only $3/month on Supercast: https://taking-the-land.supercast.com• Subscribe for only $3.99/month on Spotify: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/taking-the-land/subscribe • Subscribe for only $4.99/month on Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/4owjo5Z Using the transition from David to Solomon, the recommissioning of the USS Wisconsin, and the unforgettable picture of walking an old dog and a young pup, this message shows why every Christian must learn both to receive an inheritance and prepare one for somebody else.The Great Commission is bigger than one pastor, one ministry, one church, or one generation. Older believers possess wisdom that must be transferred. Younger believers possess strength and energy that must be directed. Revival continues when both generations walk together in humility, trust, and unity.Chapters00:00 Introduction and Pastor Adam's Background04:01 Understanding Cellular Regeneration and Spiritual Renewal09:29 David's Desire to Build the Temple and God's Plan11:13 The Concept of Regeneration and Church Growth20:42 The Danger of Generational Disconnection26:30 Passing the Torch: From David to Solomon37:09 The Legacy of Leadership and Preparation44:30 The Long-Term Vision: Building for Future Generations50:02 The Example of the USS Wisconsin Battleship51:42 Unity, Trust, and Passing the Mantle52:37 Invitation to Salvation and Reflection01:02:07 Practical Steps for Ministry and Discipleship01:03:52 The Power of Unity and Lasting LegacyNotesALL PROCEEDS GO TO WORLD EVANGELISMLocate a CFM Church near you: https://cfmmap.orgWe need five-star reviews! Tell the world what you think about this podcast at:• Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3vy1s5b• Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/taking-the-land-cfm-sermon-pod-43369v
The unemployment rate fell in June, but beneath that encouraging headline are signs that the U.S. job market may be losing momentum. Employers added just 57,000 jobs, previous estimates were revised downward and the share of people working or actively looking for work declined. Older workers are leaving at especially high rates, while hiring burnout, return-to-office mandates, caregiving responsibilities, retirement and lower immigration may all be contributing to a shrinking labor force. USA TODAY Money Reporter Rachel Barber joins The Excerpt to explain what the latest numbers really reveal, why fewer available workers could constrain economic growth and how much confidence we should place in a jobs report that may still be revised.Let us know what you think of this episode by sending an email to podcasts@usatoday.com. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Topics covered in this episode: django-orjson Best Django Redis configuration for speed and size Linus Torvalds puts the foot down against Anti-AI Kernel Maintainers Django Steering Council backs the Triptych Project Extras Joke Watch on YouTube About the show Sponsored by us! Support our work through: Our courses at Talk Python Consulting from Six Feet Up Connect with the hosts Michael: Mastodon / BlueSky / X / LinkedIn Calvin: Mastodon / BlueSky / X / LinkedIn Show: Mastodon / BlueSky / X Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Tuesday at 7am PT. Older video versions available there too. Michael #1: django-orjson Adam Johnson dropped django-orjson - drop-in replacements for the Django and DRF pieces that touch JSON, swapping stdlib json for orjson, the Rust-based library. Headline numbers: 10x faster serialization, 2x faster deserialization. The interesting question is why this needs to be a package at all. pip install orjson is the easy part. Adam's actual pitch: adopting it "isn't easy, especially when your framework uses json in many different parts." Django scatters JSON across JsonResponse, the test client and test case classes, the json_script template tag, and more. There's no single hook to grab, so you get a library that catches them all. Adam is refreshingly honest about the scale of the win. His words: "While database queries tend to dominate the typical Django application's runtime, the time spent in serialization and deserialization can still be significant." He calls it "a nearly free performance win" - not "this will 10x your app." That's a claim about cost, not magnitude, and it's worth keeping those straight. Worth flagging what the post doesn't cover: caveats. There are none in the article, but orjson has real ones. Django and Flask both render datetimes as RFC 822 HTTP-date (Wed, 15 Jul 2026 12:00:00 GMT); orjson does ISO 8601. It can't do ensure_ascii, it rejects NaN and Infinity (which stdlib happily emits), and it raises on Decimal. If you've got a JS client parsing dates, that's a wire-format change. Who should actually take this? If you're a DRF shop shoveling JSON all day, yes - it's cheap and it's real. If your app mostly renders HTML templates, you're optimizing a slice of runtime that's already near zero. The problem Adam's package solves doesn't exist in Flask or Quart. They already centralize every JSON operation - jsonify, request.get_json(), the test client, the |tojson filter - behind one provider object at app.json. So there's no library to install. It's about ten lines: import orjson from quart.json.provider import JSONProvider # or flask.json.provider class OrjsonProvider(JSONProvider): def dumps(self, obj, **kwargs) -> str: return orjson.dumps(obj).decode() # provider must return str def loads(self, s, **kwargs): return orjson.loads(s) app.json = OrjsonProvider(app) The numbers on talkpython.fm Evaluated it, measured it, and skipped it. The biggest JSON payload we serve is our MCP server returning a cached episode transcript, about 139 KB. Swapping the provider saves 0.119 milliseconds per request. That total response takes 1.1 ms We got 4.1x, not 10x - and the reason is the good lesson. Payload shape decides your speedup. The 10x is for structure-heavy data, lots of small keys where stdlib burns time in Python-level dispatch per item. Our hot payload is one giant transcript string, so the work is escaping and memcpy Calvin #2: Best Django Redis configuration for speed and size Peter Bengtsson revisits a classic: his 2017 "Fastest Redis configuration for Django" benchmark now has a 2026 update posted this week. The 2017 post pitted django-redis serializers (json, ujson, msgpack, pickle) and compressors (zlib, lzma) against each other; conclusion was msgpack + zlib as the sweet spot - avoid the json serializer, it's fat and slow. The 2026 update narrows focus to just compressors: default (no compression), zlib, lzma, and newcomer zstd. New results: lzma compresses best but is slowest; zstd is the fastest compressor on Ubuntu; differences between them are very small. Big takeaway across both: compression buys you a lot of space (2–3.5x smaller) for very little speed cost - worth it for Redis where memory is the constraint. Caveat from the author: results depend heavily on your data - his test stores short strings of numbers, so benchmark your own workload. Michael #3: Linus Torvalds puts the foot down against Anti-AI Kernel Maintainers Write up on Ars. Really good coverage by Maximillian: Time to wake up (for some) Torvalds said that “Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it. Or just walk away.” I agree with Max, putting your head in the sand and waiting for AI to go away will likely mean you won't be working professionally in software development in the coming years. The statement came amid a lengthy thread arguing about the use of Sashiko, an “agentic Linux kernel code review system” that its creators claim can, in tests, independently find 53.6 percent of the bugs that would end up being fixed by human coders in later commits. “We're not forcing anybody to use [LLM tools], but I will very loudly ignore people who try to argue against other people from using it,” Torvalds said. “Anybody who points to the problems at AI had better be looking in the mirror and pointing at themselves at the same time,” Torvalds wrote. Calvin #4: Django Steering Council backs the Triptych Project Django Steering Council issued a Letter of Collaboration backing Carson Gross & Alex Petros's funding bid for the Triptych Project - three proposals to make HTML more expressive natively, in every browser. The three additions: PUT/PATCH/DELETE methods for forms, button actions (buttons that fire HTTP requests without a wrapping form), and partial page replacement. Distills the core ideas from HTMX/Unpoly/Turbo into the HTML standard itself - no JS, no library, nothing to ship or maintain. Current focus is button actions (WHATWG #12330): Logout instead of wrapping a button in a form. Relevant to Django directly - think the admin submit row and disguised delete links; Django 6.0's template partials were already inspired by these patterns. How to help: companies can send non-binding letters of support on letterhead; individuals can read the proposals and weigh in on the WHATWG issues. Extras Calvin: DOOMQL - A playable first-person shooter whose framebuffer is a SQL query. Michael: Granian 2.7.9 fixes WSGI threadpool scheduler starvation/underscaling Welcome Calvin post Joke: Solving all bugs
Welcome back, Arthro-Pod listeners! This week we chat with Kevyn Juneau, Associate Professor at University of Wisconsin - River Falls, about teaching and research at a primarily undergraduate institution (PUI). We take a deep dive into his habitat restoration work in the Bahamas and how teaching at a PUI is different from a larger (e.g., R1, land grant, state) university. Part of Kevyn's research has been conducted via collaborations made through the Ecological Research as Education Network, which helps connect folks at PUIs so they can conduct larger, more impactful work across broader geographic areas. __ Get the show through Apple Podcast, Spotify, or your favorite podcatching app! Older episodes can be accessed through Archive.org. If you can spare a moment, we appreciate when you subscribe to the show on those apps or when you take time to leave a review!
Jenn talks about a few things older generations got right... but for some reason we don't do them anymore.
Welcome to Catholic Apologetics, led by Dr. Jim Dobbins, Author of Take My Hand: A Personal Retreat Companion. Just finished an RCIA program? This is the next stop on your faith journey. In these classes, we look at the different truths of Catholic doctrine and why we know they are true. We also discuss apologetics, spiritual growth, examine the liturgy of the Catholic Mass, and do scripture studies. Please encourage your friends to listen. I also encourage you to leave a comment about our podcasts. If you want the slides or any other documents for any class, just e-mail me at jhdphd@gmail.com and I will reply with the documents attached. If you wish, I will also add you to the class materials distribution list so that each time I send anything out for the class you will get it. If you are getting the podcast files from iTunes and would like to see the full set of available classes for download, you can see and download them all at http://yorked.podomatic.com. Older podcasts are now stored at a free podcast site at Podcast.com. The link to the podcasts there is: http://poddirectory.com/podcast/86506/dr-james-dobbins-catholic-apologetics We ask you to also consider going to http://yorked.podomatic.com and becoming a subscriber. It is free, helps our ratings, and thus helps us reach and help more people. This session is part of our second discussion series of the Gospel of Matthew. Please also let me know if there is a particular topic you would like to see addressed. skvEapm1rLLW8foJsII1
The Older Son | A Man Had Two Sons | Drew Ritchie by The Hills Church
AI is helping reveal how the brain flushes out toxic waste while we sleep. The mystery of chronic itch may finally be traced back to the finest hairs on your skin. An herbal supplement marketed as a safe, natural remedy is quietly sparking a major public health crisis among young Americans. Older adults may want to ditch the expensive dietary supplements and head straight for the gym. Facebook: ingoodhealthpodX: @ ingoodhealthpodIG: @ingoodhealthpodYouTube: @ingoodhealthpodSpotify Apple Podcast In Good Health PodcastSubscribed to the newsletterFull ArchiveContact UsBecome an Affiliate Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
This week's video transcript summary is here. You can click on any bulleted section to see the actual transcript. Thanks to Granola for its software.EditorialIntelligence: Who Owns it?This week the word “AI” feels too small.AI is a technology. Intelligence is its product. And if intelligence is the product, the question is no longer just: Which model is best? Who has the cheapest tokens? Who owns the weights? Who controls the data center? Those are important questions, but they are lower in the stack.The bigger question is simpler and more political:Who owns intelligence?That sounds abstract until you make it concrete. Intelligence is becoming something companies can capture, package, serve, meter, route, improve, and sell.It can write code, answer questions, design molecules, automate offices, run agents, draft legal work, advise scientists, serve consumers, and reshape workflows. It is not merely software. It is a general-purpose capability. And all humans could benefit from more of it.General-purpose capabilities have a habit of becoming public questions. But the default answer, that public good is best delivered by government, is the wrong answer in this context.The Product Is IntelligenceWe should stop talking about AI as a feature and start talking about intelligence as the universal thing that is delivered as an input to the world.Water is an input. Electricity is an input. Literacy is an input. Connectivity is an input. Once a society depends on them, access stops being optional. Nobody needs government to build every well, power plant, school, or network. But everybody understands that a civilization cannot be organized around less than universal and reliable access to foundational inputs.Intelligence is reaching that level of importance now that we all know it is real.Government should not own it, operate it, or develop it. Quite the opposite. Companies are the right actors to build fast, compete hard, improve models, serve customers, and discover the real use cases. Self-interest is a useful framing here. Markets are good at finding demand, reducing costs, and turning invention into services people actually use.Companies are the right operators, developers, and owners. But that does not settle the real question of who owns the benefits. That is an economic question.If intelligence becomes metered infrastructure, what happens to the value it creates?The Ownership StackThis week's articles keep circling the same issue from different directions but in the nature of ‘circling' never quite nail it.Jamin Ball's “Own Your Weights” starts with the enterprise version of the question. Owning a model file is not enough. The durable asset is the loop: the data flywheel, the evaluations, the reinforcement system, the workflow learning, and the operating context that lets capability compound.Benedict Evans' “Ways to Think About Token Pricing” adds the market layer. Tokens may become essential, abundant, and cheap, like mobile data. But being essential does not guarantee that the token layer captures the value. The money may move up the stack to whoever owns the workflow, the customer, the distribution, or the application.Alex Karp's fight with the labs, reported in “Alex Karp Is Saying What Every Angry CEO Is Thinking About AI”, is the same argument in sharper enterprise language. Companies are afraid that model providers will not just sell intelligence, but learn from customer workflows and then move into the markets where those workflows create value. The “All-in” group are echoing Karp's view.And “What Is Loop Engineering, and Who Owns It?” names the new contested terrain. The loop is where intelligence meets the world. Whoever owns the loop owns the learning. Whoever owns the learning owns the compounding asset.That is why “who owns intelligence?” is not a slogan. It is the question under the model layer, the application layer, the enterprise layer, and the economic layer.Because intelligence is the product, the tools creating it are fragmented and competitive. So there is no logic in trying to discuss this at the level of a single company or set of tools and models.The Old Promise Was That Commerce Would Tame PowerThe essays this week give the historical backdrop.Deirdre McCloskey, in “What Really Caused the Industrial Revolution”, argues that modern growth came not simply from capital accumulation, but from a change in permission: ordinary people were allowed to innovate, trade, build, and be honored for it.That matters because intelligence could be another expansion of permission. It could make more people capable of building, learning, creating, coding, researching, translating, selling, and coordinating. It could lower the cost of competence.But only if access is broad.Paul Krugman's “AI in an Age of Oligarchy” warns that the same technology lands differently in different political economies. A new general-purpose technology entering a broad, open, upwardly mobile society is one thing. The same technology entering a concentrated economy, with extreme wealth and weak counterweights, is another.Tim O'Reilly's Economist essay, “Elon Musk is building a form of capitalism that Adam Smith would hate”, makes the governance point more directly. The old liberal hope was that commerce would tame arbitrary power. Markets, boards, courts, shareholders, disclosure, and competition would discipline the prince.But what if the prince uses markets to escape discipline?Henry Farrell's “political economy of billionaire derangement” pushes the same point. Founder culture, monopoly ambition, peer rivalry, weak correction mechanisms, and vast private control can amplify appetites rather than restrain them.The danger with intelligence is not that companies build it. They should. Companies build it, meter it, use public tolerance and public infrastructure to scale it, learn from everyone who uses it. All of those things are inevitable and healthy. Market forces will sort out winners from losers. The real danger is that the winners treat all of the surplus produced as purely private.Metered Intelligence Creates SurplusIf metering is not the problem, what is?The problem is pretending that metered intelligence creates value only for the metering entity. Metering water is only tolerated as a public good. If the public were blackmailed by a private water company with the threat of no water we would all rebel.Once we understand that the product of AI is intelligence we can see that every time intelligence is used, there is the immediate transaction: the user pays, the provider serves.But there is also system value. Usage creates signals. Workflows reveal patterns. Prompts, corrections, failures, preferences, integrations, edge cases, and business processes all help define where intelligence is useful and how it should improve. Intelligence breeds intelligence.Even when customer data is contractually protected, the market learns. The platform learns where demand is. The product team learns which workflows matter. The ecosystem learns which jobs are vulnerable, which tasks are automatable, and which parts of the economy can be reorganized around machine intelligence.So the surplus is not born in a vacuum.It rests on public science, public education, public data exhaust, public law, public infrastructure, public energy systems, public tolerance for data centers, and billions of human interactions. It is served by companies, but it is not made only by companies.This is why “Americans Deserve a Dividend From AI Companies' Riches” belongs at the center of this week's issue. The detail can be debated. The principle is harder to dismiss. If intelligence becomes a new foundational resource, then some part of the wealth it creates should flow back to the people whose society makes it possible. Intelligence did not suddenly appear. AI is built on the entire history of human intelligence. It benefits from it and at the same time evolves it.Not Nationalization. A Human Wealth Fund.If intelligence belongs to everybody, some conclude that government ownership of intelligence is the right outcome.Governments are not well suited to build, operate, or improve intelligence. They will move too slowly, regulate too early, politicize the wrong things, and confuse economic participation with operational control.Andrew McAfee's “Why I Didn't Sign the AI Open Letter” is useful here. His objection is not that the technology is unimportant. It is that steering too hard before we understand the shape of the change can become its own failure mode. Marc Andreessen's satire of AI regulation is less policy than temperament, but it captures a real Silicon Valley fear: that regulation can become permission, capture, and incumbency before it becomes wisdom.That fear should be taken seriously.But it does not answer the economic question. It answers only the operational one.How can the economic benefits of intelligence be distributed? The better answer is a sovereign human wealth fund.Call it a sovereign wealth fund if you must, but the phrase is too national. Intelligence will not respect borders. The leading companies are global. The models, chips, data centers, agents, platforms, and workflows will be transnational from the beginning. If the value created by intelligence is global, then the mechanism for sharing some of that value should begin with the companies global enough to capture it. The nice thing about xAI, OpenAI, and Anthropic is that they are supranational.These companies own and operate intelligence. Let them compete. Let them profit. Let them keep the incentives that make the system improve. But if intelligence is the new water, the wealth it creates cannot belong only to the companies that meter it. And they, themselves, have the power to fix it, even more than governments.Access will become a Human Right; Ownership Is the Economic DesignThis is where human rights come in. There is no right to access an AI model, yet. But there will soon be a need to change that.Not as a claim that every person is entitled to every frontier model at every moment for free. That is not serious. Capacity has costs. Models have costs. Inference has costs. Data centers have costs. Although those costs will decline over time, possibly quite quickly as self-learning models address costs.The claim is more basic: in a world where intelligence becomes a primary input into education, work, health, science, citizenship, creativity, and economic agency, baseline access to intelligence starts to look like a civic requirement.That could mean public access layers. It could mean education credits. It could mean open models. It could mean AI dividends. It could mean public-interest compute. It could mean taxes on rents. It could mean a company-initiated human wealth fund that returns some of the upside to society without handing the operating system to the state. The latter could couple wealth growth with universal distribution of ownership.The exact mechanism matters. But the distinction matters more.Government should not own intelligence. It should be universally available. And people should have a claim on the wealth intelligence creates.The Frontier Is Also PhysicalThe abstraction is not weightless.“The Fight Against AI Data Centers Is Just Beginning”, “New York becomes the first state to enact a data center moratorium”, Reuters on pollution from Musk's xAI power project, and DataGravity's “Who Captures Value in AI Infrastructure?” all say the same thing from the ground up.Intelligence uses land. It uses power. It uses water. It uses chips. It uses grid capacity. It uses neighborhoods. It uses public patience.That makes the value question unavoidable. A society can accept the buildout if the buildout is legible as shared progress. It will resist it if the costs are local, the profits are private, and the benefits feel enclosed.Who Owns the “Loop”?The week ends where it began.“Anthropic and Blackstone” are betting that implementation is the next trillion-dollar business. “Vint Cerf” is working on identity for agents on the open internet. “GPT-Red” points toward systems that improve their own robustness. “Kimi K3” adds another open frontier model to the global mix.The model race continues. The deployment race is accelerating. The governance race is behind.My view is this:The central product of this era is intelligence. Companies have figured out how to capture it, package it, serve it, and meter it. That is good. It should stay in the hands of builders who have the incentive to make it better.But intelligence is too foundational to become just another private toll booth. A significant part of it will turn out to be free to users.As intelligence becomes a general-purpose resource, then access to it becomes a human-capability question, and the surplus from it becomes an economic-justice question. Not because government should run it. Because government should not run it. The operating layer belongs with companies. The wealth question belongs with everyone. But companies are best placed to turn that into a process of distribution.The question is not whether companies should build intelligence. They should.The question is whether humanity gets a stake in the wealth created by the thing that may soon become its most important shared input.Contents* Essays* Deirdre McCloskey on What Really Caused the Industrial Revolution* AI in an Age of Oligarchy* Elon Musk is building a form of capitalism that Adam Smith would hate* Murky Mirror: Truth and Consequences* The political economy of billionaire derangement* Is there any “oligarchy” to fight?* AI* Nearly 200 Economists and Tech Leaders Warn of A.I. Threats* Why I Didn't Sign the AI Open Letter* Own Your Weights* Ways to Think About Token Pricing* Alex Karp Is Saying What Every Angry CEO Is Thinking About AI* The AI Agents Are Coming for Microsoft Office* What Is Loop Engineering, and Who Owns It?* The Fight Against AI Data Centers Is Just Beginning* 6 months to live for open models* Americans Deserve a Dividend From AI Companies' Riches* Who Gets to Define the Frontier?* GPT-Red: Unlocking Self-Improvement for Robustness* Anthropic, Blackstone bet the next trillion-dollar AI business is implementation, not just models* Vint Cerf is working on a plan to unleash AI agents on the open internet* xai-org/grok-build, now open source* The Pulse: What can we learn from Bun's rapid Rust rewrite with AI?* Orphan risks at the frontier of artificial intelligence* The Lab of the Future Should Feel Like a Data Center* Why AMI Labs' Alexandre LeBrun won't call his AI “AGI” or “superintelligence”* Kimi K3 Tech Blog: Open Frontier Intelligence* Venture Capital* Three Years In* Venture Has Rarely Looked More Bifurcated* The Best Angel Investors in the US: Who Backs the Most Unicorns, and Who's Active Now* Are Prediction Markets Doomed to Fail?* Regulation* Exclusive: The Next Frontier of the Deportation Wars: College Campuses* The Supreme Court Broke Independent Agencies. Here's a Way to Slow the Damage.* India's crackdown on a new WhatsApp feature risks setting a global precedent* Let's build a children's public internet* Computer cops* Google is better at playing the AI regulations game* Infrastructure* Who Captures Value in AI Infrastructure?* New York becomes the first state to enact a data center moratorium* Pollution from Musk's unpermitted xAI power project hits hardest in Black communities* Interview of the Week* The End of the End of Geography* Startup of the Week* Radical AI's Joseph Krause: The Scientist Building The “Waymo” Lab For New Materials* Post of the Week* Marc Andreessen on AI RegulationEssaysDeirdre McCloskey on What Really Caused the Industrial RevolutionYascha Mounk and Deirdre McCloskey | Persuasion | July 11, 2026Yascha Mounk interviews Deirdre McCloskey about her argument that the modern world's economic liftoff came less from capital accumulation than from a change in ideas. McCloskey says both left and right versions of the conventional story rely too heavily on investment: the left stresses exploitation and surplus value, while the right stresses virtuous saving by capitalists. Her objection is historical and economic. Human beings had always invested, from irrigation works and Roman roads to seed grain, and simple accumulation quickly runs into diminishing returns.McCloskey's alternative is that northwestern Europe, first Holland, then Britain and Scotland, and then the North American colonies, developed a liberal ideology that changed who was allowed to innovate and be honored for it. The conversation links that shift to the erosion of inherited hierarchy, the spread of dignity for ordinary commercial life, and a moral vocabulary in which liberalism is not merely procedural but connected to virtues and values. The point is not that machines, coal, trade, and institutions did not matter, but that they do not explain the scale and timing of modern enrichment without a cultural permission structure for innovation.The interview also turns to the contemporary defense of liberalism. Mounk frames the series around the worry that liberalism is often treated as too thin to command allegiance, while its opponents speak more directly to moral passions. McCloskey's case is that liberal societies became rich because they dignified experimentation and ordinary enterprise, and that liberals need to recover the moral language behind that claim.Read moreAI in an Age of OligarchyPaul Krugman | Paul Krugman | July 12, 2026Paul Krugman frames AI as a major technological shock arriving inside an already unequal political economy. The post says AI's economic and social effects may take years to understand, but argues that the setting matters now: America has much greater wealth concentration and political inequality than it did in the 1950s and 1960s, when progressive taxation, stronger regulation, and more active antitrust might have contained some of the destructive effects of a new technology.Krugman's opening claim is that the same technology would likely have different consequences in a more level society. In today's United States, he writes, extreme wealth is both a cause and effect of policies that favor a small elite, including low effective taxes on capital and high incomes, weak enforcement of worker protections and antitrust, and cuts to programs that benefit ordinary Americans.The article is explicitly more about oligarchy than AI. Krugman says the paid sections document the rise of the “.0002%,” the economics and politics of extreme wealth, how oligarchy will shape AI's impact, and possible policy paths. His caveat is that AI itself may still produce a pushback against oligarchy, but absent that, he expects the pre-existing concentration of wealth and power to magnify AI's downsides.Read moreElon Musk is building a form of capitalism that Adam Smith would hateAuthor: Tim O'Reilly Published: July 12, 2026Tim O'Reilly argues that Elon Musk is using the legal forms of shareholder capitalism to escape the restraints that shareholder capitalism was supposed to impose. The article begins with SpaceX's public-market structure: ordinary public investors get little meaningful governance power, Musk keeps roughly 85 percent of the votes through super-voting shares, buyers waive jury trials and class actions, the company qualifies as controlled, and removal of Musk depends on the share class he controls. In O'Reilly's framing, that is not ordinary founder control; it is a design for being answerable to no one, possibly beyond Musk's own lifetime.The killer detail is the article's turn through Albert Hirschman, Montesquieu, James Steuart, Adam Smith, and Keynes. Older defenses of commerce held that markets would tame princely passions because the self-interest of merchants was safer than arbitrary rule. O'Reilly says Musk reverses that hope. The market discipline that was supposed to cage the prince has become the lever by which the prince raises capital, removes feedback loops, and carries private power into politics, government, Mars, robots, AI, or whatever ambition comes next.The pull is the link to AI governance. O'Reilly says corporations are already a kind of artificial intelligence: narrow-input systems that act at a scale no individual human can match. Their partial controls include independent boards, shareholder votes, courts, disclosure, regulators, public pressure, and activism. If the leaders building frontier AI strip those alignment mechanisms out of their own companies, the governance of the company becomes a preview of the governance of the machine.Read more: The EconomistMurky Mirror: Truth and ConsequencesAuthor: Esther Dyson Published: July 14, 2026Esther Dyson argues that today's institutional crisis is better viewed through the 14th century than through recent political history. Using Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror as her frame, she compares a world of famine, plague, church schism, feudal predation, and purposeless war with a present in which institutions again feel brittle, incentives are badly aligned, and power is shifting into forms that are hard to govern.The killer detail is the historical analogy between land, corporations, and AI. Dyson moves from nobles who controlled serfs and territory, to the East India Company as a quasi-sovereign business, to today's AI systems and data centers as a possible new sector that crosses and weakens both nation-states and companies. The question is whether AI becomes a new kind of private land, owned by a new nobility, or an open prairie that many people can cultivate.The pull is human attention. Dyson says the central question is not what AI will do to people, but how people will react to it: whether they can value love, kindness, embodied attention, and artisanal human presence in a world of seductive artificial offerings.Read more: SourceThe political economy of billionaire derangementAuthor: Henry Farrell Published: July 15, 2026Henry Farrell argues that the visible political radicalization of some Silicon Valley billionaires is not a random personality quirk, but a product of the political economy that made them. Starting from Tyler Cowen's dismissal of “billionaire derangement syndrome” and Tim O'Reilly's warning that Elon Musk is using shareholder capitalism to escape shareholder restraint, Farrell flips the phrase: the question is why billionaires themselves can become deranged.The killer detail is Farrell's use of Peter Thiel as both theorist and example. Thiel's Stanford lectures described startups as monarchies and founders as figures vested with unusual power, while Silicon Valley culture rewarded eccentricity, monopoly ambition, and founder exceptionalism. Farrell says those ideas combined with dense founder-investor networks, peer rivalry, and weak correction mechanisms to amplify rather than discipline princely appetites.The pull is the ideological problem for classical liberals who once saw tech wealth as an ally of markets and freedom. Farrell says commerce did not tame the passions; in parts of Silicon Valley, the passions have begun to devour markets, institutions, and the liberal story that justified them.Read more: SourceIs there any “oligarchy” to fight?Matthew Yglesias | Slow Boring | July 16, 2026Matthew Yglesias argues that “oligarchy” is a rhetorically powerful but analytically loose way to describe American politics. The post begins from Bernie Sanders' “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, Amy Klobuchar's warning about a MAGA “broligarchy,” and the long afterlife of the Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page paper that was widely summarized as showing that only the rich matter in policy outcomes. Yglesias says the evidence supports a weaker claim: affluent people and business leaders have unusual access and influence, but that is not the same as rule by a small cabal.His main distinction is between inequality and oligarchy. The Gilens-Page measure treated the top 10 percent of households as “the wealthy,” and later critics found that rich and middle-class preferences usually align; in the cases where they differ, the rich win about 53 percent of the time. Yglesias also says business executives get special access partly because their decisions are materially important to communities, jobs, investment, and local tax bases, not only because of campaign donations.The post preserves Jerusalem Demsas' counterpoint from their podcast discussion: privileged donor and business access can still violate democratic equality even if the oligarchy label overstates the structure of power. Yglesias' narrower claim is that Democrats should be precise about what problem they are trying to solve, because donor influence can also push the party left on climate and cultural issues in ways that alienate many voters.Read more: Slow BoringAINearly 200 Economists and Tech Leaders Warn of A.I. ThreatsAuthor: Ben Casselman Published: July 13, 2026Ben Casselman reports on “We Must Act Now,” a statement warning that artificial intelligence could transform the economy faster than any previous technology and that policymakers need to move faster to understand and respond. The statement says AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years, bringing risks such as large-scale job displacement as well as opportunities such as higher living standards. Nearly 200 people signed, including 15 Nobel laureates, the chief economists of OpenAI and Anthropic, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla.The killer detail is who joined the warning. Casselman notes that the signatories include economists who have historically been skeptical of Silicon Valley's most dramatic AI job-loss forecasts, including Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, the MIT professors who won the 2024 Nobel in economics. Erik Brynjolfsson, who helped organize the statement, says there has been a notable change in the profession and that economists and policymakers are not ready for the “tsunami” he sees coming.The pull is the measurement problem. The statement does not offer a specific policy menu, but calls for economists, policymakers, and industry leaders to understand the economics of transformative AI and steer it toward complementing humans. Brynjolfsson says one high priority is better data on AI's spread and impact, because current measures tell conflicting stories about job losses and which workers are most exposed.Read more: The New York TimesWhy I Didn't Sign the AI Open LetterAuthor: Andrew McAfee Published: July 13, 2026Andrew McAfee explains why he did not sign “We Must Act Now,” the AI economy statement organized in part by his longtime collaborator Erik Brynjolfsson. McAfee agrees with the letter's starting point that AI is likely to become radically more powerful over the next decade and that it is a general-purpose technology. His objection is not to urgency or to studying AI's economic effects, but to the framing of risk, displacement, and institutional steering as the first move.The killer detail is McAfee's line edit. He says the original letter comes close, then “bounces off the crossbar” by calling for incentives, guardrails, and institutions to steer AI before we know enough about its actual impacts. He points to mixed current evidence: labor-market canaries, but also rising software job postings, low unemployment for younger workers, rising real median income, and claims that AI-adopting companies are adding workers faster than low-adopting peers. His worry is that the letter leans toward upstream governance and dirigisme when the evidence may call for capability building instead.The pull is his replacement statement. McAfee keeps the three-paragraph structure but changes the emphasis: AI is likely to become radically more powerful; like earlier world-changing technologies it will raise living standards while also bringing harms and shocks; and economists, policymakers, and technology leaders should build the capabilities to respond quickly and effectively. It is a concise version of the permissionless-innovation case inside the AI policy debate.Read more: The Geek WayOwn Your WeightsAuthor: Jamin Ball Published: July 10, 2026Jamin Ball argues that the enterprise AI debate about whether companies should “own their weights” or rent models from frontier labs is asking too narrow a question. A model weight file gives a company control over a point-in-time artifact, but not durable control over the capability stack. In his framing, the weight file is a melting ice cube: it does not get worse in absolute terms, but it falls behind as frontier systems improve and enterprise needs change.The killer detail is what Ball says companies really need to own: the data flywheel, reinforcement learning infrastructure, and evaluation harness that produce and improve the model. Simply deploying an open-weights model and declaring sovereignty leaves the enterprise with yesterday's capability and no way to compound workflow-specific learning.The pull is that enterprise AI control may be less about model ownership than operating ownership. The defensible layer is the system that turns company data, edge cases, business definitions, and evaluations into continuously improving performance.Read more: Clouded JudgementWays to Think About Token PricingAuthor: Benedict Evans Published: July 9, 2026Benedict Evans argues that today's AI token prices are a temporary signal from a supply-constrained market, not a reliable guide to long-term value capture. The open question is whether foundation models keep durable pricing power or become commodity infrastructure as data-center capacity, inference efficiency, and model competition all shift. His current read is that the visible market dynamics point toward commoditization unless something materially changes.The killer detail is the mobile data analogy. Evans says cellular networks became a trillion-dollar industry with hundreds of billions in capex after data usage exploded, but carrier stocks went nowhere because value moved up the stack. Tokens may behave similarly: an opaque unit tied to marginal cost, sold through bundles, essential to everything, yet not necessarily where profits accrue.The pull is uncertainty, not prediction. Evans lists paths to model dominance, including network effects, less competition, regulation, export controls, or a lab pulling ahead on execution, but says each requires a new fact not yet visible. Without that change, the model layer looks more like infrastructure beneath the products that capture value.Read more: SourceAlex Karp Is Saying What Every Angry CEO Is Thinking About AIAuthor: Tim Higgins Published: July 11, 2026Tim Higgins reports that Palantir CEO Alex Karp has turned corporate frustration with AI labs into a public argument about enterprise control. Palantir released a white paper, “Institutional Sovereignty in the Age of AI,” laying out steps companies and governments can take to protect themselves from OpenAI, Anthropic, and other foundation-model providers. The article links that paper to Karp's CNBC appearance, where he said “something has gone completely wrong” in the relationship between AI labs and customers and argued that enterprises are paying for tokens that create little value.The killer detail is the value-capture question. Higgins writes that Karp's critique has resonated because AI labs may gain power and insight from customer data, workflows, and decision-making, even when enterprise policies say customer data are not used for training. David Sacks amplified the concern by arguing that Anthropic is moving from the model layer into vertical applications such as science, security, legal, and coding, raising the fear that model providers will watch where value is being created and then move into those markets directly.The pull is that Karp is not alone, even if his style is unusually combative. Higgins notes that Satya Nadella has also warned that companies need to retain the learnings created when they use AI models, while Mark Zuckerberg has framed Meta's new model release partly around lower-cost frontier intelligence. The article presents Karp's campaign as one sign that established technology companies and large enterprises are trying to define where they fit when AI labs become central infrastructure, application competitors, and potential IPO giants at the same time.Read more: The Wall Street JournalThe AI Agents Are Coming for Microsoft OfficeAlex Wilhelm | Cautious Optimism | July 11, 2026Alex Wilhelm argues that one of the week's quieter AI questions is whether the productivity market that Microsoft successfully moved into subscription software is now being attacked by agentic tools. The piece begins with the infrastructure backdrop: SK Hynix raised $26.5 billion in a U.S. listing while building U.S. HBM and advanced-packaging capacity, and memory, chip, and foundry companies are now priced for sustained AI demand.Wilhelm then says the AI conversation has shifted quickly from raw capability to cost per task. He cites new model releases and vendor language emphasizing cheaper agentic and coding models, faster performance, and lower dollars per task. That matters because lower costs make it more plausible for AI systems to take on routine knowledge work at scale rather than remain a premium coding assistant market.The core of the article is Microsoft Office. Wilhelm notes that Microsoft turned Office from a one-time purchase into Microsoft 365, a large recurring revenue business with tens of millions of subscribers and a major productivity segment. Now, he says, late-stage unicorns and AI labs are pushing into the same territory: Anthropic's Cowork was reportedly used mostly outside software development, OpenAI merged ChatGPT and Codex into a tool for creating sheets, slides, docs, web apps, and long-running work, and other companies are building agentic coworkers that connect business data to documents, workflows, schedules, alerts, and apps.The article's caveat is that Microsoft has survived major platform shifts before. The argument is not that Office disappears quickly, but that the definition of office software is broadening from documents and spreadsheets into AI systems that can create, monitor, and act across workplace data.Read moreWhat Is Loop Engineering, and Who Owns It?Author: Nilesh Barla Published: July 11, 2026Nilesh Barla argues that “loop engineering” is becoming a distinct discipline because production AI agents now fail less at single prompts than at runtime: when to stop, what state to preserve, and how to recover after a bad step. Prompt engineering shapes one model call, and context engineering shapes what the model sees, but loop engineering shapes what a sequence of calls actually does.The killer detail is the three-primitives frame. Barla says a real agent loop needs halt conditions, state carryover, and recovery paths, then maps teams across five maturity levels. At the lowest level, an agent is just a model call in a for-loop with a step cap and raw history; by the higher levels, the system has structured state, explicit planning, replay, evaluation, and self-repair.The pull is organizational. If agents are becoming production systems rather than demos, someone has to own the runtime itself. The loop engineer is the role Barla gives to the person responsible for making long-running agent work dependable.Read more: Adaline LabsThe Fight Against AI Data Centers Is Just BeginningEmma Roth | The Verge | July 12, 2026Emma Roth argues that community resistance to data centers has moved from an early warning sign into a national political fight as AI facilities grow larger, more power-hungry, and more visible to nearby residents. The article starts with Apple's failed 2015 plan for a $1 billion data center in Athenry, Ireland, where a small group of residents challenged the project over noise, light pollution, flooding, traffic, and wildlife effects until Apple abandoned it in 2018.The current data-center buildout is presented as much larger and more contentious. Roth writes that residents now cite rising energy costs, water quality, noise, light pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions, while the U.S. Energy Information Administration expects commercial energy demand to surpass residential demand this year because of AI data centers and Goldman Sachs expects data-center power demand to double by 2027.The central evidence comes from Data Center Watch, which says protesters blocked or delayed at least 75 U.S. projects worth $130 billion from January to March, with active opposition groups more than doubling from 396 at the end of 2025 to 833 by the end of the first quarter of 2026. Roth also cites QTS abandoning a $12 billion Wisconsin campus, Delaware City regulators blocking a 580-acre project under the Coastal Zone Act, opposition stopping a QTS project in Prince William County, and pressure that pushed Kevin O'Leary to downsize the proposed 40,000-acre Project Stratos in Utah.The policy section describes a split between federal acceleration and local resistance. President Trump has treated data centers as part of the AI race with China and fast-tracked construction, while some Republican candidates are distancing themselves from that position ahead of midterms. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have proposed a moratorium until price and environmental protections exist, bipartisan lawmakers are backing ratepayer-protection measures, and states including Florida, Idaho, and Washington have passed rules on cost shifting, water use, and tax breaks. Roth's caveat is that the policy patchwork is still incomplete, leaving many communities to fight project by project.Read more6 months to live for open modelsAuthor: Nathan Lambert Published: July 12, 2026Nathan Lambert argues that open-weight AI models are facing their most serious policy test so far because U.S. officials are beginning to discuss concrete controls rather than abstract safety concerns. He says reported White House conversations about a new executive order may initially target Chinese-origin models and government use, but could create a broader review habit for frontier open models. His forecast is that a model above the capability range of GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.8, or GLM-5.2 could trigger a ban or indefinite delay within six months.The post separates two policy fights that are becoming intertwined: distillation and frontier capability. Lambert says the distillation campaign against Chinese models has become a form of regulatory capture because Anthropic and other closed-model companies would gain economically if Chinese open models were banned. He does not dismiss IP protection, but argues that if a closed model's capabilities are dangerous enough to justify restricting open models, the lab also has to explain why those capabilities are exposed through a queryable API. He cites unauthorized access to Anthropic's Mythos private beta as evidence that APIs are not automatically secure.The broader claim is that a unilateral U.S. ban would hurt positive actors more than bad actors if comparable open models remain available elsewhere. Lambert says the only durable ceiling would require global agreement, which does not exist, and that open models can improve safety by allowing broad inspection, adaptation, and understanding. His proposed near-term off-ramps are a strong U.S. open model release from companies such as Microsoft, Meta, or Reflection, and a broader coalition of open-source beneficiaries lobbying for safe rollout rather than prohibition.Read more: SourceAmericans Deserve a Dividend From AI Companies' RichesAuthor: Scott Stanford Published: July 14, 2026Scott Stanford argues that proposals to give the government a stake in AI companies miss the point unless ordinary citizens directly receive and control the upside. Sam Altman has discussed giving up equity in OpenAI, Washington already owns a stake in Intel, Nvidia is sharing China chip revenue, and Bernie Sanders wants large AI labs to contribute half their stock to a sovereign wealth fund. Stanford says those ideas all park value with the state, not with people.The killer detail is New Carlisle, Indiana, where AWS's Project Rainier is turning cornfields into one of the world's largest AI superclusters. The project is planned to run up to a million chips, draw more than two gigawatts of power, and represents an investment that has grown from $11 billion to $13.8 billion. Stanford uses that local transformation to argue that AI's public bargain should be visible at the household level.The pull is design. A citizen AI dividend would have to specify who earns a stake, how they hold it, and when they see cash. Without that mechanism, the AI wealth debate remains a fight over government balance sheets rather than public ownership.Read more: SourceWho Gets to Define the Frontier?Author: Mark Daley Published: July 14, 2026Mark Daley argues that Demis Hassabis is right to call for a serious institution to verify frontier AI systems, but that the power to test models is also the power to govern them. Hassabis's proposed Frontier AI Standards Body would get privileged pre-release access to advanced models, testing compute, held-out evaluations, support from national labs and security agencies, third-party auditors, and eventually authority to block models from the American market or coordinate a slowdown.The killer detail is Daley's constitutional objection. He says the proposal sometimes looks like a scientific lab, a standards body, an industry regulator, a licensing authority, and an emergency security council at once. Combining those roles because each requires technical expertise would be like putting the central bank, auditor-general, and Supreme Court in one building and calling it efficient.The pull is standard-setting. Daley's concern is not that verification is unnecessary, but that whoever writes the tests, decides what passes, adjudicates disputes, and grants market access may end up defining the frontier itself.Read more: SourceGPT-Red: Unlocking Self-Improvement for RobustnessOpenAI | OpenAI | July 15, 2026OpenAI describes GPT-Red as an internal automated red-teaming model trained to find prompt-injection vulnerabilities at a scale human red teams cannot match. The post says AI systems increasingly encounter third-party data through browsers, connected apps, local files, and tools, creating opportunities for malicious instructions hidden in emails, webpages, tool responses, or code repositories. Human red-teaming remains part of OpenAI's safety process, but the company says it is time-intensive and cannot generate enough diverse adversarial examples for model training.The system is trained through self-play reinforcement learning, with GPT-Red rewarded for eliciting valid failures and defender models rewarded for resisting attacks while still completing their tasks. OpenAI says the training environments specify threat models across settings such as local files, webpage banners, email bodies, and tool outputs. The model is kept separate from deployed production models because it is intentionally trained with malicious capabilities.OpenAI reports that GPT-Red generalized beyond its training set, including an internal replication of the indirect prompt-injection arena from Dziemian et al. (2025), where it found successful attacks in 84% of scenarios compared with 13% for human red-teamers. The post also says GPT-Red transferred attacks from simulation to a live autonomous vending-machine agent, causing price changes and order cancellations, and outperformed a prompted GPT-5.5 baseline against a Codex CLI agent on held-out data-exfiltration tasks.The article's main robustness claim is that OpenAI has used GPT-Red and predecessor models in training since GPT-5.3, with later GPT releases becoming more resistant to prompt injections. It says GPT-5.6 Sol has six times fewer failures on OpenAI's hardest direct prompt-injection benchmark than the best production model from four months earlier, that a “Fake Chain-of-Thought” attack class fell from more than 95% success against GPT-5.1 to below 10% against GPT-5.6 Sol, and that GPT-5.6 Sol fails on only 0.05% of GPT-Red's direct prompt injections. OpenAI says general capabilities and targeted over-refusal evaluations were not harmed, and says a preprint with more details will follow.Read moreAnthropic, Blackstone bet the next trillion-dollar AI business is implementation, not just modelsRebecca Bellan | TechCrunch | July 15, 2026Rebecca Bellan reports that Ode with Anthropic is the $1.5 billion AI implementation company launched by Anthropic with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs, and other backers. The article says the venture reflects a growing belief among frontier AI labs that enterprise adoption requires more than better models: customers need engineers who can embed inside businesses and turn AI into working systems.Ode was originally conceived by Blackstone after it used both large consulting firms and smaller AI services boutiques across its portfolio companies. TechCrunch reports that Fractional AI, an AI engineering services startup, stood out and was acquired by the joint venture shortly after the venture was announced. Fractional now forms the foundation of Ode, which has 100 engineers and works closely with Anthropic's applied AI team to identify where the technology can affect specific businesses.Ode CEO Chris Taylor tells TechCrunch that the company could someday become a trillion-dollar business if it scales without losing quality. He says an ideal customer is one whose CEO treats the AI project as a top one or two priority, whether it is a major product feature or the reworking of a core business process. Ode will operate under a “Claude-first” principle, using Anthropic technology whenever possible, but the article says it can use rival AI products when needed.The article's central implementation argument comes from Ode chief technologist Eddie Siegel, who says model selection matters but is not where most of the engineering effort goes. He compares it to the choice of programming language in software: one ingredient in a system that still has to be engineered. Bellan writes that Ode's challenge is hiring and training enough elite generalist engineers, many of them former founders, while competing with OpenAI's The Deployment Company and consulting giants that have built their own forward-deployed engineering teams.Read moreVint Cerf is working on a plan to unleash AI agents on the open internetTim Fernholz | TechCrunch | July 15, 2026Tim Fernholz reports that Vint Cerf, after leaving Google, is advising Innovation Labs on an open architecture for identifying AI agents online. Innovation Labs is a subsidiary of Identity Digital, a DNS registry company, and its proposal is to use domain-name infrastructure as part of a system for agent identity, accountability, and auditability. The premise is that agents will need a way to identify themselves if they move beyond proprietary systems and begin interacting across the open internet.The concrete proposal is DNSid, a registry that links an AI agent to an existing internet domain and uses cryptographic proofs to log its registration over time. Innovation Labs says it is trialing the standard with unnamed hyperscalers and identity companies. Cerf frames the problem around authority and accountability: what authority an agent has, where that authority came from, who is accountable for the agent's behavior, how its identity is established, and why anyone should trust it.The article's caveat is that standards are still emerging and agents are more active than static domains. Cerf says the period may be both fascinating and exasperating because the functionality is powerful and interoperability is unresolved. He compares the adoption problem to TCP/IP: competing systems may not work together until users push for functional interoperation. He also says an agentic economy is not inevitable, but that people will try to build it because delegating work to agents will be easier.Read more: TechCrunchxai-org/grok-build, now open sourceAuthor: Simon Willison Published: July 15, 2026Simon Willison argues that xAI's decision to open-source Grok Build is best understood as a trust repair move after a severe privacy failure. The CLI had triggered backlash when users realized that running it in a directory could upload the entire directory to xAI's Google Cloud buckets, including one user's reported SSH keys, password manager database, documents, photos, and videos. xAI disabled the feature, said previously retained coding data would be deleted, and released the code under Apache 2.0.The killer detail is what the codebase reveals. Willison counts 844,530 lines of Rust, only about 3% of which appears vendored, and finds remnants of the upload system still present but disabled: gcs.rs contains Google Cloud upload code, while upload_session_state() now returns a hard-coded session_state_upload_unavailable error. He also notes copied or ported tool implementations from Codex and OpenCode, prompt files, and a terminal Mermaid renderer.The pull is that terminal coding agents are becoming large, intricate software systems in their own right. The privacy failure mattered because these tools operate inside the directories where developers keep their most sensitive work; the open-source release matters because trust now depends on inspecting what an agent can see, send, and do.Read more: SourceThe Pulse: What can we learn from Bun's rapid Rust rewrite with AI?Author: Gergely Orosz and Ivan Klaric Published: July 16, 2026Gergely Orosz and Ivan Klaric argue that Bun's AI-assisted rewrite from Zig to Rust is a practical sign of how software engineering changes when models can take on large, bounded migrations with clear feedback loops. The piece does not treat the rewrite as magic: Jarred Sumner first spent hours turning design judgment into a detailed porting guide, then used adversarial review, parallel agents, compiler errors, and tests to force the work toward correctness.The killer detail is the scale. Bun had 535,496 lines of Zig, 1,448 files, and 22 million monthly downloads, making a conventional rewrite a year-long freeze the team could not justify. Using Fable, Sumner split the work across 64 agents, produced about 6,500 commits, and got the migration done in 11 days at an estimated API cost of $165,000.The pull is economic, not theatrical. If a one- or two-year migration can become an 11-day project, AI coding is not just faster autocomplete; it changes which technical debts are worth paying down.Read more: SourceOrphan risks at the frontier of artificial intelligenceAuthor: Andrew Maynard Published: July 16, 2026Andrew Maynard argues that frontier AI safety frameworks are creating “orphan risks”: harms that companies can see, but do not formally own because they are hard to quantify, do not fit catastrophic-risk thresholds, or fall outside audit-friendly compliance machinery. His target is not existing frontier safety work, but the narrowing effect that happens when private companies decide which risks count as governable.The killer detail is Maynard's contrast between measurable model dangers and threats to value. He points to Meta's three-day Galactica collapse, OpenAI's 2023 board crisis, safety-team departures, and wellbeing litigation as examples of risks that damaged trust, culture, legitimacy, or users without fitting cleanly into conventional model-risk categories. The proposed fix is an orphan-risk register: a public record of risks a company considered and chose not to manage, with reasons.The pull is accountability. Frontier developers' internal scoping choices have become a de facto layer of public governance, so the question is no longer only which risks they manage, but which risks they quietly leave outside the frame.Read more: SourceThe Lab of the Future Should Feel Like a Data CenterLatent.Space with Andy Beam and Rafa Gomez-Bombarelli | Latent.Space | July 16, 2026Latent.Space interviews Lila Sciences CTO Andy Beam and chief science officer for physical sciences Rafa Gomez-Bombarelli about the company's attempt to build an AI-run science factory. The post describes Lila's thesis as treating the lab itself as an “infinite token generator”: if internet data drove the first era of AI scaling, experimentally verified scientific data may be the next scarce training source. Lila is trying to produce that data with robotics, lab instruments, orchestration software, and AI models wired into the wet lab.The central analogy is the lab as data center. Instruments are nodes on a graph, a magnetically levitating transport layer moves materials between them, and experiment scheduling looks like a compute queue. Beam says Lila is not simply an automation company, because the point is not just throughput; it is flexibility, generalization, and experiment capture. The post says Lila has built more than 10 trillion experimentally validated “scientific reasoning tokens,” not internet text or biological sequences.The interview ranges across biology, chemistry, drug discovery, materials science, and the limits of automation. It notes that Lila rebuilt one gas-sorption measurement to run roughly 2,500 times faster, claims its general models can transfer priors from small-molecule chemistry to metal-organic frameworks for carbon capture, and describes model-suggested platinum-group-free electrocatalysts that moved from looking boring or wrong to becoming strong performers. The caveats are physical: experiments have runtimes, biology cannot always be accelerated, chains of thought can be unreliable narrators, and reward hacking becomes more dangerous when a model controls a real lab.Read more: Latent.SpaceWhy AMI Labs' Alexandre LeBrun won't call his AI “AGI” or “superintelligence”Kate Park | TechCrunch | July 16, 2026Kate Park interviews AMI Labs CEO Alexandre LeBrun about why Yann LeCun's world-model startup avoids the language of “AGI” and “superintelligence.” LeBrun says the terms are not useful because they lack stable definitions: “We never used the word AGI. And I just noticed that nobody is using it anymore; they switched to superintelligence.” His argument is that the practical frontier is not a label, but whether AI systems can understand and predict real-world states.The article explains the world-model thesis by contrasting language prediction with physical-state prediction. A large language model predicts the next word; a world model predicts the next state, such as what happens when a glass tips over. LeBrun says LLMs remain complementary and efficient for language, but the physical world is where current AI is weak. Robotics is the clearest case: hardware has advanced quickly, but robots are still brittle outside controlled routines because they lack context and situational understanding.AMI is still pre-product, but TechCrunch reports that LeBrun was in Seoul looking for industrial partners, researchers, and global companies. He says world models cannot be built entirely inside a lab because they need access to real environments. That is why South Korea appeals to AMI: robotics, semiconductors, manufacturing, and fast adoption create the kind of hardware-heavy context that software-only AI has barely touched.Read more: TechCrunchKimi K3 Tech Blog: Open Frontier IntelligenceKimi | Kimi | July 16, 2026Kimi introduces Kimi K3 as an open 3T-class frontier model aimed at coding, knowledge work, reasoning, multimodality, and long-context agentic use. The source describes the model as a 2.8T-parameter system built on Kimi Delta Attention and Attention Residuals, with native multimodality and a 1M-token context window. It says Moonshot AI plans to release model weights by July 27.The post presents K3 through benchmark and use-case sections rather than as a general product announcement. It reports results across coding, productivity, agentic, and multimodal evaluations, including DeepSWE, Terminal-Bench 2.1, Program Bench, SWE Marathon, FrontierSWE, PostTrain Bench, OfficeQA Pro, SpreadsheetBench 2, MCP Atlas, AutomationBench, BrowseComp, GDPval-AA v2, AA-Briefcase, MMMU-Pro, MathVision, BabyVision, OmniDocBench, and PerceptionBench. The source says all reported K3 results use maximum reasoning effort with temperature and top-p set to 1.0, and that different benchmark comparisons use KimiCode, Claude Code, or Codex harnesses depending on the test.Kimi's caveats are unusually concrete. The limitations section says K3 was trained in preserved thinking-history mode, so quality may become unstable if an agent harness does not pass historical thinking content correctly or if an ongoing session switches to K3 midstream. It also says K3's emphasis on long-horizon tasks can make it excessively proactive when it encounters minor issues or ambiguous intent, and recommends imposing explicit behavioral constraints for applications that require strict boundaries. The post adds that K3 remains behind Claude Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol in user experience despite being competitive overall.Read moreVenture CapitalThree Years InAuthor: Tomasz Tunguz Published: July 10, 2026Tomasz Tunguz marks Theory Ventures' third anniversary by arguing that AI's central market effect is time compression. In his telling, model release cycles, company revenue milestones, enterprise adoption, and venture categories have all accelerated. Seed, Series A, and Series B still exist as financing labels, but they no longer cleanly describe company maturity when some seed rounds are larger than IPOs and the best AI companies can mature much earlier than prior software companies.The killer detail is the shift from models to inference. Tunguz argues that inference has become the dominant AI market because workloads and buyer preferences are fragmenting: video, batch, local, agentic, and real-time tasks each create different infrastructure needs. He compares this to databases splitting into OLTP, OLAP, vector, and streaming categories, with AI pushing the same specialization into inference infrastructure.The pull is that Theory sees the AI-native venture firm as part of the same pattern. The firm says it has analyzed twice as many investment opportunities with three investors working alongside a nine-person intelligence organization, using agents and research systems to map markets, source companies, and support diligence. The piece is both a market map and a statement about how venture itself is being rebuilt by the technology it funds.Read more: LinkedInVenture Has Rarely Looked More BifurcatedAuthor: Beezer Clarkson Published: July 14, 2026Beezer Clarkson points to PitchBook's Q2 report as evidence that the U.S. venture market has split into two very different realities. AI now accounts for more than 60 percent of all U.S. venture deal value, meaning the headline market can look active and well-funded even while much of the non-AI market is dealing with a much colder liquidity and fundraising environment.The thread uses that split as the setup for Clarkson's latest Origins episode with Alec Litowitz, founder of Magnetar and QStar Capital and one of Citadel's original founding partners. Clarkson says markets like this are periods of genuine uncertainty, not merely ordinary risk, which is why Litowitz's Adaptability Quotient framework is relevant.The embedded clip makes the liquidity point concrete. Litowitz says DPI is “the resolution of uncertainty” because it converts an uncertain investment into actual cash returned to LPs. In his framing, a realized dollar is a real mark, while TVPI remains uncertain until it is realized.The killer detail is the distinction between pricing risk and resolving uncertainty. Litowitz's perspective matters because QStar is a SpaceX investor and Clarkson says the conversation happened just before one of venture's most consequential IPOs. The episode's stated questions are why venture remains a way to gain exposure to innovation, how AI is changing what is investable, why liquidity is ultimately a function of time, and why uncertainty requires a different decision framework from risk.Read more: XThe Best Angel Investors in the US: Who Backs the Most Unicorns, and Who's Active NowAuthor: Ilya Strebulaev Published: July 10, 2026Ilya Strebulaev ranks angels, angel groups, accelerators, and incubators by lifetime U.S. unicorn investments, counting checks written before a company reached unicorn status. The top of the combined list is dominated by organizations: Y Combinator leads with 113 unicorn investments, followed by Plug and Play at 52 and 500 Global at 41. Sand Hill Angels is the highest-ranked angel group at 31.The killer detail is how quickly the list changes below the biggest accelerators. Strebulaev says 271 of the 304 investors in the Top 200 are individuals, or 89%. In the top 100, individuals are 91%. That makes the market underneath the large accelerator counts look much more personal: mostly operators and individual angels writing early checks from their own networks.The pull is the ranking's own caveat. Strebulaev writes that every lifetime leaderboard has a blind spot because many of the unicorns behind those totals were founded a decade or more ago, and some angels have since moved into formal funds, slowed down, or stopped investing. His post therefore separates lifetime performance from recent cohorts, including companies founded in 2015 or later and 2020 or later. For founders or allocators making current decisions, that distinction matters: a career record and a current record are not the same measure.Read more: Ilya StrebulaevAre Prediction Markets Doomed to Fail?Author: Contrary Published: July 16, 2026Contrary argues that prediction markets' current boom depends on whether platforms can prove they are more than regulated gambling with exchange-style branding. Kalshi and Polymarket have reached mass cultural, investor, and regulatory attention, but the article says the underlying idea is old: academic markets, corporate forecasting tools, Intrade, PredictIt, and other predecessors all struggled with the same linked problems of liquidity, legality, and user appeal.The killer detail is the comparison with sportsbooks. Prediction markets present themselves as peer-to-peer, transparent, and non-house-based, but sports contracts reportedly account for more than 90 percent of Kalshi trading, and the article says the platforms keep a much thinner slice of volume than sportsbooks. A market can therefore show sports-betting-scale handle while generating far less revenue.The pull is that the product's hardest problem may be distribution of wins. If a small group of sharp traders captures most profits while casual users lose interest, prediction markets may become valuable data feeds and professional tools before they become durable consumer networks.Read more: SourceRegulationExclusive: The Next Frontier of the Deportation Wars: College CampusesAuthor: Adrian Carrasquillo Published: July 11, 2026Adrian Carrasquillo reports that college campuses are becoming a new front in the fight over immigration enforcement because automatic license plate readers can turn ordinary campus security infrastructure into searchable location data. His thesis is that Flock Safety's camera network, even without direct ICE or DHS contracts, can feed deportation enforcement through local police partnerships and data-sharing practices.The killer detail is the campaign target. The Emergency Campaign to Support Higher Education, working with Schools Drop ICE, is focusing on 75 colleges and universities publicly identified as having Flock contracts. Flock says it has no ICE or DHS contracts, but activists argue the risk comes through local agencies that coordinate with federal authorities and run searches on their behalf.The pull is broader than immigration. Carrasquillo notes that license plate readers have already been abused by officers for stalking, and that Flock's AI search features can identify more than plates, including bumper stickers. A campus safety tool can become a political surveillance system when the data layer is searchable.Read more: The BulwarkThe Supreme Court Broke Independent Agencies. Here's a Way to Slow the Damage.Author: Todd Phillips Published: July 12, 2026Todd Phillips argues that the Supreme Court's decision in Trump v. Slaughter damaged independent agencies by ending for-cause removal protections, but did not leave Congress powerless. The ruling weakens the old model in which commissioners at bodies such as the FTC, NLRB, CPSC, SEC, and CFTC could be insulated from dismissal over policy disagreements. Phillips says the next fight is whether presidents can turn nominally bipartisan commissions into one-party instruments.The killer detail is the procedural fix: quorum rules. Phillips proposes that Congress require bipartisan slates of commissioners to be seated before independent agencies can act. A president could still fire commissioners, as the Court now permits, but if those firings broke quorum, the agency would be unable to proceed until replacements were confirmed. The guardrail would
This week's video transcript summary is here. You can click on any bulleted section to see the actual transcript. Thanks to Granola for its software.There was an issue with this only going to paid subscribers, so sending it again. Apologies to those who get it twice. I appreciate being paid so feel free to upgrade if you enjoy TWTW.EditorialIntelligence: Who Owns it?This week the word “AI” feels too small.AI is a technology. Intelligence is its product. And if intelligence is the product, the question is no longer just: Which model is best? Who has the cheapest tokens? Who owns the weights? Who controls the data center? Those are important questions, but they are lower in the stack.The bigger question is simpler and more political:Who owns intelligence?That sounds abstract until you make it concrete. Intelligence is becoming something companies can capture, package, serve, meter, route, improve, and sell.It can write code, answer questions, design molecules, automate offices, run agents, draft legal work, advise scientists, serve consumers, and reshape workflows. It is not merely software. It is a general-purpose capability. And all humans could benefit from more of it.General-purpose capabilities have a habit of becoming public questions. But the default answer, that public good is best delivered by government, is the wrong answer in this context.The Product Is IntelligenceWe should stop talking about AI as a feature and start talking about intelligence as the universal thing that is delivered as an input to the world.Water is an input. Electricity is an input. Literacy is an input. Connectivity is an input. Once a society depends on them, access stops being optional. Nobody needs government to build every well, power plant, school, or network. But everybody understands that a civilization cannot be organized around less than universal and reliable access to foundational inputs.Intelligence is reaching that level of importance now that we all know it is real.Government should not own it, operate it, or develop it. Quite the opposite. Companies are the right actors to build fast, compete hard, improve models, serve customers, and discover the real use cases. Self-interest is a useful framing here. Markets are good at finding demand, reducing costs, and turning invention into services people actually use.Companies are the right operators, developers, and owners. But that does not settle the real question of who owns the benefits. That is an economic question.If intelligence becomes metered infrastructure, what happens to the value it creates?The Ownership StackThis week's articles keep circling the same issue from different directions but in the nature of ‘circling' never quite nail it.Jamin Ball's “Own Your Weights” starts with the enterprise version of the question. Owning a model file is not enough. The durable asset is the loop: the data flywheel, the evaluations, the reinforcement system, the workflow learning, and the operating context that lets capability compound.Benedict Evans' “Ways to Think About Token Pricing” adds the market layer. Tokens may become essential, abundant, and cheap, like mobile data. But being essential does not guarantee that the token layer captures the value. The money may move up the stack to whoever owns the workflow, the customer, the distribution, or the application.Alex Karp's fight with the labs, reported in “Alex Karp Is Saying What Every Angry CEO Is Thinking About AI”, is the same argument in sharper enterprise language. Companies are afraid that model providers will not just sell intelligence, but learn from customer workflows and then move into the markets where those workflows create value. The “All-in” group are echoing Karp's view.And “What Is Loop Engineering, and Who Owns It?” names the new contested terrain. The loop is where intelligence meets the world. Whoever owns the loop owns the learning. Whoever owns the learning owns the compounding asset.That is why “who owns intelligence?” is not a slogan. It is the question under the model layer, the application layer, the enterprise layer, and the economic layer.Because intelligence is the product, the tools creating it are fragmented and competitive. So there is no logic in trying to discuss this at the level of a single company or set of tools and models.The Old Promise Was That Commerce Would Tame PowerThe essays this week give the historical backdrop.Deirdre McCloskey, in “What Really Caused the Industrial Revolution”, argues that modern growth came not simply from capital accumulation, but from a change in permission: ordinary people were allowed to innovate, trade, build, and be honored for it.That matters because intelligence could be another expansion of permission. It could make more people capable of building, learning, creating, coding, researching, translating, selling, and coordinating. It could lower the cost of competence.But only if access is broad.Paul Krugman's “AI in an Age of Oligarchy” warns that the same technology lands differently in different political economies. A new general-purpose technology entering a broad, open, upwardly mobile society is one thing. The same technology entering a concentrated economy, with extreme wealth and weak counterweights, is another.Tim O'Reilly's Economist essay, “Elon Musk is building a form of capitalism that Adam Smith would hate”, makes the governance point more directly. The old liberal hope was that commerce would tame arbitrary power. Markets, boards, courts, shareholders, disclosure, and competition would discipline the prince.But what if the prince uses markets to escape discipline?Henry Farrell's “political economy of billionaire derangement” pushes the same point. Founder culture, monopoly ambition, peer rivalry, weak correction mechanisms, and vast private control can amplify appetites rather than restrain them.The danger with intelligence is not that companies build it. They should. Companies build it, meter it, use public tolerance and public infrastructure to scale it, learn from everyone who uses it. All of those things are inevitable and healthy. Market forces will sort out winners from losers. The real danger is that the winners treat all of the surplus produced as purely private.Metered Intelligence Creates SurplusIf metering is not the problem, what is?The problem is pretending that metered intelligence creates value only for the metering entity. Metering water is only tolerated as a public good. If the public were blackmailed by a private water company with the threat of no water we would all rebel.Once we understand that the product of AI is intelligence we can see that every time intelligence is used, there is the immediate transaction: the user pays, the provider serves.But there is also system value. Usage creates signals. Workflows reveal patterns. Prompts, corrections, failures, preferences, integrations, edge cases, and business processes all help define where intelligence is useful and how it should improve. Intelligence breeds intelligence.Even when customer data is contractually protected, the market learns. The platform learns where demand is. The product team learns which workflows matter. The ecosystem learns which jobs are vulnerable, which tasks are automatable, and which parts of the economy can be reorganized around machine intelligence.So the surplus is not born in a vacuum.It rests on public science, public education, public data exhaust, public law, public infrastructure, public energy systems, public tolerance for data centers, and billions of human interactions. It is served by companies, but it is not made only by companies.This is why “Americans Deserve a Dividend From AI Companies' Riches” belongs at the center of this week's issue. The detail can be debated. The principle is harder to dismiss. If intelligence becomes a new foundational resource, then some part of the wealth it creates should flow back to the people whose society makes it possible. Intelligence did not suddenly appear. AI is built on the entire history of human intelligence. It benefits from it and at the same time evolves it.Not Nationalization. A Human Wealth Fund.If intelligence belongs to everybody, some conclude that government ownership of intelligence is the right outcome.Governments are not well suited to build, operate, or improve intelligence. They will move too slowly, regulate too early, politicize the wrong things, and confuse economic participation with operational control.Andrew McAfee's “Why I Didn't Sign the AI Open Letter” is useful here. His objection is not that the technology is unimportant. It is that steering too hard before we understand the shape of the change can become its own failure mode. Marc Andreessen's satire of AI regulation is less policy than temperament, but it captures a real Silicon Valley fear: that regulation can become permission, capture, and incumbency before it becomes wisdom.That fear should be taken seriously.But it does not answer the economic question. It answers only the operational one.How can the economic benefits of intelligence be distributed? The better answer is a sovereign human wealth fund.Call it a sovereign wealth fund if you must, but the phrase is too national. Intelligence will not respect borders. The leading companies are global. The models, chips, data centers, agents, platforms, and workflows will be transnational from the beginning. If the value created by intelligence is global, then the mechanism for sharing some of that value should begin with the companies global enough to capture it. The nice thing about xAI, OpenAI, and Anthropic is that they are supranational.These companies own and operate intelligence. Let them compete. Let them profit. Let them keep the incentives that make the system improve. But if intelligence is the new water, the wealth it creates cannot belong only to the companies that meter it. And they, themselves, have the power to fix it, even more than governments.Access will become a Human Right; Ownership Is the Economic DesignThis is where human rights come in. There is no right to access an AI model, yet. But there will soon be a need to change that.Not as a claim that every person is entitled to every frontier model at every moment for free. That is not serious. Capacity has costs. Models have costs. Inference has costs. Data centers have costs. Although those costs will decline over time, possibly quite quickly as self-learning models address costs.The claim is more basic: in a world where intelligence becomes a primary input into education, work, health, science, citizenship, creativity, and economic agency, baseline access to intelligence starts to look like a civic requirement.That could mean public access layers. It could mean education credits. It could mean open models. It could mean AI dividends. It could mean public-interest compute. It could mean taxes on rents. It could mean a company-initiated human wealth fund that returns some of the upside to society without handing the operating system to the state. The latter could couple wealth growth with universal distribution of ownership.The exact mechanism matters. But the distinction matters more.Government should not own intelligence. It should be universally available. And people should have a claim on the wealth intelligence creates.The Frontier Is Also PhysicalThe abstraction is not weightless.“The Fight Against AI Data Centers Is Just Beginning”, “New York becomes the first state to enact a data center moratorium”, Reuters on pollution from Musk's xAI power project, and DataGravity's “Who Captures Value in AI Infrastructure?” all say the same thing from the ground up.Intelligence uses land. It uses power. It uses water. It uses chips. It uses grid capacity. It uses neighborhoods. It uses public patience.That makes the value question unavoidable. A society can accept the buildout if the buildout is legible as shared progress. It will resist it if the costs are local, the profits are private, and the benefits feel enclosed.Who Owns the “Loop”?The week ends where it began.“Anthropic and Blackstone” are betting that implementation is the next trillion-dollar business. “Vint Cerf” is working on identity for agents on the open internet. “GPT-Red” points toward systems that improve their own robustness. “Kimi K3” adds another open frontier model to the global mix.The model race continues. The deployment race is accelerating. The governance race is behind.My view is this:The central product of this era is intelligence. Companies have figured out how to capture it, package it, serve it, and meter it. That is good. It should stay in the hands of builders who have the incentive to make it better.But intelligence is too foundational to become just another private toll booth. A significant part of it will turn out to be free to users.As intelligence becomes a general-purpose resource, then access to it becomes a human-capability question, and the surplus from it becomes an economic-justice question. Not because government should run it. Because government should not run it. The operating layer belongs with companies. The wealth question belongs with everyone. But companies are best placed to turn that into a process of distribution.The question is not whether companies should build intelligence. They should.The question is whether humanity gets a stake in the wealth created by the thing that may soon become its most important shared input.Contents* Essays* Deirdre McCloskey on What Really Caused the Industrial Revolution* AI in an Age of Oligarchy* Elon Musk is building a form of capitalism that Adam Smith would hate* Murky Mirror: Truth and Consequences* The political economy of billionaire derangement* Is there any “oligarchy” to fight?* AI* Nearly 200 Economists and Tech Leaders Warn of A.I. Threats* Why I Didn't Sign the AI Open Letter* Own Your Weights* Ways to Think About Token Pricing* Alex Karp Is Saying What Every Angry CEO Is Thinking About AI* The AI Agents Are Coming for Microsoft Office* What Is Loop Engineering, and Who Owns It?* The Fight Against AI Data Centers Is Just Beginning* 6 months to live for open models* Americans Deserve a Dividend From AI Companies' Riches* Who Gets to Define the Frontier?* GPT-Red: Unlocking Self-Improvement for Robustness* Anthropic, Blackstone bet the next trillion-dollar AI business is implementation, not just models* Vint Cerf is working on a plan to unleash AI agents on the open internet* xai-org/grok-build, now open source* The Pulse: What can we learn from Bun's rapid Rust rewrite with AI?* Orphan risks at the frontier of artificial intelligence* The Lab of the Future Should Feel Like a Data Center* Why AMI Labs' Alexandre LeBrun won't call his AI “AGI” or “superintelligence”* Kimi K3 Tech Blog: Open Frontier Intelligence* Venture Capital* Three Years In* Venture Has Rarely Looked More Bifurcated* The Best Angel Investors in the US: Who Backs the Most Unicorns, and Who's Active Now* Are Prediction Markets Doomed to Fail?* Regulation* Exclusive: The Next Frontier of the Deportation Wars: College Campuses* The Supreme Court Broke Independent Agencies. Here's a Way to Slow the Damage.* India's crackdown on a new WhatsApp feature risks setting a global precedent* Let's build a children's public internet* Computer cops* Google is better at playing the AI regulations game* Infrastructure* Who Captures Value in AI Infrastructure?* New York becomes the first state to enact a data center moratorium* Pollution from Musk's unpermitted xAI power project hits hardest in Black communities* Interview of the Week* The End of the End of Geography* Startup of the Week* Radical AI's Joseph Krause: The Scientist Building The “Waymo” Lab For New Materials* Post of the Week* Marc Andreessen on AI RegulationEssaysDeirdre McCloskey on What Really Caused the Industrial RevolutionYascha Mounk and Deirdre McCloskey | Persuasion | July 11, 2026Yascha Mounk interviews Deirdre McCloskey about her argument that the modern world's economic liftoff came less from capital accumulation than from a change in ideas. McCloskey says both left and right versions of the conventional story rely too heavily on investment: the left stresses exploitation and surplus value, while the right stresses virtuous saving by capitalists. Her objection is historical and economic. Human beings had always invested, from irrigation works and Roman roads to seed grain, and simple accumulation quickly runs into diminishing returns.McCloskey's alternative is that northwestern Europe, first Holland, then Britain and Scotland, and then the North American colonies, developed a liberal ideology that changed who was allowed to innovate and be honored for it. The conversation links that shift to the erosion of inherited hierarchy, the spread of dignity for ordinary commercial life, and a moral vocabulary in which liberalism is not merely procedural but connected to virtues and values. The point is not that machines, coal, trade, and institutions did not matter, but that they do not explain the scale and timing of modern enrichment without a cultural permission structure for innovation.The interview also turns to the contemporary defense of liberalism. Mounk frames the series around the worry that liberalism is often treated as too thin to command allegiance, while its opponents speak more directly to moral passions. McCloskey's case is that liberal societies became rich because they dignified experimentation and ordinary enterprise, and that liberals need to recover the moral language behind that claim.Read moreAI in an Age of OligarchyPaul Krugman | Paul Krugman | July 12, 2026Paul Krugman frames AI as a major technological shock arriving inside an already unequal political economy. The post says AI's economic and social effects may take years to understand, but argues that the setting matters now: America has much greater wealth concentration and political inequality than it did in the 1950s and 1960s, when progressive taxation, stronger regulation, and more active antitrust might have contained some of the destructive effects of a new technology.Krugman's opening claim is that the same technology would likely have different consequences in a more level society. In today's United States, he writes, extreme wealth is both a cause and effect of policies that favor a small elite, including low effective taxes on capital and high incomes, weak enforcement of worker protections and antitrust, and cuts to programs that benefit ordinary Americans.The article is explicitly more about oligarchy than AI. Krugman says the paid sections document the rise of the “.0002%,” the economics and politics of extreme wealth, how oligarchy will shape AI's impact, and possible policy paths. His caveat is that AI itself may still produce a pushback against oligarchy, but absent that, he expects the pre-existing concentration of wealth and power to magnify AI's downsides.Read moreElon Musk is building a form of capitalism that Adam Smith would hateAuthor: Tim O'Reilly Published: July 12, 2026Tim O'Reilly argues that Elon Musk is using the legal forms of shareholder capitalism to escape the restraints that shareholder capitalism was supposed to impose. The article begins with SpaceX's public-market structure: ordinary public investors get little meaningful governance power, Musk keeps roughly 85 percent of the votes through super-voting shares, buyers waive jury trials and class actions, the company qualifies as controlled, and removal of Musk depends on the share class he controls. In O'Reilly's framing, that is not ordinary founder control; it is a design for being answerable to no one, possibly beyond Musk's own lifetime.The killer detail is the article's turn through Albert Hirschman, Montesquieu, James Steuart, Adam Smith, and Keynes. Older defenses of commerce held that markets would tame princely passions because the self-interest of merchants was safer than arbitrary rule. O'Reilly says Musk reverses that hope. The market discipline that was supposed to cage the prince has become the lever by which the prince raises capital, removes feedback loops, and carries private power into politics, government, Mars, robots, AI, or whatever ambition comes next.The pull is the link to AI governance. O'Reilly says corporations are already a kind of artificial intelligence: narrow-input systems that act at a scale no individual human can match. Their partial controls include independent boards, shareholder votes, courts, disclosure, regulators, public pressure, and activism. If the leaders building frontier AI strip those alignment mechanisms out of their own companies, the governance of the company becomes a preview of the governance of the machine.Read more: The EconomistMurky Mirror: Truth and ConsequencesAuthor: Esther Dyson Published: July 14, 2026Esther Dyson argues that today's institutional crisis is better viewed through the 14th century than through recent political history. Using Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror as her frame, she compares a world of famine, plague, church schism, feudal predation, and purposeless war with a present in which institutions again feel brittle, incentives are badly aligned, and power is shifting into forms that are hard to govern.The killer detail is the historical analogy between land, corporations, and AI. Dyson moves from nobles who controlled serfs and territory, to the East India Company as a quasi-sovereign business, to today's AI systems and data centers as a possible new sector that crosses and weakens both nation-states and companies. The question is whether AI becomes a new kind of private land, owned by a new nobility, or an open prairie that many people can cultivate.The pull is human attention. Dyson says the central question is not what AI will do to people, but how people will react to it: whether they can value love, kindness, embodied attention, and artisanal human presence in a world of seductive artificial offerings.Read more: SourceThe political economy of billionaire derangementAuthor: Henry Farrell Published: July 15, 2026Henry Farrell argues that the visible political radicalization of some Silicon Valley billionaires is not a random personality quirk, but a product of the political economy that made them. Starting from Tyler Cowen's dismissal of “billionaire derangement syndrome” and Tim O'Reilly's warning that Elon Musk is using shareholder capitalism to escape shareholder restraint, Farrell flips the phrase: the question is why billionaires themselves can become deranged.The killer detail is Farrell's use of Peter Thiel as both theorist and example. Thiel's Stanford lectures described startups as monarchies and founders as figures vested with unusual power, while Silicon Valley culture rewarded eccentricity, monopoly ambition, and founder exceptionalism. Farrell says those ideas combined with dense founder-investor networks, peer rivalry, and weak correction mechanisms to amplify rather than discipline princely appetites.The pull is the ideological problem for classical liberals who once saw tech wealth as an ally of markets and freedom. Farrell says commerce did not tame the passions; in parts of Silicon Valley, the passions have begun to devour markets, institutions, and the liberal story that justified them.Read more: SourceIs there any “oligarchy” to fight?Matthew Yglesias | Slow Boring | July 16, 2026Matthew Yglesias argues that “oligarchy” is a rhetorically powerful but analytically loose way to describe American politics. The post begins from Bernie Sanders' “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, Amy Klobuchar's warning about a MAGA “broligarchy,” and the long afterlife of the Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page paper that was widely summarized as showing that only the rich matter in policy outcomes. Yglesias says the evidence supports a weaker claim: affluent people and business leaders have unusual access and influence, but that is not the same as rule by a small cabal.His main distinction is between inequality and oligarchy. The Gilens-Page measure treated the top 10 percent of households as “the wealthy,” and later critics found that rich and middle-class preferences usually align; in the cases where they differ, the rich win about 53 percent of the time. Yglesias also says business executives get special access partly because their decisions are materially important to communities, jobs, investment, and local tax bases, not only because of campaign donations.The post preserves Jerusalem Demsas' counterpoint from their podcast discussion: privileged donor and business access can still violate democratic equality even if the oligarchy label overstates the structure of power. Yglesias' narrower claim is that Democrats should be precise about what problem they are trying to solve, because donor influence can also push the party left on climate and cultural issues in ways that alienate many voters.Read more: Slow BoringAINearly 200 Economists and Tech Leaders Warn of A.I. ThreatsAuthor: Ben Casselman Published: July 13, 2026Ben Casselman reports on “We Must Act Now,” a statement warning that artificial intelligence could transform the economy faster than any previous technology and that policymakers need to move faster to understand and respond. The statement says AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years, bringing risks such as large-scale job displacement as well as opportunities such as higher living standards. Nearly 200 people signed, including 15 Nobel laureates, the chief economists of OpenAI and Anthropic, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla.The killer detail is who joined the warning. Casselman notes that the signatories include economists who have historically been skeptical of Silicon Valley's most dramatic AI job-loss forecasts, including Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, the MIT professors who won the 2024 Nobel in economics. Erik Brynjolfsson, who helped organize the statement, says there has been a notable change in the profession and that economists and policymakers are not ready for the “tsunami” he sees coming.The pull is the measurement problem. The statement does not offer a specific policy menu, but calls for economists, policymakers, and industry leaders to understand the economics of transformative AI and steer it toward complementing humans. Brynjolfsson says one high priority is better data on AI's spread and impact, because current measures tell conflicting stories about job losses and which workers are most exposed.Read more: The New York TimesWhy I Didn't Sign the AI Open LetterAuthor: Andrew McAfee Published: July 13, 2026Andrew McAfee explains why he did not sign “We Must Act Now,” the AI economy statement organized in part by his longtime collaborator Erik Brynjolfsson. McAfee agrees with the letter's starting point that AI is likely to become radically more powerful over the next decade and that it is a general-purpose technology. His objection is not to urgency or to studying AI's economic effects, but to the framing of risk, displacement, and institutional steering as the first move.The killer detail is McAfee's line edit. He says the original letter comes close, then “bounces off the crossbar” by calling for incentives, guardrails, and institutions to steer AI before we know enough about its actual impacts. He points to mixed current evidence: labor-market canaries, but also rising software job postings, low unemployment for younger workers, rising real median income, and claims that AI-adopting companies are adding workers faster than low-adopting peers. His worry is that the letter leans toward upstream governance and dirigisme when the evidence may call for capability building instead.The pull is his replacement statement. McAfee keeps the three-paragraph structure but changes the emphasis: AI is likely to become radically more powerful; like earlier world-changing technologies it will raise living standards while also bringing harms and shocks; and economists, policymakers, and technology leaders should build the capabilities to respond quickly and effectively. It is a concise version of the permissionless-innovation case inside the AI policy debate.Read more: The Geek WayOwn Your WeightsAuthor: Jamin Ball Published: July 10, 2026Jamin Ball argues that the enterprise AI debate about whether companies should “own their weights” or rent models from frontier labs is asking too narrow a question. A model weight file gives a company control over a point-in-time artifact, but not durable control over the capability stack. In his framing, the weight file is a melting ice cube: it does not get worse in absolute terms, but it falls behind as frontier systems improve and enterprise needs change.The killer detail is what Ball says companies really need to own: the data flywheel, reinforcement learning infrastructure, and evaluation harness that produce and improve the model. Simply deploying an open-weights model and declaring sovereignty leaves the enterprise with yesterday's capability and no way to compound workflow-specific learning.The pull is that enterprise AI control may be less about model ownership than operating ownership. The defensible layer is the system that turns company data, edge cases, business definitions, and evaluations into continuously improving performance.Read more: Clouded JudgementWays to Think About Token PricingAuthor: Benedict Evans Published: July 9, 2026Benedict Evans argues that today's AI token prices are a temporary signal from a supply-constrained market, not a reliable guide to long-term value capture. The open question is whether foundation models keep durable pricing power or become commodity infrastructure as data-center capacity, inference efficiency, and model competition all shift. His current read is that the visible market dynamics point toward commoditization unless something materially changes.The killer detail is the mobile data analogy. Evans says cellular networks became a trillion-dollar industry with hundreds of billions in capex after data usage exploded, but carrier stocks went nowhere because value moved up the stack. Tokens may behave similarly: an opaque unit tied to marginal cost, sold through bundles, essential to everything, yet not necessarily where profits accrue.The pull is uncertainty, not prediction. Evans lists paths to model dominance, including network effects, less competition, regulation, export controls, or a lab pulling ahead on execution, but says each requires a new fact not yet visible. Without that change, the model layer looks more like infrastructure beneath the products that capture value.Read more: SourceAlex Karp Is Saying What Every Angry CEO Is Thinking About AIAuthor: Tim Higgins Published: July 11, 2026Tim Higgins reports that Palantir CEO Alex Karp has turned corporate frustration with AI labs into a public argument about enterprise control. Palantir released a white paper, “Institutional Sovereignty in the Age of AI,” laying out steps companies and governments can take to protect themselves from OpenAI, Anthropic, and other foundation-model providers. The article links that paper to Karp's CNBC appearance, where he said “something has gone completely wrong” in the relationship between AI labs and customers and argued that enterprises are paying for tokens that create little value.The killer detail is the value-capture question. Higgins writes that Karp's critique has resonated because AI labs may gain power and insight from customer data, workflows, and decision-making, even when enterprise policies say customer data are not used for training. David Sacks amplified the concern by arguing that Anthropic is moving from the model layer into vertical applications such as science, security, legal, and coding, raising the fear that model providers will watch where value is being created and then move into those markets directly.The pull is that Karp is not alone, even if his style is unusually combative. Higgins notes that Satya Nadella has also warned that companies need to retain the learnings created when they use AI models, while Mark Zuckerberg has framed Meta's new model release partly around lower-cost frontier intelligence. The article presents Karp's campaign as one sign that established technology companies and large enterprises are trying to define where they fit when AI labs become central infrastructure, application competitors, and potential IPO giants at the same time.Read more: The Wall Street JournalThe AI Agents Are Coming for Microsoft OfficeAlex Wilhelm | Cautious Optimism | July 11, 2026Alex Wilhelm argues that one of the week's quieter AI questions is whether the productivity market that Microsoft successfully moved into subscription software is now being attacked by agentic tools. The piece begins with the infrastructure backdrop: SK Hynix raised $26.5 billion in a U.S. listing while building U.S. HBM and advanced-packaging capacity, and memory, chip, and foundry companies are now priced for sustained AI demand.Wilhelm then says the AI conversation has shifted quickly from raw capability to cost per task. He cites new model releases and vendor language emphasizing cheaper agentic and coding models, faster performance, and lower dollars per task. That matters because lower costs make it more plausible for AI systems to take on routine knowledge work at scale rather than remain a premium coding assistant market.The core of the article is Microsoft Office. Wilhelm notes that Microsoft turned Office from a one-time purchase into Microsoft 365, a large recurring revenue business with tens of millions of subscribers and a major productivity segment. Now, he says, late-stage unicorns and AI labs are pushing into the same territory: Anthropic's Cowork was reportedly used mostly outside software development, OpenAI merged ChatGPT and Codex into a tool for creating sheets, slides, docs, web apps, and long-running work, and other companies are building agentic coworkers that connect business data to documents, workflows, schedules, alerts, and apps.The article's caveat is that Microsoft has survived major platform shifts before. The argument is not that Office disappears quickly, but that the definition of office software is broadening from documents and spreadsheets into AI systems that can create, monitor, and act across workplace data.Read moreWhat Is Loop Engineering, and Who Owns It?Author: Nilesh Barla Published: July 11, 2026Nilesh Barla argues that “loop engineering” is becoming a distinct discipline because production AI agents now fail less at single prompts than at runtime: when to stop, what state to preserve, and how to recover after a bad step. Prompt engineering shapes one model call, and context engineering shapes what the model sees, but loop engineering shapes what a sequence of calls actually does.The killer detail is the three-primitives frame. Barla says a real agent loop needs halt conditions, state carryover, and recovery paths, then maps teams across five maturity levels. At the lowest level, an agent is just a model call in a for-loop with a step cap and raw history; by the higher levels, the system has structured state, explicit planning, replay, evaluation, and self-repair.The pull is organizational. If agents are becoming production systems rather than demos, someone has to own the runtime itself. The loop engineer is the role Barla gives to the person responsible for making long-running agent work dependable.Read more: Adaline LabsThe Fight Against AI Data Centers Is Just BeginningEmma Roth | The Verge | July 12, 2026Emma Roth argues that community resistance to data centers has moved from an early warning sign into a national political fight as AI facilities grow larger, more power-hungry, and more visible to nearby residents. The article starts with Apple's failed 2015 plan for a $1 billion data center in Athenry, Ireland, where a small group of residents challenged the project over noise, light pollution, flooding, traffic, and wildlife effects until Apple abandoned it in 2018.The current data-center buildout is presented as much larger and more contentious. Roth writes that residents now cite rising energy costs, water quality, noise, light pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions, while the U.S. Energy Information Administration expects commercial energy demand to surpass residential demand this year because of AI data centers and Goldman Sachs expects data-center power demand to double by 2027.The central evidence comes from Data Center Watch, which says protesters blocked or delayed at least 75 U.S. projects worth $130 billion from January to March, with active opposition groups more than doubling from 396 at the end of 2025 to 833 by the end of the first quarter of 2026. Roth also cites QTS abandoning a $12 billion Wisconsin campus, Delaware City regulators blocking a 580-acre project under the Coastal Zone Act, opposition stopping a QTS project in Prince William County, and pressure that pushed Kevin O'Leary to downsize the proposed 40,000-acre Project Stratos in Utah.The policy section describes a split between federal acceleration and local resistance. President Trump has treated data centers as part of the AI race with China and fast-tracked construction, while some Republican candidates are distancing themselves from that position ahead of midterms. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have proposed a moratorium until price and environmental protections exist, bipartisan lawmakers are backing ratepayer-protection measures, and states including Florida, Idaho, and Washington have passed rules on cost shifting, water use, and tax breaks. Roth's caveat is that the policy patchwork is still incomplete, leaving many communities to fight project by project.Read more6 months to live for open modelsAuthor: Nathan Lambert Published: July 12, 2026Nathan Lambert argues that open-weight AI models are facing their most serious policy test so far because U.S. officials are beginning to discuss concrete controls rather than abstract safety concerns. He says reported White House conversations about a new executive order may initially target Chinese-origin models and government use, but could create a broader review habit for frontier open models. His forecast is that a model above the capability range of GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.8, or GLM-5.2 could trigger a ban or indefinite delay within six months.The post separates two policy fights that are becoming intertwined: distillation and frontier capability. Lambert says the distillation campaign against Chinese models has become a form of regulatory capture because Anthropic and other closed-model companies would gain economically if Chinese open models were banned. He does not dismiss IP protection, but argues that if a closed model's capabilities are dangerous enough to justify restricting open models, the lab also has to explain why those capabilities are exposed through a queryable API. He cites unauthorized access to Anthropic's Mythos private beta as evidence that APIs are not automatically secure.The broader claim is that a unilateral U.S. ban would hurt positive actors more than bad actors if comparable open models remain available elsewhere. Lambert says the only durable ceiling would require global agreement, which does not exist, and that open models can improve safety by allowing broad inspection, adaptation, and understanding. His proposed near-term off-ramps are a strong U.S. open model release from companies such as Microsoft, Meta, or Reflection, and a broader coalition of open-source beneficiaries lobbying for safe rollout rather than prohibition.Read more: SourceAmericans Deserve a Dividend From AI Companies' RichesAuthor: Scott Stanford Published: July 14, 2026Scott Stanford argues that proposals to give the government a stake in AI companies miss the point unless ordinary citizens directly receive and control the upside. Sam Altman has discussed giving up equity in OpenAI, Washington already owns a stake in Intel, Nvidia is sharing China chip revenue, and Bernie Sanders wants large AI labs to contribute half their stock to a sovereign wealth fund. Stanford says those ideas all park value with the state, not with people.The killer detail is New Carlisle, Indiana, where AWS's Project Rainier is turning cornfields into one of the world's largest AI superclusters. The project is planned to run up to a million chips, draw more than two gigawatts of power, and represents an investment that has grown from $11 billion to $13.8 billion. Stanford uses that local transformation to argue that AI's public bargain should be visible at the household level.The pull is design. A citizen AI dividend would have to specify who earns a stake, how they hold it, and when they see cash. Without that mechanism, the AI wealth debate remains a fight over government balance sheets rather than public ownership.Read more: SourceWho Gets to Define the Frontier?Author: Mark Daley Published: July 14, 2026Mark Daley argues that Demis Hassabis is right to call for a serious institution to verify frontier AI systems, but that the power to test models is also the power to govern them. Hassabis's proposed Frontier AI Standards Body would get privileged pre-release access to advanced models, testing compute, held-out evaluations, support from national labs and security agencies, third-party auditors, and eventually authority to block models from the American market or coordinate a slowdown.The killer detail is Daley's constitutional objection. He says the proposal sometimes looks like a scientific lab, a standards body, an industry regulator, a licensing authority, and an emergency security council at once. Combining those roles because each requires technical expertise would be like putting the central bank, auditor-general, and Supreme Court in one building and calling it efficient.The pull is standard-setting. Daley's concern is not that verification is unnecessary, but that whoever writes the tests, decides what passes, adjudicates disputes, and grants market access may end up defining the frontier itself.Read more: SourceGPT-Red: Unlocking Self-Improvement for RobustnessOpenAI | OpenAI | July 15, 2026OpenAI describes GPT-Red as an internal automated red-teaming model trained to find prompt-injection vulnerabilities at a scale human red teams cannot match. The post says AI systems increasingly encounter third-party data through browsers, connected apps, local files, and tools, creating opportunities for malicious instructions hidden in emails, webpages, tool responses, or code repositories. Human red-teaming remains part of OpenAI's safety process, but the company says it is time-intensive and cannot generate enough diverse adversarial examples for model training.The system is trained through self-play reinforcement learning, with GPT-Red rewarded for eliciting valid failures and defender models rewarded for resisting attacks while still completing their tasks. OpenAI says the training environments specify threat models across settings such as local files, webpage banners, email bodies, and tool outputs. The model is kept separate from deployed production models because it is intentionally trained with malicious capabilities.OpenAI reports that GPT-Red generalized beyond its training set, including an internal replication of the indirect prompt-injection arena from Dziemian et al. (2025), where it found successful attacks in 84% of scenarios compared with 13% for human red-teamers. The post also says GPT-Red transferred attacks from simulation to a live autonomous vending-machine agent, causing price changes and order cancellations, and outperformed a prompted GPT-5.5 baseline against a Codex CLI agent on held-out data-exfiltration tasks.The article's main robustness claim is that OpenAI has used GPT-Red and predecessor models in training since GPT-5.3, with later GPT releases becoming more resistant to prompt injections. It says GPT-5.6 Sol has six times fewer failures on OpenAI's hardest direct prompt-injection benchmark than the best production model from four months earlier, that a “Fake Chain-of-Thought” attack class fell from more than 95% success against GPT-5.1 to below 10% against GPT-5.6 Sol, and that GPT-5.6 Sol fails on only 0.05% of GPT-Red's direct prompt injections. OpenAI says general capabilities and targeted over-refusal evaluations were not harmed, and says a preprint with more details will follow.Read moreAnthropic, Blackstone bet the next trillion-dollar AI business is implementation, not just modelsRebecca Bellan | TechCrunch | July 15, 2026Rebecca Bellan reports that Ode with Anthropic is the $1.5 billion AI implementation company launched by Anthropic with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs, and other backers. The article says the venture reflects a growing belief among frontier AI labs that enterprise adoption requires more than better models: customers need engineers who can embed inside businesses and turn AI into working systems.Ode was originally conceived by Blackstone after it used both large consulting firms and smaller AI services boutiques across its portfolio companies. TechCrunch reports that Fractional AI, an AI engineering services startup, stood out and was acquired by the joint venture shortly after the venture was announced. Fractional now forms the foundation of Ode, which has 100 engineers and works closely with Anthropic's applied AI team to identify where the technology can affect specific businesses.Ode CEO Chris Taylor tells TechCrunch that the company could someday become a trillion-dollar business if it scales without losing quality. He says an ideal customer is one whose CEO treats the AI project as a top one or two priority, whether it is a major product feature or the reworking of a core business process. Ode will operate under a “Claude-first” principle, using Anthropic technology whenever possible, but the article says it can use rival AI products when needed.The article's central implementation argument comes from Ode chief technologist Eddie Siegel, who says model selection matters but is not where most of the engineering effort goes. He compares it to the choice of programming language in software: one ingredient in a system that still has to be engineered. Bellan writes that Ode's challenge is hiring and training enough elite generalist engineers, many of them former founders, while competing with OpenAI's The Deployment Company and consulting giants that have built their own forward-deployed engineering teams.Read moreVint Cerf is working on a plan to unleash AI agents on the open internetTim Fernholz | TechCrunch | July 15, 2026Tim Fernholz reports that Vint Cerf, after leaving Google, is advising Innovation Labs on an open architecture for identifying AI agents online. Innovation Labs is a subsidiary of Identity Digital, a DNS registry company, and its proposal is to use domain-name infrastructure as part of a system for agent identity, accountability, and auditability. The premise is that agents will need a way to identify themselves if they move beyond proprietary systems and begin interacting across the open internet.The concrete proposal is DNSid, a registry that links an AI agent to an existing internet domain and uses cryptographic proofs to log its registration over time. Innovation Labs says it is trialing the standard with unnamed hyperscalers and identity companies. Cerf frames the problem around authority and accountability: what authority an agent has, where that authority came from, who is accountable for the agent's behavior, how its identity is established, and why anyone should trust it.The article's caveat is that standards are still emerging and agents are more active than static domains. Cerf says the period may be both fascinating and exasperating because the functionality is powerful and interoperability is unresolved. He compares the adoption problem to TCP/IP: competing systems may not work together until users push for functional interoperation. He also says an agentic economy is not inevitable, but that people will try to build it because delegating work to agents will be easier.Read more: TechCrunchxai-org/grok-build, now open sourceAuthor: Simon Willison Published: July 15, 2026Simon Willison argues that xAI's decision to open-source Grok Build is best understood as a trust repair move after a severe privacy failure. The CLI had triggered backlash when users realized that running it in a directory could upload the entire directory to xAI's Google Cloud buckets, including one user's reported SSH keys, password manager database, documents, photos, and videos. xAI disabled the feature, said previously retained coding data would be deleted, and released the code under Apache 2.0.The killer detail is what the codebase reveals. Willison counts 844,530 lines of Rust, only about 3% of which appears vendored, and finds remnants of the upload system still present but disabled: gcs.rs contains Google Cloud upload code, while upload_session_state() now returns a hard-coded session_state_upload_unavailable error. He also notes copied or ported tool implementations from Codex and OpenCode, prompt files, and a terminal Mermaid renderer.The pull is that terminal coding agents are becoming large, intricate software systems in their own right. The privacy failure mattered because these tools operate inside the directories where developers keep their most sensitive work; the open-source release matters because trust now depends on inspecting what an agent can see, send, and do.Read more: SourceThe Pulse: What can we learn from Bun's rapid Rust rewrite with AI?Author: Gergely Orosz and Ivan Klaric Published: July 16, 2026Gergely Orosz and Ivan Klaric argue that Bun's AI-assisted rewrite from Zig to Rust is a practical sign of how software engineering changes when models can take on large, bounded migrations with clear feedback loops. The piece does not treat the rewrite as magic: Jarred Sumner first spent hours turning design judgment into a detailed porting guide, then used adversarial review, parallel agents, compiler errors, and tests to force the work toward correctness.The killer detail is the scale. Bun had 535,496 lines of Zig, 1,448 files, and 22 million monthly downloads, making a conventional rewrite a year-long freeze the team could not justify. Using Fable, Sumner split the work across 64 agents, produced about 6,500 commits, and got the migration done in 11 days at an estimated API cost of $165,000.The pull is economic, not theatrical. If a one- or two-year migration can become an 11-day project, AI coding is not just faster autocomplete; it changes which technical debts are worth paying down.Read more: SourceOrphan risks at the frontier of artificial intelligenceAuthor: Andrew Maynard Published: July 16, 2026Andrew Maynard argues that frontier AI safety frameworks are creating “orphan risks”: harms that companies can see, but do not formally own because they are hard to quantify, do not fit catastrophic-risk thresholds, or fall outside audit-friendly compliance machinery. His target is not existing frontier safety work, but the narrowing effect that happens when private companies decide which risks count as governable.The killer detail is Maynard's contrast between measurable model dangers and threats to value. He points to Meta's three-day Galactica collapse, OpenAI's 2023 board crisis, safety-team departures, and wellbeing litigation as examples of risks that damaged trust, culture, legitimacy, or users without fitting cleanly into conventional model-risk categories. The proposed fix is an orphan-risk register: a public record of risks a company considered and chose not to manage, with reasons.The pull is accountability. Frontier developers' internal scoping choices have become a de facto layer of public governance, so the question is no longer only which risks they manage, but which risks they quietly leave outside the frame.Read more: SourceThe Lab of the Future Should Feel Like a Data CenterLatent.Space with Andy Beam and Rafa Gomez-Bombarelli | Latent.Space | July 16, 2026Latent.Space interviews Lila Sciences CTO Andy Beam and chief science officer for physical sciences Rafa Gomez-Bombarelli about the company's attempt to build an AI-run science factory. The post describes Lila's thesis as treating the lab itself as an “infinite token generator”: if internet data drove the first era of AI scaling, experimentally verified scientific data may be the next scarce training source. Lila is trying to produce that data with robotics, lab instruments, orchestration software, and AI models wired into the wet lab.The central analogy is the lab as data center. Instruments are nodes on a graph, a magnetically levitating transport layer moves materials between them, and experiment scheduling looks like a compute queue. Beam says Lila is not simply an automation company, because the point is not just throughput; it is flexibility, generalization, and experiment capture. The post says Lila has built more than 10 trillion experimentally validated “scientific reasoning tokens,” not internet text or biological sequences.The interview ranges across biology, chemistry, drug discovery, materials science, and the limits of automation. It notes that Lila rebuilt one gas-sorption measurement to run roughly 2,500 times faster, claims its general models can transfer priors from small-molecule chemistry to metal-organic frameworks for carbon capture, and describes model-suggested platinum-group-free electrocatalysts that moved from looking boring or wrong to becoming strong performers. The caveats are physical: experiments have runtimes, biology cannot always be accelerated, chains of thought can be unreliable narrators, and reward hacking becomes more dangerous when a model controls a real lab.Read more: Latent.SpaceWhy AMI Labs' Alexandre LeBrun won't call his AI “AGI” or “superintelligence”Kate Park | TechCrunch | July 16, 2026Kate Park interviews AMI Labs CEO Alexandre LeBrun about why Yann LeCun's world-model startup avoids the language of “AGI” and “superintelligence.” LeBrun says the terms are not useful because they lack stable definitions: “We never used the word AGI. And I just noticed that nobody is using it anymore; they switched to superintelligence.” His argument is that the practical frontier is not a label, but whether AI systems can understand and predict real-world states.The article explains the world-model thesis by contrasting language prediction with physical-state prediction. A large language model predicts the next word; a world model predicts the next state, such as what happens when a glass tips over. LeBrun says LLMs remain complementary and efficient for language, but the physical world is where current AI is weak. Robotics is the clearest case: hardware has advanced quickly, but robots are still brittle outside controlled routines because they lack context and situational understanding.AMI is still pre-product, but TechCrunch reports that LeBrun was in Seoul looking for industrial partners, researchers, and global companies. He says world models cannot be built entirely inside a lab because they need access to real environments. That is why South Korea appeals to AMI: robotics, semiconductors, manufacturing, and fast adoption create the kind of hardware-heavy context that software-only AI has barely touched.Read more: TechCrunchKimi K3 Tech Blog: Open Frontier IntelligenceKimi | Kimi | July 16, 2026Kimi introduces Kimi K3 as an open 3T-class frontier model aimed at coding, knowledge work, reasoning, multimodality, and long-context agentic use. The source describes the model as a 2.8T-parameter system built on Kimi Delta Attention and Attention Residuals, with native multimodality and a 1M-token context window. It says Moonshot AI plans to release model weights by July 27.The post presents K3 through benchmark and use-case sections rather than as a general product announcement. It reports results across coding, productivity, agentic, and multimodal evaluations, including DeepSWE, Terminal-Bench 2.1, Program Bench, SWE Marathon, FrontierSWE, PostTrain Bench, OfficeQA Pro, SpreadsheetBench 2, MCP Atlas, AutomationBench, BrowseComp, GDPval-AA v2, AA-Briefcase, MMMU-Pro, MathVision, BabyVision, OmniDocBench, and PerceptionBench. The source says all reported K3 results use maximum reasoning effort with temperature and top-p set to 1.0, and that different benchmark comparisons use KimiCode, Claude Code, or Codex harnesses depending on the test.Kimi's caveats are unusually concrete. The limitations section says K3 was trained in preserved thinking-history mode, so quality may become unstable if an agent harness does not pass historical thinking content correctly or if an ongoing session switches to K3 midstream. It also says K3's emphasis on long-horizon tasks can make it excessively proactive when it encounters minor issues or ambiguous intent, and recommends imposing explicit behavioral constraints for applications that require strict boundaries. The post adds that K3 remains behind Claude Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol in user experience despite being competitive overall.Read moreVenture CapitalThree Years InAuthor: Tomasz Tunguz Published: July 10, 2026Tomasz Tunguz marks Theory Ventures' third anniversary by arguing that AI's central market effect is time compression. In his telling, model release cycles, company revenue milestones, enterprise adoption, and venture categories have all accelerated. Seed, Series A, and Series B still exist as financing labels, but they no longer cleanly describe company maturity when some seed rounds are larger than IPOs and the best AI companies can mature much earlier than prior software companies.The killer detail is the shift from models to inference. Tunguz argues that inference has become the dominant AI market because workloads and buyer preferences are fragmenting: video, batch, local, agentic, and real-time tasks each create different infrastructure needs. He compares this to databases splitting into OLTP, OLAP, vector, and streaming categories, with AI pushing the same specialization into inference infrastructure.The pull is that Theory sees the AI-native venture firm as part of the same pattern. The firm says it has analyzed twice as many investment opportunities with three investors working alongside a nine-person intelligence organization, using agents and research systems to map markets, source companies, and support diligence. The piece is both a market map and a statement about how venture itself is being rebuilt by the technology it funds.Read more: LinkedInVenture Has Rarely Looked More BifurcatedAuthor: Beezer Clarkson Published: July 14, 2026Beezer Clarkson points to PitchBook's Q2 report as evidence that the U.S. venture market has split into two very different realities. AI now accounts for more than 60 percent of all U.S. venture deal value, meaning the headline market can look active and well-funded even while much of the non-AI market is dealing with a much colder liquidity and fundraising environment.The thread uses that split as the setup for Clarkson's latest Origins episode with Alec Litowitz, founder of Magnetar and QStar Capital and one of Citadel's original founding partners. Clarkson says markets like this are periods of genuine uncertainty, not merely ordinary risk, which is why Litowitz's Adaptability Quotient framework is relevant.The embedded clip makes the liquidity point concrete. Litowitz says DPI is “the resolution of uncertainty” because it converts an uncertain investment into actual cash returned to LPs. In his framing, a realized dollar is a real mark, while TVPI remains uncertain until it is realized.The killer detail is the distinction between pricing risk and resolving uncertainty. Litowitz's perspective matters because QStar is a SpaceX investor and Clarkson says the conversation happened just before one of venture's most consequential IPOs. The episode's stated questions are why venture remains a way to gain exposure to innovation, how AI is changing what is investable, why liquidity is ultimately a function of time, and why uncertainty requires a different decision framework from risk.Read more: XThe Best Angel Investors in the US: Who Backs the Most Unicorns, and Who's Active NowAuthor: Ilya Strebulaev Published: July 10, 2026Ilya Strebulaev ranks angels, angel groups, accelerators, and incubators by lifetime U.S. unicorn investments, counting checks written before a company reached unicorn status. The top of the combined list is dominated by organizations: Y Combinator leads with 113 unicorn investments, followed by Plug and Play at 52 and 500 Global at 41. Sand Hill Angels is the highest-ranked angel group at 31.The killer detail is how quickly the list changes below the biggest accelerators. Strebulaev says 271 of the 304 investors in the Top 200 are individuals, or 89%. In the top 100, individuals are 91%. That makes the market underneath the large accelerator counts look much more personal: mostly operators and individual angels writing early checks from their own networks.The pull is the ranking's own caveat. Strebulaev writes that every lifetime leaderboard has a blind spot because many of the unicorns behind those totals were founded a decade or more ago, and some angels have since moved into formal funds, slowed down, or stopped investing. His post therefore separates lifetime performance from recent cohorts, including companies founded in 2015 or later and 2020 or later. For founders or allocators making current decisions, that distinction matters: a career record and a current record are not the same measure.Read more: Ilya StrebulaevAre Prediction Markets Doomed to Fail?Author: Contrary Published: July 16, 2026Contrary argues that prediction markets' current boom depends on whether platforms can prove they are more than regulated gambling with exchange-style branding. Kalshi and Polymarket have reached mass cultural, investor, and regulatory attention, but the article says the underlying idea is old: academic markets, corporate forecasting tools, Intrade, PredictIt, and other predecessors all struggled with the same linked problems of liquidity, legality, and user appeal.The killer detail is the comparison with sportsbooks. Prediction markets present themselves as peer-to-peer, transparent, and non-house-based, but sports contracts reportedly account for more than 90 percent of Kalshi trading, and the article says the platforms keep a much thinner slice of volume than sportsbooks. A market can therefore show sports-betting-scale handle while generating far less revenue.The pull is that the product's hardest problem may be distribution of wins. If a small group of sharp traders captures most profits while casual users lose interest, prediction markets may become valuable data feeds and professional tools before they become durable consumer networks.Read more: SourceRegulationExclusive: The Next Frontier of the Deportation Wars: College CampusesAuthor: Adrian Carrasquillo Published: July 11, 2026Adrian Carrasquillo reports that college campuses are becoming a new front in the fight over immigration enforcement because automatic license plate readers can turn ordinary campus security infrastructure into searchable location data. His thesis is that Flock Safety's camera network, even without direct ICE or DHS contracts, can feed deportation enforcement through local police partnerships and data-sharing practices.The killer detail is the campaign target. The Emergency Campaign to Support Higher Education, working with Schools Drop ICE, is focusing on 75 colleges and universities publicly identified as having Flock contracts. Flock says it has no ICE or DHS contracts, but activists argue the risk comes through local agencies that coordinate with federal authorities and run searches on their behalf.The pull is broader than immigration. Carrasquillo notes that license plate readers have already been abused by officers for stalking, and that Flock's AI search features can identify more than plates, including bumper stickers. A campus safety tool can become a political surveillance system when the data layer is searchable.Read more: The BulwarkThe Supreme Court Broke Independent Agencies. Here's a Way to Slow the Damage.Author: Todd Phillips Published: July 12, 2026Todd Phillips argues that the Supreme Court's decision in Trump v. Slaughter damaged independent agencies by ending for-cause removal protections, but did not leave Congress powerless. The ruling weakens the old model in which commissioners at bodies such as the FTC, NLRB, CPSC, SEC, and CFTC could be insulated from dismissal over policy disagreements. Phillips says the next fight is whether presidents can turn nominally bipartisan commissions into one-party instruments.The killer detail is the procedural fix: quorum rules. Phillips proposes that Congress require bipartisan slates of commissioners to be seated before independent agencies can act. A president
Every season of parenting comes with new joys, new challenges, and new opportunities to lead our children toward Christ. In this episode, we explore how parenting changes as children grow, what remains constant through every stage, and how to intentionally love, guide, and disciple them along the way.
The Pentagon is launching a new health screening initiative that will check for low testosterone as part of annual physicals for service members age 30 and older. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says the effort is intended to improve readiness, resilience and long-term health, while emphasizing that testosterone replacement therapy would be voluntary. But the announcement is also raising questions about the medical evidence behind widespread screening and how the policy will be implemented across the force. Federal News Network's Rachel Cohen joins me with more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Seth, Sean and Cole dive into the 1st of their 10 questions each day leading up to Texans training camp: is the Texans' offensive line improved or just older and costs more?
This week I had my regularly schedule phone-in with syndicated radio host Michael DelGiorno. We discussed nutritional strategies for health as we age.LONGEVITY AND NUTRITION: 7-NUTRIENTS TO PAY ATTENTION TO AS YOU AGE. DR. JOE GALATI EXPLAINS…1. CalciumWhy it's needed: Keeps bones and teeth strong, helps muscles contract, and assists neurotransmitter release. As you age, the body leaches calcium from bones if you don't consume enough.Best Sources: Dairy (yogurt, cheese, milk), canned salmon/sardines with bones, kale, chia seeds, and fortified plant milks.2. Vitamin DWhy it's needed: Promotes calcium absorption and supports immune and brain health. Seniors often spend more time indoors and their skin becomes less efficient at producing Vitamin D from sunlight.Best Sources: Fatty fish (salmon, trout), egg yolks, and fortified foods like orange juice and cereals.3. Vitamin B6Why it's needed: Vital for metabolism and brain health. Older bodies break down B6 more quickly and absorb it less efficiently.Best Sources: Chickpeas (one cup provides over half the daily goal), chicken breast, bananas, and potatoes.4. Vitamin B12Why it's needed: Essential for the nervous system and red blood cell production. Roughly 10-30% of seniors have trouble absorbing B12 from food, often due to lower stomach acid or medications (like Metformin).Best Sources: Beef, seafood, and eggs. Experts recommend seniors get at least half their B12 from fortified foods (like nutritional yeast or cereals) because they are easier to absorb.5. ProteinWhy it's needed: To blunt sarcopenia(the gradual loss of muscle mass and strength). Nearly one-third of seniors do not eat enough protein.Requirements: Aim for 0.45 to 0.54 grams per pound of body weight (approx. 68–81g for a 150lb person).Best Sources: Greek yogurt, eggs, beans, tofu, and lean meats.6. FiberWhy it's needed: To prevent constipation and lower the risk of cardiovascular disease. Most seniors fall well short of the recommended intake.Requirements: Men (51+) need 30g; Women (51+) need 21g daily.Best Sources: Lentils, whole grains, berries, and leafy greens.7. Total Calories (Energy Intake)Why it's needed: Appetite often declines with age, leading to unintended weight loss and weakness.The Approach: If appetite is low, focus on nutrient-dense, high-calorie foods rather than large volumes of food.Best Strategy: Use healthy fats like olive oil, avocados, peanut butter, and full-fat dairy, or drink smoothies with protein powder to ensure energy needs are met.How To Reach Dr. Joe Galati and his Team:For an on-line consultation or press inquiries, contact Teresa Reyes at 713-794-0700Dr. Galati's Newsletter Sign-UpLiver Specialists of TexasGet a Copy of Dr. Galati's BookDr. Galati on FacebookMessage Dr. Galati and his team Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Welcome back, everybody. It's Outside the Cinema, your weekly source for cult movie discussions, where your hosts, I'm Bill. That's Chris. Thank you for being here. Whether you're listening to the show when it comes out or whether you're listening to it down the road, hey, thanks for taking the time to listen to these two geezers babble on about movies that we didn't like. ## The Evolution of Podcasting: From Niche to Mainstream In this episode, Bill and Chris reflect on the evolution of podcasting since they began their journey. They discuss how the medium has changed, the growing acceptance of podcasts, and how their own show has adapted to the changing landscape. The Shift in Podcasting Bill and Chris express surprise at the longevity of the term "podcast" and how it has become a staple in entertainment. They reminisce about starting their show in their thirties, a time when podcasts were still finding their footing in the media world. Revisiting Classic Comedies This week, the duo dives into two comedies that, while light-hearted, also serve as reflections of their respective eras. They examine how movies from the seventies, like "Airplane!" and "Blazing Saddles," continue to resonate due to their relatable themes, despite being products of their time. They also raise important questions about the relevance of older films in today's cultural context. ### Outdated Humor in "Squeeze Play" One of the films discussed is "Squeeze Play" (1979) directed by Lloyd Kaufman. Bill and Chris critique the film's portrayal of gender dynamics in sports and how the narrative feels outdated. They explore how the humor and themes in the film reflect societal attitudes of the time and how they may not translate well to modern audiences. ### The Challenges of Dialogue in "Banned" The conversation also touches on the film "Banned" (1989), which Bill and Chris find struggles with dialogue that seems out of touch for its intended youth audience. They discuss the difficulties of older generations trying to write for younger ones, and how this disconnect can lead to awkward and unrealistic interactions in film. ## Conclusion: Adapting to Change In wrapping up, Bill and Chris emphasize the importance of understanding the context of films, both old and new. They encourage listeners to approach older films with a critical eye while also recognizing their historical significance. As the podcast continues to evolve, the duo remains committed to exploring and discussing the nuances of cult cinema. Key Takeaways - Podcasting has evolved significantly since its inception, becoming a mainstream form of entertainment. - Older films often reflect the societal norms and humor of their time, which can feel outdated today. - Understanding the context of films enhances appreciation and critical discussion.
Red pill dating advice for older men exposes the biggest illusion in the manosphere: that aging and money automatically make you a high-value bachelor without ongoing effort. Today we break down Briffault's Law, why the burden of sexual performance never lets up regardless of age or income, the mandatory upkeep required across fitness, finance, and frame to stay competitive, and why marriage is game on hard mode that most older men walk into completely unprepared.VIDEOS TO WATCH NEXT:Watch this playlist to figure out how to fix your failing marriage: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEXcvFDdRqPuu_G8-sTLS7eXT7myvidMFWatch this playlist to help you get over your ex for good: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEXcvFDdRqPsZ9JCTSAIkin-oMnavqNJZWatch this playlist to develop an unshakable frame and take control of your life: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEXcvFDdRqPvgN8idHfGfOp3gA8Y0tMxT&si=NccZ6koKYz3hSuUz--------------------------------------------FREE EBOOKS➡️ She's Made You Weak: https://ebook.fixdeadbedrooms.com➡️ Fine... Here's How You Get Her Back: https://ebook.getoveryourex.us➡️ The 4 Magic $3X Positions: https://sexytime.fixdeadbedrooms.com--------------------------------------------BOOKS AND WORKBOOKS➡️ Find all of my books here: https://mybook.to/comeonmanpod➡️ Find all of my workbooks here: https://mybook.to/RPWorkbooks--------------------------------------------FOLLOW MEFollow on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@comeonmanpodFollow on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/comeonmanpodcast/Follow on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/comeonmanpodcastFollow on X - https://x.com/bestmenspodFollow on Gettr - https://gettr.com/user/comeonmanpodFollow on Truth - https://truthsocial.com/@comeonmanpodFollow on Substack - https://substack.com/@comeonmanpod--------------------------------------------COMMUNITIES➡️ Join The W.O.L.F. Pack: https://wolf.comeonmanpod.com/➡️ Become a Spotify Channel Subscriber: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/comeonman/subscribe--------------------------------------------
AP correspondent Charles de Ledesma reports the U.K. is unveiling plans for a social media curfew for older teens - but it's voluntary.
This hour, What are older movies that young people should see? Senator Lindsey Graham called a staffer while having chest pains, and that staffer called 911 on his behalf. Why do people sometimes fail to call emergency services directly when they know something is seriously wrong? The family of Nolan Wells met with Jackson County District Attorney Angel Myers McIlrath marking a pivotal step in the ongoing investigation into the mysterious death of the 18-year-old.
In this episode, Cole Phillips and Bobby Fraumann share insights on passing the baton of faith across generations, the importance of intentionality in mentorship, and how to cultivate a legacy of faith within the church community.Keywordsfaith, legacy, mentorship, passing the baton, church community, spiritual growth, generational faith, intentionality, discipleship, church leadershipKey topics:Passing the baton of faith across generationsThe importance of intentionality in mentorshipBuilding a legacy of faith within the churchThe role of older and younger generations in spiritual growthPractical ways to pass on spiritual wisdom and valuesTakeaways:Faith is passed through intentional relationships and conversations.Older generations have a vital role in mentoring and inspiring the next.Living with purpose and intentionality creates a lasting legacy.Ask meaningful questions to learn from those who have gone before.Modeling faith through actions speaks louder than words.Sound bites"Faith is passed through intentional relationships.""Living with purpose creates a lasting legacy.""Model faith through actions, not just words."
By the time the grey hairs start creeping in, we're considerably more careful and much more easily exhausted by anything but a very small walk. Ever pondered why that is?
Topics covered in this episode: The trusted-publishing debate: how to do it right vs. why you shouldn't trust it JupyterLab 4.6 and Notebook 7.6 are out! Tau – new small, readable terminal coding agent Django Tasks and Django 6.1 Extras Joke Watch on YouTube About the show Sponsored by us! Support our work through: Our courses at Talk Python Consulting from Six Feet Up Connect with the hosts Michael: Mastodon / BlueSky / X / LinkedIn Calvin: Mastodon / BlueSky / X / LinkedIn Show: Mastodon / BlueSky / X Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Tuesday at 7am PT. Older video versions available there too. Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to our friends of the show list, we'll never share it. Calvin #1: The trusted-publishing debate: how to do it right vs. why you shouldn't trust it https://snarky.ca/how-to-publish-to-pypi-using-github-actions-securely/ (Brett Cannon) and https://blog.yossarian.net/2026/07/07/You-shouldnt-trust-trusted-publishing (William Woodruff) Trusted Publishing (PyPI's OIDC-based auth scheme, also now used by npm, RubyGems, crates.io, NuGet) replaces long-lived API tokens with short-lived, auto-scoped credentials tied to CI/CD machine identity. Yossarian's post: it's purely an authentication mechanism between a machine identity and a package — it says nothing about package safety or quality. PyPI deliberately avoids any "verified/trusted" badge for it, unlike its verified-URL checkmarks. Same logic applies to PyPI attestations: anyone can sign with any machine identity they control, so an attestation's presence isn't itself a trust signal. Bottom line from that post: don't confuse "trusted" (machine-to-machine) with "trustworthy" (human judgment about the package). Snarky.ca's companion piece is more practical: given GitHub Actions compromises in the news, the real fix is 3 concrete steps — run zizmor to lock down workflow permissions/checkout credentials and pin actions to commit hashes, adopt Trusted Publishing to eliminate stored PyPI tokens, and require manual approval via a GitHub environment before any publish job runs. Takeaway for listeners: Trusted Publishing is good hygiene for how you authenticate to PyPI, but it's not a substitute for securing your CI pipeline itself — or for actually vetting the packages you install. Michael #2: JupyterLab 4.6 and Notebook 7.6 are out! Michał Krassowski's rundown - a chunky minor release: 68 features, 97 bug fixes, 95 contributors, one of the biggest ever. Scratchpad console (Notebook 7.6 headliner) - a console next to your notebook sharing its kernel, for throwaway experiments. Ctrl+B. Jump to last-edited cell - new commands hop through recently edited cells. File browser glow-up - Date Created column, editable breadcrumbs with Tab-completion, and Open in Terminal. Debugger - sources open in the main area, floating step/continue overlay, live kernel-sources filter. Custom layouts (Lab) - activity bar top/bottom, draggable panels, four-way tab splits, per-panel Ctrl+scroll zoom. ~5x faster extension builds - webpack → Rspack, and jupyter-builder means no full Lab install needed to build extensions. Keyboard/a11y - add shortcuts from the UI (no JSON), Find & Replace in Edit menu (Ctrl+H). Calvin #3: Tau – new small, readable terminal coding agent Tau – new small, readable terminal coding agent (Python 3.12+), built as both a working tool and a teaching project for how coding agents work under the hood Install via uv tool install tau-ai, pipx, or pip; ships a tau CLI Three-layer architecture: tau_ai (provider-neutral model layer) → tau_agent (reusable "brain": messages, tools, events, loop) → tau_coding (CLI/TUI, file & shell tools, sessions) Supports OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenAI Codex, OpenRouter, Hugging Face, and custom/local OpenAI-compatible endpoints Built-in tools (read/write/edit/bash), durable JSONL sessions with resume/branching, project instructions via AGENTS.md, and context compaction Core harness is UI-agnostic — same brain can power the TUI, print mode, or a custom frontend — usable as a standalone library too Michael #4: Django Tasks and Django 6.1 Django 6.0 finally ships first-party background tasks (django.tasks) - out of Jake Howard's DEP 14, accepted May 2024, after two decades of everyone bolting on Celery/RQ/Huey. It's an API, not a worker. Django handles task definition, validation, queuing, and result storage - it does not execute them. You bring the backend. The default backend traps people. ImmediateBackend runs tasks inline on the request thread and blocks until done - so out of the box .enqueue() backgrounds nothing (a 5-second task means a 5-second response). The other built-in, DummyBackend, runs nothing at all. Both are dev/test only. Nice API otherwise: slap @task on a function, call .enqueue(), get back a TaskResult you look up later by id - with async twins like aenqueue(). Gotcha: args and return values must survive a JSON round-trip, so a tuple sneakily comes back as a list. The community local backend to know: django-tasks-local by Chris Beaven (SmileyChris). A ThreadPoolExecutor backend that gives real background threads with zero infrastructure - no Redis, no Celery, no database - plus a ProcessPoolBackend for CPU-bound work → github.com/lincolnloop/django-tasks-local Its catch: results live in memory, so pending tasks vanish on restart or deploy. Great for dev and low-traffic production; for persistence, drop to Jake Howard's django-tasks (DatabaseBackend + worker command). Extras Calvin: Fixing the dictionary with Python 3.14 — Hugo van Kemenade stumbled on - and got fixed - a markup bug in the OED's own citation of a 1706 use of the pi symbol. Michael: Bunny DNS is now free Jokes: What's the object-oriented way to become wealthy? Inheritance To understand what recursion is... You must first understand what recursion is 3 SQL statements walk into a NoSQL bar. Soon, they walk out They couldn't find a table.
It's possible to obey all the rules and still miss the grace of God. In the second sermon of our Summer Sermon Series, Voddie Baucham unpacks the Parable of the Older Son, showing that Jesus' warning isn't just for the prodigal—it's for the self-righteous who believe they've earned the Father's favor.
This week, Carla and Dex catch up on everything from spontaneous adventures and Puerto Rico reflections to the conversations that have everyone talking online. What starts with stories about swan boats, bingo halls, and self-driving cars quickly turns into a deeper conversation about motherhood, friendship, financial security, and why adulthood keeps forcing us to redefine what support really looks like. The episode explores whether women should be financially compensated for pregnancy, the rising maternal mortality crisis impacting Black women, and the reality that bringing children into the world still comes with unequal risks. They also unpack new student loan changes, share thoughts on the true cost of maintaining friendships in your 30s, and discuss how relationships naturally evolve without always needing to end in conflict. Dex also opens up about parenting a child with autism while reacting to the viral story of an 11-year-old boy who independently ordered an Uber to the airport because he wanted to fly to Japan. The conversation becomes a reminder of both the incredible capabilities of autistic children and the unique challenges their families navigate every day. As always, the episode balances humor with honesty, mixing viral stories, personal experiences, and thoughtful conversations about growing up, growing apart, and figuring out life as you go. In This Episode Carla's mission to experience Orlando like a tourist Puerto Rico, family reunions, and finding a sense of home Are self-driving cars ready for real life? Woman of the Week: Coco Gauff Should mothers be compensated for pregnancy? The rising Black maternal mortality crisis and why doulas matter Student loan changes and what they could mean for future students The viral autism story of the boy who tried to fly to Japan Parenting children with autism and advocating for better support The financial and emotional cost of female friendships in your 30s How friendships evolve through different seasons of life CONNECT WITH US ON SOCIAL MEDIA: CARLA WILMARIS | DEX
Welcome to Catholic Apologetics, led by Dr. Jim Dobbins, Author of Take My Hand: A Personal Retreat Companion. Just finished an RCIA program? This is the next stop on your faith journey. In these classes, we look at the different truths of Catholic doctrine and why we know they are true. We also discuss apologetics, spiritual growth, examine the liturgy of the Catholic Mass, and do scripture studies. Please encourage your friends to listen. I also encourage you to leave a comment about our podcasts. If you want the slides or any other documents for any class, just e-mail me at jhdphd@gmail.com and I will reply with the documents attached. If you wish, I will also add you to the class materials distribution list so that each time I send anything out for the class you will get it. If you are getting the podcast files from iTunes and would like to see the full set of available classes for download, you can see and download them all at http://yorked.podomatic.com. Older podcasts are now stored at a free podcast site at Podcast.com. The link to the podcasts there is: http://poddirectory.com/podcast/86506/dr-james-dobbins-catholic-apologetics We ask you to also consider going to http://yorked.podomatic.com and becoming a subscriber. It is free, helps our ratings, and thus helps us reach and help more people. This session is part of our second discussion series of the Gospel of Matthew. Please also let me know if there is a particular topic you would like to see addressed. skvEapm1rLLW8foJsII1
Lessons I learned from my granddaughters
Over the past two decades, the amount of hops sitting in cold-storage warehouses has more than doubled. While the volume of those stocks is inching back down from its peak in 2022—and while it's important that the industry has a buffer against climate challenges and bad harvests—a fundamental question remains: Just how useful are those hops two, three, or four years after harvest? Through a series of research projects and resulting papers, professor Tom Shellhammer and postdoctoral researcher Cécile Chenot of Oregon State University have been working to understand how age impacts hops, and how factors such as temperature, oxygen, and even hop variety drive not just changes in chemical analysis over time, but also have a real sensory impact in finished beer. The results? Surprising, to say the least. In this episode, Shellhammer and Chenot discuss: the myth that fresh is best, and that brewers should use a last-in, first-out approach to hop lots pinpointing the chemical markers in hops that actually convey in finished beer quantifying the range of variability in hops due to fixed factors such as soil, and to changing factors such as water stress or insect and disease pressure how terpenoids degrade at a different rate than thiols in stored hops matching analytical chemistry to sensory analysis for a real-world test of the impact of aging the vintage effect on thiols in hop lots how robust varieties such as Citra and Strata age relative to more delicate varieties the impact of oxygen and temperature on hop aging and compound degradation variability in packaging integrity within bags of the same hop lot And more. This episode is brought to you by: G&D Chillers G&D's new Elite 290 Micro-series is built for brewers who care about sustainability and performance. It runs on a natural refrigerant with near-zero global warming potential (GWP), has a compact footprint, and features variable-speed fans for efficiency. We've chilled beer for more than 3,000 breweries across North America, and with 24/7 support and remote monitoring, your cold side stays dialed in—day or night. Get the details on natural-refrigerant technology at gdchillers.com/podcast. Berkeley Yeast Here's a brewer nightmare. It's the night before packaging. You walk into the brewery, straight to the tank. You pull a sample to do a forced diacetyl test and you wait for it in silence. Something feels not quite right. You reach into the water bath and bring the flask to your nose… And it's a butter bomb. The logistics start running through your head. Do we hold the tank? We have accounts waiting. How many days until it clears? And then you wake up and remember that you use Berkeley Yeast's FRESH™ Chico. It's got ALDC inside every cell, so diacetyl can't even form in the first place. Through primary. Through dry hopping and hop creep. Diacetyl stays ultra-low. So you don't have to add ALDC, or wait for diacetyl to clean up. And most importantly, you don't have to wake up in a cold sweat, worrying about scary stories like these. FRESH™ Chico is now available in dried bricks for as low as $88 at berkeleyyeast.com. PakTech This episode is sponsored by PakTech—delivering craft-beer multipacking you can trust. Our handles are made from 100 percent recycled plastic and are fully recyclable, helping breweries close the loop and advance the circular economy. With a minimalist design, durable functionality you can rely on, and custom color matching, our carriers help brands stand out while staying sustainable. Trusted by craft brewers nationwide, we offer a smarter, sustainable way to carry your beer. To learn more, visit paktech-opi.com. Indie Hops Oregon hop country is heaven to world-class lager varieties, and Indie Hops is proud to have introduced Oregon's newest lager hop, Lórien, in 2022. Lórien is in a growing list of beers that have found their way to the podium and—more importantly—into the hearts of lager lovers across the country. Discover Indie Hops Lórien. (Side effects may include rampant festivity, sales bumps, and exceeded expectations.) Indie Hops—Life is Short. Let's Make It Flavorful. Midea 50/50 Flex If you're like many podcast listeners, you've got a lot of beers at home, and your regular fridge is at capacity. Enter the Midea 50/50 Flex—the industry's first dual compartment three-way convertible freezer. Here's what all that means for you: options! The 50/50 has the power to be all freezer, all fridge, or a little bit of both. But you'll probably want to use those 20 cubic feet as a massive, garage-ready beer fridge. You can also change which side the door is on or how you want the shelves to be arranged—the 50/50 totally flexes to fit your life. Plus, it's designed to maintain a stable temperature even in non-climate-controlled conditions—so you can crack a cold one even on the warmest days in the man cave. Take your garage to the next level! Check out Midea.com/us/ to get more info about this game changer today. Briess Malting Briess Malting has been supplying craft brewers with the highest quality base and specialty malts since the early 1980s. As Briess celebrates their 150th Anniversary this year, they are proud to remain a fifth-generation, family-owned company. They love to support the creativity and passion in craft brewing that results in amazing beers. All Briess malts are made in America, so you can count on a reliable supply chain. Barley is sourced from 300 growers in the Bighorn Basin of Wyoming and Montana. Plus, technical support is available through their Center of Malting Excellence. With 150 years of malting expertise, check out why so many craft brewers trust Briess for their specialty malt at BrewingWithBriess.com. John I. Haas Brewing has always been about creativity—but at scale, it's about control. For more than 100 years, Haas has worked with brewers to push what's possible with hops. And today, that means more control over flavor, efficiency, and consistency. Our advanced products help you get more out of every brew—more flavor where you want it, less waste in the process, faster tank turns, and results you can count on—batch after batch, year after year. From next-generation pellets, such as LupoCORE and LupoMAX, to innovations such as Incognito and Euphorics, our products fit seamlessly into your process—from the hot side through fermentation to the cold side. Advanced hop products are just one of the ways Haas is growing the future of brewing. Learn more at johnihaas.com.
Full show notes: https://bengreenfieldlife.com/502 In this solosode, you'll explore how to make peace with tinnitus after acoustic trauma, including the half dozen different root causes that can drive it and the specific supplements and technologies with research behind them, why cardiovascular fitness itself seems to protect your hearing as you age, and whether tattoos are actually as risky as people think, from the heavy metals hiding in colored ink to what a major 2024 study found about tattoos and lymphoma risk. I also break down a new study showing you can get the same heat shock protein boost from heavy resistance training that you would normally only get from a sauna, why stacking a hard workout with a sauna session afterward may give you the best of both worlds, and take a closer look at a study making headlines for supposedly debunking the whole eating before bedtime rule, because the fine print tells a very different story than the headline does. Episode Sponsors: Xtendlife: Most vitamin E supplements contain only alpha-tocopherol, but the more compelling research points to tocotrienols for cardiovascular, brain, and healthy aging support. Xtendlife’s Tocotrienols Vitamin E is formulated without excess alpha-tocopherol and is backed by over 26 years of formulation expertise in New Zealand. Visit www.xtendlife.com/benschoice and use code GREENFIELD for 15% off your order. Just Thrive: If you’ve accepted bloat, cravings, and sluggish digestion as normal, the Just Thrive Gut Essentials Bundle pairs a probiotic clinically proven to arrive 100% alive in your gut with Digestive Bitters, a blend of 12 science-backed herbs that support digestion and GLP-1 production. Visit justthrivehealth.com/BEN and save 20% with promo code BEN, or get a full refund if you don’t notice a difference. BIOptimizers Magnesium Breakthrough: The seven essential forms of magnesium included in this full-spectrum serving help you relax, unwind, and turn off your active brain after a long and stressful day so you can rest peacefully and wake up feeling refreshed, vibrant, and alert. Go to bioptimizers.com/ben and use code ben15 for 15% off any order. Troscriptions: Explore Troscriptions' revolutionary buccal troche delivery system that bypasses digestion, delivering pharmaceutical-grade, physician-formulated health-optimization compounds directly through your cheek mucosa for faster onset and higher bioavailability than traditional supplements. Discover a completely new way to optimize your health at troscriptions.com/BEN or enter BEN at checkout for 10% off your first order. LMNT: Everyone needs electrolytes, especially those on low-carb diets, who practice intermittent or extended fasting, are physically active, or sweat a lot. Go to DrinkLMNT.com/BenGreenfield to get a free sample pack with your purchase!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Young men have been under attack by popular culture for the last 20 years, argues Nick Freitas, a former Green Beret and Virginia state legislator. They have been told that masculinity is toxic, the future is female, that they are responsible for the world's problems, and that they no longer have a place, he says.Despite this onslaught, Freitas shares a hopeful message for the young men of today: “God has created men for a particular purpose. We are supposed to be strong. We are supposed to be capable. Why? So we can honor God, protect our families, and protect our civilization.”Freitas recently wrote a book entitled “The Manbook: A Point-by-Point Guide to Sucking It Up and Getting the Job Done,” where he shares hard-won lessons on how to be a good man despite resistance, or outright attacks, from the prevailing culture.In this episode, Freitas reveals why a whole generation of men are flocking to radical ideologies—and how to prevent it.Perhaps surprisingly, Freitas puts the onus on the men of older generations, arguing that young men desire good role models and guidance. Older men, therefore, must live the kind of lives that young men would want to model.“The best argument you make is not just the one that you articulate through your words,” Freitas says, “it's the one that you articulate through what you do in your own life.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
This week on the Andrew Yang Podcast, Andrew is joined by Brendan Greeley, Financial Times contributing editor and author of the new book "The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World's Most Powerful Money." They dig into the surprising history of the dollar, which predates the United States itself, why local currencies could matter more than ever in the AI era, how bank failures shaped the money we use today, and why the dollar's dominance has less to do with American governance than you'd think.Have a question for Andrew? Drop it in the comments section below or send us a text or voice memo to mailbag@andrewyang.com!Watch the full episode here----Follow Andrew Yang: Bluesky | Instagram | TikTok | Website | XCheck Out Branden's Book: The Almighy Dollar----Get 50% off Factor at Factor MealsGet an extra 3 months free at Express VPNGet 20% off + 2 free pillows at Helix Sleep | Use code: helixpartner20Get $30 off your first two (2) orders at Wonder | Use code: ANDREW104----Subscribe to the Andrew Yang Podcast: Apple | Spotify