Clopas

Family-friendly video game development studio founded by Roxanne and Scott Adams. Text-based games, Conversational Adventure™ games, game updates, tech history.

[Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal]

🇺🇸 WATCH: Dramatic video shows Chattanooga police officer Eli Rogers kicking down a door and running into a burning apartment, without hesitation, to save a mother and her two kids.

A Ring doorbell camera caught the whole thing.

What a hero!

[anul agarwal @anulagarwal]

i saw a mouse with an X-shaped battery compartment.

first thought: this is stupid - who designed it?

5 seconds later: oh.

10 seconds later: OHHH!

the X slot fits an AA or an AAA battery - whichever you've got lying around.

the part most people miss is that the shape also makes it physically impossible to load both at once.

there is no warning label, no instructions and no way to screw it up.
the geometry does the thinking for you.

japanese has a word for this.
poka-yoke = "mistake-proofing."

the product refuses your stupidity before you can offer it.

i wish more things worked like this.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Winston Churchill fought his depression with bricks. He'd lay them for hours at his country home in Kent. He joined the bricklayers' union. And in 1921 he wrote about why it worked. It took psychology another 75 years to catch up.

He called his depression the "Black Dog." It followed him for decades. His method for fighting it back was as basic as it sounds: laying brick after brick, hour after hour.

Churchill spelled out his theory in a long essay for The Strand Magazine. People who think for a living, he wrote, can't fix a tired brain just by resting it. They have to use a different part of themselves. The part that moves the eyes and the hands. Woodworking, chemistry, bookbinding, bricklaying, painting. Anything that drags the body into a problem the mind can't solve by itself.

Modern psychology now calls this behavioral activation. It's one of the most-studied depression treatments out there. Depression sets a behavior trap. You feel bad, so you stop doing things, and doing less means less to feel good about. Feeling worse makes you do even less. The loop tightens until you can't breathe inside it.

Behavioral activation breaks the loop from the action side. You schedule the activity first, even when every part of you doesn't want to. Doing it produces small rewards: a wall gets straighter, a painting fills in, a messy room gets clean. Those small rewards slowly rewire the brain. Action comes first, and the feeling follows.

Researchers at the University of Washington put this to the test in 2006. They studied 241 adults with major depression and compared three treatments: behavioral activation, regular talk therapy, and antidepressants. For the people who were most severely depressed, behavioral activation matched the drugs. It beat the talk therapy. A 2014 review of more than 1,500 patients across 26 trials backed up the result.

Physical work like bricklaying does something extra on top of this. It crowds out rumination, the looping bad thoughts that grind people down during the worst stretches of depression. Bricklaying needs both hands and gives feedback brick by brick: each one is straight or crooked. After an hour you can see exactly how much wall you built. No room left for the mental chewing.

The line George Mack used in his post, "depression hates a moving target," is good poetry. The science behind it is sharper. Depression hates a brain that has somewhere else to be.

[Om Patel @om_patel5]

RESEARCHERS JUST BUILT AN AI MODEL TRAINED ONLY ON TEXT FROM BEFORE 1931

it's called talkie. 13 billion parameters, trained exclusively on text published before december 31, 1930

its worldview is completely frozen in time

the reason this matters: every major AI model today (GPT, claude, gemini, llama) was trained on the modern web.

that makes it almost impossible to tell if these models actually reason or if they just memorized the answers from their training data

talkie breaks that completely because it has never seen any modern information

the crazy part:

talkie can learn to write python code from just a few examples you show it in the prompt. despite having ZERO modern code in its training data.

it's figuring out programming from 19th century mathematics texts. that's ACTUAL reasoning

claude sonnet 4.6 was used as the judge in talkie's reinforcement learning pipeline. claude opus 4.6 generated the synthetic conversations used in fine tuning. a modern AI was used to train a model that's supposed to be frozen in 1930

the team already flagged this as a contamination risk they want to eliminate in future versions

what they're using it to study:

> long range forecasting. how well can a model "predict" the future from a frozen vantage point
> invention. can it develop ideas that didn't exist until after its knowledge cutoff
> LLM identity. what makes a model itself vs what's just patterns absorbed from the web

alec radford built this. the same guy behind GPT, CLIP, and whisper

both models are open source on hugging face.

they're already planning a GPT-3 scale vintage model later this year

an AI that has never seen the modern world can still reason its way to writing code.

THAT alone tells you more about intelligence than any benchmark ever will

[Om Patel @om_patel5]

ANTHROPIC JUST BANNED A 110 PERSON COMPANY OVERNIGHT WITHOUT WARNING

monday morning at an agricultural tech company, every single employee wakes up to an email saying their claude account has been suspended

110 people locked out at the same time with zero warning and the email even pretended it was an individual ban with a link to a personal appeal form

it took them 10 minutes on slack to realize the entire org had been wiped at once.

not even the account admins were told it was coming

they submitted the appeal form and got no response, even after 36 hours later there was still nothing

AND it gets worse:

> their separate API account is still active and still billing them
> their admins can't log in to view usage or billing because the email addresses are banned
> they got hit with a renewal invoice the day AFTER the team account was suspended
> they have no idea what triggered it. fertilizer conversations? GPS satellites? agriculture in general?

so they're paying anthropic to get banned by anthropic while anthropic ignores their support tickets

the founder of the company laid out the bigger problem perfectly

banning an entire organization for one user's behavior means a single employee or careless intern can revoke claude access for your whole business.

there's no per seat guardrail, no admin override, no way to limit the ban radius

his words: "you have to ask yourself if this is a platform you can entrust your daily workflows to as a business"

every founder reading this who runs claude through their company should be checking right now what their actual exposure looks like

billion dollar AI company with zero enterprise customer support

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

An MIT professor taught the same math course for 62 years, and the day he retired, students from every country on earth showed up online to watch him give his final lecture.

I opened the playlist at 2am and ended up watching three of them back to back.

His name is Gilbert Strang. The course is MIT 18.06 Linear Algebra.

Every machine learning engineer, every data scientist, every quant, every self-taught programmer who actually understands how AI works learned the math from this one man. Most of them never set foot on MIT's campus. They just opened a free playlist on YouTube and let him teach.

Here's the story almost nobody tells you.

Strang joined the MIT math faculty in 1962. He retired in 2023. That is 61 years of standing at the same chalkboard teaching the same subject to 18-year-olds.

The interesting part is what he did when MIT launched OpenCourseWare in 2002. Most professors were skeptical. They worried that putting their lectures online would make their classrooms irrelevant. Strang did not hesitate. He said his life's mission was to open mathematics to students everywhere. He filmed every lecture and gave it away.

The decision quietly changed how the world learns math.

For decades linear algebra was taught the wrong way. Professors started with abstract vector spaces and proofs about field axioms. Students drowned in the abstraction. Most never recovered. They walked out believing they were bad at math when they had simply been taught in an order that nobody's brain is built to absorb.

Strang inverted the entire curriculum.

He started with matrix multiplication. Something you can write down on paper. Something you can compute by hand. Something you can see. Then he showed his students that everything else in linear algebra eigenvectors, singular value decomposition, orthogonality, the four fundamental subspaces was just a different lens for understanding what the matrix was actually doing under the hood.

His rule was strict. If a student could not explain a concept using a concrete 3 by 3 example, that student did not actually understand the concept yet. The abstraction was supposed to come last, not first. The intuition was the foundation. The proofs were just confirmation that the intuition was correct.

The second thing Strang changed was the classroom itself. He said please and thank you to his students. Every single lecture. He paused mid-derivation to ask "am I OK?" to check if anyone was lost. He never used the word "obviously" or "trivially" because he knew exactly what those words do to a student who is one step behind. He treated 19-year-olds learning math for the first time the way he treated his own colleagues. With patience. With respect. With the assumption that they belonged in the room.

For 62 years.

The result is something that has never happened in the history of education. A single math professor became the default teacher of his subject for the entire planet.

Universities in India, China, Brazil, Nigeria, every country with a computer science department, started telling their own students to just watch Strang's lectures. The University of Illinois revised its linear algebra course to do almost no in-person lecturing. The reason was honest. The professor said they could not compete with the videos.

His final lecture was in May 2023.

The auditorium was packed with students who had never met him before. He walked to the chalkboard, taught for an hour, and at the end the entire room stood and applauded. He looked confused for a moment, like he genuinely did not understand why they were cheering. Then he smiled and waved them off and walked out.

His written comment under the YouTube video of that final lecture was four sentences long. He said teaching had been a wonderful life. He said he was grateful to everyone who saw the importance of linear algebra. He said the movement of teaching it well would continue because it was right.

That was it. No book promotion. No farewell speech. No legacy management.

The man whose teaching is the foundation of modern AI just thanked the audience and went home.

20 million views. Zero ego. The entire engine of the AI revolution sits on top of math that millions of people learned for free from one quiet professor in Cambridge.

The course is still on MIT OpenCourseWare. Every lecture, every problem set, every exam, every solution. Free.

The most important math course of the 21st century is sitting one click away from you. Most people will never open it.

[Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal]

Rumor has it he's still there 😂

[DaVinci @BiancoDavinci]

A knot that allows you to carry things.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Soviet psychologist walked into a café in 1927 and watched a waiter do something impossible.

He remembered every open order at every table. Perfectly. Without notes. Without effort.

Then a table paid their bill. She asked him to repeat the order.

He couldn't remember a single item.

She spent the next two years figuring out why. What she found is now the operating system underneath every platform fighting for your attention.

Her name was Bluma Zeigarnik, and she was a graduate student at the time, sitting with her professor Kurt Lewin, watching the waiters work the room. What caught her attention was something so ordinary that it had been happening in restaurants for centuries without anyone asking why.

The waiters could remember every open order with perfect accuracy. Table four wanted the schnitzel with no sauce. Table seven had changed their wine twice. Table twelve owed for three coffees and a dessert. Every detail, held without effort, without notes, without any visible system at all.

But the moment a table paid their bill, the information vanished. Completely. Lewin tested it on the spot. He called a waiter back minutes after a table had settled up and asked him to recite the order. The waiter could not do it. Not partially. Not approximately. The information was simply gone.

Zeigarnik went back to her lab and spent the next two years turning that observation into one of the most replicated findings in the history of psychology.

Here is what she proved, and why it changes how you think about attention, memory, and almost every piece of media you have ever consumed.

She gave participants a series of tasks. Some tasks they were allowed to finish. Others were interrupted before completion. Then she tested recall across both groups.

The unfinished tasks were remembered at nearly twice the rate of the completed ones.

Not slightly better. Nearly twice. The brain was holding the incomplete work in a state of active tension, returning to it, keeping it warm, refusing to file it away. The finished tasks were closed, archived, released. The unfinished ones were still running.

She called it the resumption goal. When the brain commits to a task and cannot complete it, it opens a file that stays open until resolution arrives. That open file consumes a portion of your cognitive bandwidth whether you are thinking about it consciously or not. It surfaces in idle moments. It pulls at the edge of your attention during other work. It is the thing you find yourself thinking about in the shower when you were not trying to think about anything at all.

This is not a flaw in human cognition. It is a feature. The brain evolved to finish things. An open loop is a signal that something important is unresolved. Keeping that signal active increases the probability that you will return to it and complete it. In an environment where most tasks had real survival stakes, this was an extraordinarily useful mechanism.

In the modern world, it is the most exploited vulnerability in human attention.

Netflix did not invent the cliffhanger. But it industrialized it in a way no medium before it ever had. When a show ends on an unresolved question, it does not just create curiosity. It opens a file in your brain that stays active until the next episode closes it. The autoplay countdown that begins at 15 seconds is not a convenience feature. It is a precise calculation about how long the average person can tolerate an open loop before the discomfort of not knowing overrides every other intention they had for the evening. One more episode is not a choice. It is your brain doing exactly what it was designed to do: return to what is unfinished.

The writers who built Lost, Breaking Bad, and Succession understood this intuitively without ever reading a psychology paper. Every episode ended on an open question. Every season finale answered three things and opened five more. The entire architecture of prestige television is a Zeigarnik machine running at industrial scale.

But television is not where this gets dangerous.

Every notification on your phone is an open loop. Every unread email is an open loop. Every task you wrote on a list and have not yet crossed off is an open loop. Each one is consuming a small but real portion of your available attention, pulling fractionally at your focus, degrading your capacity to be fully present in whatever you are actually doing right now. TikTok's algorithm does not just serve you content you like. It serves you content that ends one loop and immediately opens another, keeping the resumption system permanently activated so the cost of stopping always feels higher than the cost of continuing.

The research on this accumulation effect is striking. Psychologists studying cognitive load have found that unfinished tasks do not sit passively in memory. They actively interrupt. They surface at the wrong moments. They are the reason you are reading something and suddenly remember an email you forgot to send. The brain is not malfunctioning. It is running its resumption system exactly as designed. It is just running it across forty open loops simultaneously, in an environment that generates new ones faster than any human nervous system was built to process.

The most important practical implication Zeigarnik's research produced is one that most people use backwards.

David Allen built his entire Getting Things Done system on the insight that the only way to close a cognitive open loop is to either complete the task or make a trusted commitment to complete it later. Writing something down in a system you actually trust has the same effect on the brain as finishing it. The file closes. The bandwidth is released. This is why writing a task down feels like relief even before you have done anything about it. You have not solved the problem. You have simply told your brain that the loop is registered and will be returned to, which is enough for the resumption system to stand down.

The inverse is equally true and far more destructive. Every task that lives only in your head, unwritten and unscheduled, is an open loop burning cognitive resources around the clock. The mental cost is not proportional to the size of the task. A tiny nagging obligation consumes the same active tension as a major project. Your brain does not discriminate by importance. It discriminates by completion.

Zeigarnik published her findings in 1927. The paper sat in academic literature for decades before anyone outside psychology paid attention to it.

Then television got good. Then the smartphone arrived. Then the entire attention economy was engineered, largely by people who understood intuitively what she had proven scientifically: an open loop is the most powerful hook available to anyone who wants to hold human attention.

Netflix knew it. Instagram knew it. Every designer who ever made a notification badge red instead of grey knew it.

The café in Vienna is long gone.

The mechanism she discovered there is now the operating system underneath every platform fighting for your time.

Every "to be continued."

Every unread notification.

Every thread that ends with "part 2 tomorrow."

All of it is the same waiter, the same unpaid bill, the same brain refusing to let go of what it has not yet finished.

Zeigarnik noticed it over coffee in 1927.

A century later, it is the most valuable insight in the history of media.

And nobody taught it to you in school.

[Johnny Midnight ⚡️ @its_The_Dr]

Pretty neat! How a simple paper glider stays aloft using steady airflow and basic aerodynamics

[Today In History @historigins]

A woman offered food to a peacock, and the peacock thanked her in the most beautiful way

[The Figen @TheFigen_]

The cat's owners didn't know why the cat wouldn't sleep in its bed, then they saw this.

[Right Angle News Network @Rightanglenews]

BREAKING - Passengers on an American flight from Atlanta to Puerto Rico captured one of the closest videos of the Artemis II launch from their plane, and it’s going massively viral, with some commenters expressing concern about how close the plane was to the rocket.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Yes

[Today In History @historigins]

One of the greatest lecture in the world

[Clopas @ClopasLLC]

@MustangMan_TX @grok what is the child singing in the video. I can't make out the words or tune

[Mindset Machine  @mindsetmachine]

Watch This Until You Understand the Point of Failure.

[Yogi @Houseofyogi]

Unrealized gains tax for Gen-Z:

You buy a Pokémon card for $50.

Someone offers you $500 for it. You say no. You love that card. You're keeping it.

The government says: "Cool, but that card is worth $500 now. You owe us $100 in taxes."
You: "…I didn't sell it."

Government: "Don't care. Pay up."

You don't have $100 lying around. So you're forced to sell the card you love just to pay a tax on money you never received.

Next month? That card drops back to $50.

Your card is gone. Your money is gone. And the government shrugs.

That's a wealth tax on unrealized gains. They don't pay you back the tax...

Now picture this.

Your mom calls you crying. She has to sell the house she raised you in. Not because she can't afford it. She's lived there 30 years. It's paid off.

But some website says it's worth more now and the government says she owes $15,000 she doesn't have.

So she sells your childhood home. The kitchen where she made you breakfast. The doorframe where she marked your height every birthday.

Gone.

To pay a tax on money that was never real.

Now picture the opposite.

Your dad put everything into his small business. For 20 years he built it from nothing. One year the business is "valued" at $2 million on paper. He owes a massive tax bill. He empties his savings. Sells his truck. Borrows money. Pays it.

Next year the market crashes. His business is worth $200,000.

He lost everything to pay a tax on a number that doesn't exist anymore.

Does the government give him his money back?
No.

Does the government give him his truck back?
No.

Does the government care?
No.

They sold this idea as "taxing billionaires." But billionaires have armies of lawyers, offshore accounts, and trusts. They'll be fine.

You know who won't be fine? Your mom. Your dad. Your neighbor with a small business. The farmer down the road who's had the same land for four generations and now has to sell it because dirt got expensive.

You're not taxing wealth. You're taxing people for owning things.

It's like getting a parking ticket for a car you might drive somewhere someday.

They want you to own nothing and be happy. To fund the fraud, waste and abuse of the welfare state they created.

There is enough money. More tax isn't needed. It's all a lie. But you've been gaslit into believing this is a rich vs poor debate.

I hope you understand what's at stake.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Yes

[Wholesome Side of 𝕏 @itsme_urstruly]

Bro unlocked a feeling he didn't know existed 🥹