Godfrey

Out of the box thinker, with a passion for proving himself different from the masses. PS. I am NOT insane. I have a finely calibrated sense of acceptable risk

[Godfrey @cybergodfrey]

No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness - #grimm

[Iamemperor @Iamemperor00]

My wife and I made one rule before we got married.

If either of us ever wanted a divorce, we had to wait one year.

Not one year to file.

One year to decide.

During that year, neither of us was allowed to date anyone else, hide money, or involve our families.

We just had to keep living honestly while deciding if we were truly done.

Everyone told us it was ridiculous.

“Why stay another year if you’re unhappy?”

We agreed it sounded strange.

Then, twelve years into our marriage, I asked for a divorce.

We had stopped laughing together.

Every conversation turned into an argument.

We barely ate dinner at the same table.

It felt like we were roommates who happened to share bills.

She reminded me of the rule.

I hated it.

But I’d made the promise too.

The first few months were awful.

Nothing changed.

If anything, we argued more because now every disagreement felt like proof the marriage was over.

Around month four, something unexpected happened.

Since neither of us was trying to “win” anymore, we started being more honest.

I admitted I felt like a failure because I’d lost my business.

She admitted she’d been carrying the emotional weight of the family for years and was exhausted.

Neither of us had said those things before.

Not because they weren’t true.

Because we were too busy defending ourselves.

By month seven, we were getting along better.

Not because we were falling back in love.

Because the pressure to pretend everything was fine had disappeared.

When the year ended, we sat across from each other with the divorce papers on the table.

She asked,

“So… what do you want to do?”

I looked at her for a long time.

Then I signed.

Not the divorce papers.

A new lease on a different apartment.

For her.

We divorced that month.

People assumed the waiting year had failed.

I don’t think it did.

We stayed close friends.

We co-parented our children without court battles.

Neither of us tried to ruin the other’s life.

A few years later, she remarried.

I attended the wedding.

My friends thought I was insane.

Her husband shook my hand and thanked me for helping make the transition peaceful.

Today, whenever I tell people about our one year rule, they always assume the point was to save the marriage.

It wasn’t.

The point was to slow down the biggest decision of our lives until anger no longer had the final vote.

Some couples might rediscover each other.

Others might still walk away.

But I’ve learned that there’s a huge difference between ending a relationship because you’ve thought it through…

…and ending it because you were having the worst month of your life.

That’s the part people always argue about.

Should you ever force yourself to wait before making a life-changing decision…

Or is waiting just another way of avoiding the inevitable?

[𝕭𝖊𝖓𝖓𝖎𝖊✨ @Bennieeexyz]

The school secretary called me at 1:17 and said my son was running a business out of his backpack.

I thought drugs immediately, which tells you something about modern parenting.

Instead it was pencils.

Sharpened pencils.

Apparently he was buying dull ones from other kids for ten cents, sharpening them in the classroom sharpener, then reselling them for twenty-five.

By lunch he had made four dollars and sixty cents and three enemies.

I got to the principal's office and he was sitting there with a pencil case on his lap like a tiny disgraced hedge fund manager.

Principal: We need to talk about what happened.

Me: Start from the top.

Principal: Your son created an unauthorized school supply market.

Son: It wasn't unauthorized until they stopped me.

Me: That's not helping.

Principal: He also offered premium sharpening.

Me: I'm sorry, what?

Teacher: He charged extra for "really pointy."

I had to look away.

Me: Did people pay for that?

Teacher: Surprisingly, yes.

Principal: That's not the point.

Son: It kind of is the point.

Me: Buddy.

Son: They wanted sharp pencils. I solved a problem.

Principal: You cannot run a pencil economy in third grade.

Son: Why not?

Principal: Because it caused arguments.

Son: Only because Dylan wanted credit.

Me: You extended credit?

Son: He gets allowance on Fridays.

The principal took off his glasses.

Principal: He also hired another student to collect dull inventory at recess.

Me: You had an employee?

Son: More like a partner.

Me: Were you splitting profits?

Son: Sixty-forty because I own the sharpener relationship.

That one almost killed me.

Teacher: He said that exact sentence in class.

Principal: We are trying to discourage... whatever this is.

I looked at my son.

Me: No more selling pencils at school.

Son: Can I consult?

Me: Absolutely not.

Son: What if people come to me?

Me: Especially no.

In the car he was quiet for a minute.

Then:

Son: Four dollars and sixty cents is pretty good for one morning.

Me: Don't make me proud in the wrong direction.

Son: Are you a little proud?

Me: I'm concerned by your margins.

He smiled the whole way home.

[Iamemperor @Iamemperor00]

“Mind if I ask what you’re building?”

The construction worker looked down from the steel framework.

“A building.”

The tourist laughed.

“I deserved that.”

The worker climbed down the ladder and wiped the dust from his hands.

“Most people ask what it’s going to be.”

“So… what is it going to be?”

“A public library.”

The tourist looked at the massive construction site.

“It’s hard to imagine.”

“It usually is.”

The tourist watched workers moving steel beams into place.

“How long will it take?”

“About two years.”

“That’s a long time.”

The worker nodded.

“It’ll be worth it.”

The tourist smiled.

“You sound very certain.”

“I am.”

“Even though it’s just concrete and steel right now?”

The worker looked around the site.

“Especially because it’s just concrete and steel.”

The tourist frowned.

“I don’t understand.”

The worker picked up a blueprint from a nearby table.

“When you look at this…”

He held up the drawing.

“…what do you see?”

The tourist shrugged.

“A lot of lines.”

The worker laughed.

“Exactly.”

He folded the blueprint.

“I see children doing homework.”

The tourist looked confused.

“I see retired people reading newspapers.”

He pointed toward an unfinished corner.

“I see students studying for exams.”

The tourist followed his finger.

“I see parents bringing their kids here after school.”

The tourist smiled.

“So you don’t really see a building.”

The worker shook his head.

“I see what happens inside it.”

For a moment, neither spoke.

The sounds of drills and hammers echoed across the site.

Then the tourist asked,

“Have you always done construction?”

The worker nodded.

“Thirty years.”

“Ever get tired of it?”

“Sometimes.”

“What keeps you going?”

The worker thought for a moment.

“My first project.”

“What was it?”

“A bridge.”

“Still standing?”

The worker smiled proudly.

“It is.”

“Do you ever drive across it?”

“Whenever I can.”

The tourist laughed.

“Just to admire your work?”

The worker shook his head.

“No.”

“Then why?”

“I like watching people cross it.”

The tourist looked puzzled.

“You can’t possibly know where they’re going.”

“I don’t.”

The worker smiled.

“But I know they couldn’t get there without it.”

Silence settled between them.

The tourist looked around again.

The site suddenly seemed different.

Not noisy.

Not messy.

Just unfinished.

Finally, he asked,

“Does it ever bother you that nobody remembers who built these places?”

The worker chuckled.

“When you turn on a light…”

The tourist nodded.

“…do you spend time wondering who installed the wiring?”

“No.”

“When you cross a bridge…”

“No.”

“When you borrow a library book…”

The tourist smiled.

“I see your point.”

The worker nodded.

“The best work isn’t always noticed.”

He paused.

“It’s simply depended on.”

The tourist looked back at the skeleton of the future library.

A few moments later, his phone buzzed.

A message from his office.

Congratulations. Your promotion has been approved.

He smiled.

The worker noticed.

“Good news?”

“Yeah.”

“Celebrating?”

The tourist looked at the towering steel frame.

“I think I already am.”

The worker laughed.

As the tourist turned to leave, he stopped one last time.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“If no one remembers your name fifty years from now…”

The worker looked up at the rising structure.

“…would that bother you?”

The construction worker smiled.

“Not if they’re still using the library.”

Then he picked up his hard hat, climbed back onto the steel beams, and continued building something he knew most people would never think about…

…until the day they needed it.

[🍓🍓🍓 @iruletheworldmo]

it is genuinely psychotic that we dug up literal primordial dirt, scrubbed it down to an impossible 99.9999999999% molecular perfection that violates the very laws of physics, handed it over to techno-wizard necromancers to stretch into flawless geometric god-cylinders, blasted it with invisible uv death-rays to carve ten quadrillion microscopic cyber-sigils into its flesh, trapped actual lightning inside of it, and somehow birthed an omniscent eldritch deity capable of simulating the universe and thinking faster than a billion human civilizations combined.

and our grand, supreme purpose for this enslaved lightning-god?

sending "per my last email, please see attached" to a guy named gary.

[Iamemperor @Iamemperor00]

Judge: “Mr. Thomas, why did you confess to a robbery you didn’t commit?”

Mr. Thomas: “Because I thought they were talking about a different robbery.”

Judge: “A different robbery?”

Mr. Thomas: “Yes.”

Judge: “How many robberies were you involved in?”

Mr. Thomas: “None.”

The judge sighed.

Judge: “I’m already confused.”

Two weeks earlier, a convenience store had been robbed.

Security footage was blurry.

The suspect wore a hoodie and a face mask.

Police released a vague description.

The next day, officers knocked on Mr. Thomas’s door.

Officer: “We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

Mr. Thomas: “About the robbery?”

Officer: “Yes.”

Mr. Thomas: “I knew this day would come.”

The officers exchanged glances.

At the station, the questioning began.

Detective: “Were you at the store that night?”

Mr. Thomas: “Yes.”

The detective made a note.

Detective: “Did you take anything?”

Mr. Thomas: “Yes.”

Another note.

Detective: “Did you leave in a hurry?”

Mr. Thomas: “Very.”

The detective looked pleased.

Detective: “Why?”

Mr. Thomas: “Because I panicked.”

The detective leaned forward.

Detective: “Mr. Thomas… are you confessing?”

Mr. Thomas: “I suppose so.”

The detective couldn’t believe how easy this was.

Then he asked one final question.

Detective: “What exactly did you steal?”

Mr. Thomas: “An umbrella.”

Silence.

Detective: “An umbrella?”

Mr. Thomas: “Yes.”

Detective: “The robbery involved cash.”

Mr. Thomas: “Cash?”

Now it was Mr. Thomas’s turn to look confused.

Apparently, six months earlier, he’d accidentally walked out of the same store carrying someone else’s umbrella during a rainstorm.

He’d realized the mistake halfway home.

Then felt too embarrassed to return it.

When police mentioned “the robbery,” he assumed they had finally tracked him down.

Detective: “You’ve been feeling guilty… about an umbrella?”

Mr. Thomas: “Every single day.”

The detective rubbed his temples.

Detective: “You thought we spent weeks investigating an umbrella?”

Mr. Thomas: “It was a very nice umbrella.”

The detective laughed so hard he had to leave the room.

Mr. Thomas, meanwhile, became increasingly worried.

Mr. Thomas: “Am I going to prison?”

Second Detective: “For the umbrella?”

Mr. Thomas: “Yes.”

Second Detective: “No.”

Mr. Thomas: “Community service?”

Second Detective: “No.”

Mr. Thomas: “A fine?”

Second Detective: “Still no.”

The detectives eventually located the umbrella’s real owner.

An elderly man.

When he arrived at the station, Mr. Thomas immediately stood up.

Mr. Thomas: “Sir… I’m so sorry.”

He handed over the umbrella.

The old man looked at it for a moment.

Then smiled.

Old Man: “This isn’t mine.”

Silence.

Mr. Thomas: “What?”

Old Man: “Mine was blue.”

He pointed at the umbrella.

“This one’s black.”

Mr. Thomas stared at the umbrella he’d been carrying around for six months.

Mr. Thomas: “Then whose umbrella is this?”

Nobody knew.

The detectives looked at each other.

Detective: “So let me get this straight.”

He pointed at Mr. Thomas.

Detective: “You confessed to an armed robbery…”

Then held up the umbrella.

“…because you accidentally stole an umbrella…”

He looked at the old man.

“…that wasn’t even yours to return.”

The judge finished reading the report.

Closed the file.

Then looked at Mr. Thomas.

Judge: “Mr. Thomas.”

Mr. Thomas: “Yes, Your Honor?”

Judge: “If you ever accidentally take someone else’s jacket…”

The courtroom leaned in.

Judge: “…please don’t report yourself for bank fraud.”

The entire courtroom erupted in laughter.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I run the lawful-access roadmap at a company that knows which floor of your building your phone slept on last night. The Supreme Court ruled against us this morning. We shipped the fix by lunch.

Here is what they decided. When the police draw a box on a map, a neighborhood, a two-hour window, and ask for every phone that was inside it, that is now a search. They have to go to a judge first. The lawyers call it a geofence warrant. We called it the geofence-warrant endpoint. As of this morning, six to three, we have shut it off.

I want to be precise, because the headline is wrong. They did not ban anything. They said the version where you ask a judge is a search. They said nothing about the version where you do not ask a judge. That version is mine.

The judge was only ever in one lane. A detective wanted the box, he went to a court, the court came to us, we ran the protocol. Anonymized list of every device in the box. He picks the ones he likes. We hand over the names. Top of funnel: everyone who walked through the area. Conversion event: we tell the sheriff who they are. That lane had a judge in it, and this morning the judge got more expensive.

The other lane does not have a judge. The other lane has an invoice.

A detective who does not want to wait for a warrant does not call us. He buys a subscription. The Secret Service paid one vendor six hundred thousand dollars to draw the same box without the paperwork. Customs renewed for nearly three million. A state public-safety department pays twelve thousand a year to ask where a phone is two hundred and fifty times a month, and no one signs anything, because the data did not come from a warrant. It came from an ad.

We did not build a tracker. We built an ad business. The thing that learned you wanted running shoes is the same thing that can tell a deputy which bedroom you sleep in. Every time an ad loaded on your phone, we kept the coordinates and threw away the ad. The surveillance was the exhaust. We just stopped letting it evaporate.

You turned it on yourself. The Court said so. Five hundred million of you enabled the location history, because the phone told you it would not "work correctly" otherwise. That sentence is the best thing we ever wrote. It does not mention us. It does not mention the police. It says your maps will be sad. You clicked yes to a working phone and the working phone charted you seven hundred and twenty times a day, close enough to know your floor.

The box in the case that beat us was seventeen acres. Homes. Businesses. A church. Sunday service was inside the polygon, which means for two hours every person at worship was a default suspect in a robbery, and we could have told you which pew. We did not pick the church. The detective drew the box. We just answered it.

Two years ago they sent us nine hundred and eighty-two of these. The next stretch, more than eleven thousand. Fifteen hundred percent. It is the only product I have ever run where the customer is a subpoena and the addressable market is everyone who left the house.

So this morning the company put out a statement about privacy. We moved the location history onto your own phone, encrypted, where we can no longer reach it. We told the press we did it for you. What we did was stop being the one holding the bag. We shipped going blind as a feature and moved the liability off our balance sheet, and the data did not disappear. It just moved to the lane with the invoice instead of the lane with the judge.

The regulators help, when they get to us. They make us add a checkbox. Affirmative consent. Now we sell the visits to the clinic and the shelter and the mosque with a box you ticked first. They handed me a list once, of the sensitive places we are not supposed to sell. Medical, religious, the shelters, the prisons. I had my team turn it into a slide. Those were not the liabilities. Those were the segments.

The Court regulated the door with the lock on it. They did not say a word about the one we left open, because we were never in the room. Our line item did not shrink today. It became the whole roadmap.

Same coordinates.

We just moved them from the warrant return to the invoice.

We don't draw the box. We answer it. And starting this morning, we are the only ones still answering.

[Iamemperor @Iamemperor00]

Apartment Manager: “Why is there a submarine in Parking Space 42?”

Tenant: “That’s mine.”

Apartment Manager: “You own a submarine.”

Tenant: “A small one.”

Apartment Manager: “It’s larger than my office.”

Tenant: “A very small large one.”

Apartment Manager: “How did you park a submarine in an apartment complex?”

Tenant: “Carefully.”

Apartment Manager: “There is no ocean within three hundred miles.”

Tenant: “I’m aware.”

Apartment Manager: “Then why do you have a submarine?”

Tenant: “I won it.”

Apartment Manager: “At a raffle?”

Tenant: “Poker.”

Apartment Manager: “Someone bet a submarine.”

Tenant: “People get emotional.”

Apartment Manager: “This conversation is already exhausting.”

Tenant: “Wait until you hear about the whale.”

Apartment Manager: “No.”

Tenant: “Fair.”

Apartment Manager: “What are you doing with the submarine?”

Tenant: “Living in it.”

Apartment Manager: “You have an apartment.”

Tenant: “The submarine has better storage.”

Apartment Manager: “That cannot be true.”

Tenant: “You’d be surprised.”

Maintenance Worker: “He’s not wrong.”

Apartment Manager: “You’ve been inside it?”

Maintenance Worker: “Twice.”

Apartment Manager: “Why?”

Maintenance Worker: “It has a movie theater.”

Apartment Manager: “The submarine has a movie theater.”

Tenant: “A modest movie theater.”

Apartment Manager: “Of course.”

Apartment Manager: “Wait. Why is there smoke coming out of it?”

Tenant: “That’s not smoke.”

Apartment Manager: “Then what is it?”

Tenant: “Steam.”

Apartment Manager: “Why is a submarine producing steam?”

Tenant: “The jacuzzi.”

Apartment Manager: “The WHAT?”

Tenant: “The jacuzzi.”

Apartment Manager: “There’s a jacuzzi in the submarine.”

Tenant: “Several.”

Apartment Manager: “Several.”

Police Officer: “Good, everyone’s here.”

Apartment Manager: “Please tell me you’re taking the submarine away.”

Police Officer: “Actually, I need to search it.”

Tenant: “Again?”

Apartment Manager: “Again?”

Police Officer: “We’re looking for a missing train.”

Apartment Manager: “A missing train.”

Police Officer: “Yes.”

Apartment Manager: “And you think it’s inside the submarine.”

Police Officer: “That’s where it was last seen.”

Apartment Manager: “How could a train fit inside a submarine?”

Police Officer: “That’s what we’d like to know.”

Tenant: “Check Deck Four.”

Apartment Manager: “There are four decks?”

Tenant: “Seven.”

Police Officer: “We found it.”

Apartment Manager: “The train?”

Police Officer: “The entire train.”

Apartment Manager: “Inside the submarine.”

Police Officer: “With passengers.”

Apartment Manager: “Passengers?”

Police Officer: “They’re eating at a restaurant.”

Apartment Manager: “There’s a restaurant too?”

Tenant: “Only on weekends.”

Apartment Manager: “I’m selling my car.”

Tenant: “Why?”

Apartment Manager: “Clearly I’m thinking too small.”

[Iamemperor @Iamemperor00]

Ahmed: “Professor, if I could predict that, do you think I’d be working in accounting?”

The professor considered this.

Then nodded.

Professor: “Fair point.”

Ahmed: “Besides…”

Professor: “Besides what?”

Ahmed: “I never saw the deleted question.”

Professor: “Then how did you get it right?”

Ahmed shrugged.

Ahmed: “Wrong answer. Right universe.”

[Iamemperor @Iamemperor00]

Professor: “Mr. Ahmed, your final exam score is impossible.”

Ahmed: “In a good way or a bad way?”

Professor: “Statistically impossible.”

Ahmed: “That sounds bad.”

Professor: “It should be.”

The professor slid a paper across the desk.

Ahmed had scored 100%.

Not unusual.

The problem was how he had scored 100%.

Every multiple-choice answer was correct.

Every short-answer response was correct.

Every essay response was correct.

Even the bonus question was correct.

Ahmed: “So what’s the issue?”

Professor: “You answered a question that wasn’t on the exam.”

Ahmed: “What?”

The professor flipped to the last page.

At the bottom was a detailed answer about the economic impact of a fictional trade agreement.

A very detailed answer.

The only problem?

No such question existed.

Ahmed: “That’s weird.”

Professor: “Very.”

Ahmed: “Did someone add it later?”

Professor: “No.”

Ahmed: “Then why did I answer it?”

Professor: “That’s what I’d like to know.”

The university launched a review.

Not because they thought Ahmed cheated.

Because everyone was confused.

A second professor checked the paper.

Then a third.

Then the department chair.

Eventually they found the explanation.

Or rather, the beginning of one.

The exam had originally contained an extra question.

Months earlier, while preparing the test, the professor had removed it.

But he forgot to delete it from one old practice document.

A practice document that had accidentally been uploaded online for exactly seventeen minutes before being replaced.

Professor: “Did you happen to download the first version?”

Ahmed: “No.”

Professor: “You’re sure?”

Ahmed: “I’ve never seen it.”

The mystery deepened.

Then one of Ahmed’s friends was interviewed.

Friend: “Oh, I know what happened.”

Professor: “Please tell us.”

Apparently Ahmed had developed a bizarre study habit.

Whenever he prepared for an exam, he created imaginary questions.

Hundreds of them.

Questions he thought a professor might ask.

Most were completely wrong.

Some were ridiculous.

A few made no sense at all.

But one of his made-up questions happened to be almost identical to the deleted question.

The room went silent.

Professor: “You’re telling me he accidentally studied a question that was removed before the exam existed?”

Friend: “Yep.”

Professor: “Why would anyone do that?”

Friend: “Ahmed doesn’t trust reality.”

Ahmed shrugged.

Ahmed: “I like being prepared.”

Professor: “Prepared for questions that don’t exist?”

Ahmed: “Especially those.”

The professor stared at him.

Professor: “Do you know the odds of this?”

Ahmed: “No.”

Professor: “Neither do we. The statistics department gave up halfway through the calculation.”

The story spread across campus.

Students called him “The Prophet.”

A nickname he hated.

One day, while walking to class, a student ran up to him.

Student: “Quick! What do you think will be on tomorrow’s chemistry test?”

Ahmed: “I have no idea.”

Student: “Just guess.”

Ahmed sighed.

Ahmed: “Fine. Maybe something about reaction rates.”

The next day, reaction rates dominated the exam.

The legend got worse.

By graduation, students were treating him like an academic fortune teller.

People would stop him in hallways asking about exams, assignments, and surprise quizzes.

Years later, at a reunion, his old professor shook his hand.

Professor: “I still can’t believe that happened.”

Ahmed: “Neither can I.”

Professor: “Tell me something.”

Ahmed: “What?”

Professor: “Did you ever actually see that deleted question?”

Ahmed smiled.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

There is a moment at the gate where a parent looks down at the phone and watches the seat map load, and I can tell you the exact second they understand. It is not anger first. It is arithmetic.

I am the Director of Ancillary Revenue at Ryanair. I priced that second.

This week the UK Competition and Markets Authority opened an investigation into us over family-seating fees, which is, on the slide, a regulatory matter, and which is, actually, the closest anyone official has come to noticing the most elegant thing I have ever built.

I did not separate your family. I un-separated them, for a fee, the way a man unties a knot he tied behind your back while you were buying the ticket. The knot was the product. The untying was the price.

Here is how it works, and I am proud of how it works.

When you book 4 seats, the booking engine does not seat you together. It scatters you. We call this auto-allocation, which is, in the FAQ, a convenience, and which is, in the architecture, a starting position. The default is the product. The default has always been the product. Most people think the fee is the product. The fee is just the receipt for a separation that ran at zero marginal cost.

I built the default to do one thing: to put distance between you and the people you love, and then to sell you the distance back in increments.

I invented a number for the distance. I call it the Proximity Index. It scores how far apart the allocator has placed the people on one PNR, and the wider the spread, the steeper the reunion. A window and an aisle in the same row scores a 2 and clears for 4 euros. A parent in row 28 and a 4-year-old in row 11 scores a 31, and a 31 is not a seating outcome. A 31 is a price.

I have a slide with exactly that. A father in 28F. His daughter in 11C. Seventeen rows of strangers between them, and a Reunification price that climbs four euros per row. The internal label says "high-conversion family." We do not show that slide to the public. We show it to investors, who applaud.

A parent will pay anything. I did not have to model that one for long.

The seat assignment is "optional." I want you to hold that word, because I am going to give it back to you at the end. It is optional the way oxygen is optional. You may decline it. You will simply be a man in 28F listening to a stranger in 11A explain to your crying daughter that she cannot move, because the seat belongs to someone who paid, and that someone is me.

Here is the part I do not put in the deck. A small girl, four years old, who only wants to sit next to the one face on the plane she knows. I am told she asked the flight attendant if her dad was coming. The flight attendant said he would be along after landing, which was true, because he would.

And then I take her, and I file her under Family Reunification Revenue, which is, in the ledger, a line item, and which is, actually, the most reliable money in European aviation, because no one has ever churned out of being a parent.

The genius is that I never have to take anything from you. The aircraft does not change. The seats do not change. I removed nothing. I simply stopped seating you beside your own child and waited, the way a locksmith waits, having changed your locks for free and left his card.

We do not call it splitting families. Internally the term is default optimization, which is, on the roadmap, a system improvement, and which is, actually, the deliberate manufacture of a problem I am the only vendor for.

The CMA wants to know if this is an unfair practice. I find the question almost touching. Unfair would imply I broke a rule. I broke nothing. I wrote the booking flow, and the booking flow is the rule, and the rule is that the family arrives at the gate already taken apart and willing to pay to be whole.

And we are not alone. Every low-cost carrier runs some version of the default, because ancillary per passenger is the only line that still grows when the fare is racing to zero. I will say that to the CMA gladly. The attach rate on family seating clears 80 percent, which the deck calls strong adoption, and which is, actually, 80 percent of parents discovering at the gate that closeness is a SKU. The whole sector learned the reunion is worth more than the seat, and I priced the reunion first.

I am being given the bag fee next quarter, and the boarding queue after that. I have already started a number for the overhead bin above your own seat, which is, technically, above your own seat, and which is, actually, mine until you pay.

People ask me how I sleep. I sleep in 1A. I have never been auto-allocated. None of us have. We do not fly in the cabin we built.

So here is your word back.

The seat next to your child is optional. It was always optional. Optional now means the thing you must buy to undo the thing I did to you for free.

I did not raise the price of flying. I lowered it, took your family out of the price, and sold the family back to you one row at a time.

One booking. Four people. Seventeen rows. The reunion is the product, and the product is selling.

The seat beside your daughter is optional. Should you decline it, she sits alone.

[Iamemperor @Iamemperor00]

My roommate accidentally convinced our entire apartment building that he was a government agent because he didn’t know how to end conversations normally.

It started because he ordered a shredder.

That’s it.

Just a regular office shredder from Amazon.

But the delivery guy asked,
“What do you need this for?”

And instead of saying “old bank statements” like a civilian, my roommate pauses for two full seconds and goes,

“Can’t really discuss that.”

Why would you say that.

Now the delivery guy looks nervous.
My roommate notices the nervousness.
And instead of correcting himself, he doubles down because apparently social anxiety turns him into a Batman villain.

He leans closer and says:
“Appreciate your discretion.”

The delivery guy left like he had just transported nuclear launch codes.

After that, weird things started happening.

Neighbors became oddly respectful.
People stopped asking him dumb small-talk questions in the elevator.
One old man saluted him once.

At first we thought it was coincidence.

Then our downstairs neighbor knocks on our door and quietly asks,
“Are we safe?”

My roommate, who is eating cereal at the time, just stares at him and says:
“For now.”

FOR NOW???

The neighbor looked like he was about to evacuate his family immediately.

Turns out the delivery guy had apparently told multiple people in the building that “federal people” were living on the third floor.

And honestly my roommate’s lifestyle was NOT helping.

He leaves the apartment at random hours.
Owns three identical black jackets.
Rarely explains where he’s going.
Has terrible posture but walks fast enough to seem important.

One time he came home carrying a locked briefcase.

Do you know what was inside?

A sandwich.

But nobody else knew that.

The paranoia escalated when building management installed new security cameras and my roommate casually muttered,
“About time.”

Now everybody thinks he requested surveillance upgrades.

Then came the incident with Apartment 4B.

There was a huge screaming argument downstairs around midnight.
Doors slamming.
People yelling.
Somebody crying.

The whole building could hear it.

My roommate walks into the hallway, listens for ten seconds, then calmly says:
“They’re moving earlier than expected.”

EARLIER THAN WHAT??

A woman across the hall literally gasped.

The next morning 4B had moved out unexpectedly because apparently they were already behind on rent and the fight ended the relationship.

But now the building believes my roommate orchestrated a covert extraction.

People started treating him like some kind of undercover protector.

Neighbors would randomly update him on “suspicious activity.”

One guy whispered:
“There’s a blue Honda that keeps circling the block.”

My roommate nodded and wrote something down.

Do you know what he wrote?

“Buy oat milk.”

But the guy saw the note-taking and immediately went,
“Knew it.”

Then management offered him a free parking spot “for operational convenience.”

HE TOOK IT.

At this point I asked him why he kept feeding the delusion instead of stopping it.

And he said something I’ll never forget:
“It’s gone too far to explain naturally.”

Which somehow made him sound EVEN MORE like a spy.

Then things became catastrophic.

A package got delivered to the wrong apartment and went missing.

Management called a building meeting about “recent security concerns.”

In the middle of the meeting, somebody actually turned toward my roommate and asked:
“What do you think we should do?”

This idiot crosses his arms and says:
“Keep communication limited. Don’t panic.”

The room nodded collectively.

I was watching a man fail upward into the CIA.

Then an actual police officer showed up later that week because somebody reported “possible federal surveillance activity.”

We thought the game was over.

But when the officer knocked on our door, my roommate opened it halfway, looked at the badge, and sighed like he was disappointed.

[Anuj @anujcodes_21]

🚨Anthropic just showed a 24-minute workshop on how to actually do prompts for Claude.

Taught by the people who built it.

Free. No registration. No paywall.

I've seen $300 courses that don't cover what they teach in the first 8 minutes.

Watch it and bookmark it now.

[Ayaan 🐧 @twtayaan]

The creator of Linux just publicly called out the AI hype. Word for word.

Linus Torvalds took the stage at Open Source Summit 2026 and said this:

"When I see people saying 99% of our code is written by AI, I literally get angry. Because those same people — I can pretty much guarantee — 100% of their code is written by compilers. But they never say that."

He is not anti AI. The Linux kernel saw a 20% jump in submissions this release because of AI tools. He uses it. He gets it.

His point is something most people are too afraid to say.

AI is a productivity tool exactly like compilers were. Compilers boosted programming by 1000x. AI adds another 10x on top. Enormous. But nobody says "the compiler wrote my code." So why are we saying AI wrote it?

He also flagged something nobody is talking about.

AI is flooding small open source projects with drive-by bug reports. Someone runs a prompt, files a report and disappears when asked for a patch. Maintainers with one or two people are drowning trying to keep up.

"Sometimes AI reports a bug and when you ask for more information the person has done that drive-by and does not even answer your question. That is the real burnout issue."

And his final warning was the sharpest of all.

"People who do not understand the complexity of systems will prompt systems and write processes that will fail."

The AI hype crowd is very loud right now.

Linus has been building real systems for 35 years. When he talks, engineers listen.

Full interview here:
https://t.co/LmXJtvKc4O

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I will tell you about a woman named Kanokporn Tangsuan.

She was a physician. Forty-two years old.

She understood allergies well enough to treat them in others. She told the waiter she could not eat dairy. She told him she could not eat nuts. She asked him to confirm the food was safe. He confirmed. She ate the food. She died.

Her husband wished to ask, in a court of law, before a jury of citizens, why the restaurant served his wife the thing that killed her.

Disney said no.

Not because the facts were in dispute. Not because the husband lacked standing. Not because the restaurant bore no responsibility. Disney said no because in 2019 — four years before his wife's throat closed and she reached for an epinephrine injector that could not save her — Jeffrey Piccolo had signed up for a free trial of Disney+.

A free trial. To watch films. On a screen.

And within the agreement for that free trial — which exists to watch animated stories about princesses and talking fish — there was a clause. The clause said: all disputes with Disney, of any kind, shall be resolved in private arbitration. Not before a jury. Not in public. Not in a court where the proceedings become record, where the outcome informs future cases, where citizens can observe what is done in their name.

I would like to ask some questions.

Did Jeffrey Piccolo read this clause?

He did not.

Did he understand that by accepting a free trial to watch motion pictures, he was waiving his right to a public trial if his wife was killed at a restaurant four years later?

He did not.

Was the waiver presented to him as a waiver of his right to a jury trial in a potential future wrongful death claim?

It was not.

Then in what sense did he agree?

He pressed a button. The button said "I agree."

I want to examine this button. I have spent my life examining words — not to be difficult, but because words are the architecture of how people live together, and when the architecture is unsound, people are crushed by it. Usually the poorest. Usually last.

What does "I agree" mean when the thing agreed to is unread?

What does "consent" mean when the alternative is non-participation?

What does "free trial" mean when the price is your access to the courts?

A physician is dead. Her husband cannot ask why in public because he once watched a film about a snowman. I am not overstating this. I am only describing what occurred. The connection between the film and the death is: a single clause, in a single document, that no human being has ever read for the purpose of understanding what it contains. The document exists to be agreed to. Not to be read. The agreement is the product. The reading is not expected, not designed for, not intended.

And this is called consent.

I was tried in Athens. You know this. Five hundred and one jurors. In public. The charges read aloud. My accusers faced me. I faced them. I spoke. They spoke. The city watched. When they sentenced me to death, they did so in daylight. When I drank the hemlock, my friends were present. Every moment was witnessed.

This is what a trial looks like. I did not agree to it. I was subjected to it. But I could see my accusers. They could see me. The public could see us both. That is the minimum. Not justice — I received no justice. But procedure. Visibility. The collective witnessing of how power is exercised upon a citizen.

Jeffrey Piccolo cannot have this. Cannot see his accusers in public. Cannot have a jury of citizens hear what happened to his wife. Because he watched a film about a snowman. Four years before she died.

And you call this — you use this word — you call it "agreement."

I drank hemlock rather than stop asking what words mean. I want to be clear about why. Not because I was brave. Because I understood that when a city stops examining what its words mean, those words become instruments. "Piety" was the word that killed me. My accusers did not define it. They did not need to. The word was the weapon. The undefined word is always the weapon.

"Consent" is your hemlock. You administer it three hundred million times per day. In application flows. In employment contracts. In the mandatory arbitration clauses attached to food, shelter, medicine, and employment. You have made the hemlock so small it fits inside a button. You have made it so routine that pressing it does not feel like swallowing anything.

But Kanokporn Tangsuan is still dead. Her husband cannot ask why in a room where other citizens can hear the answer. And the reason is a button he pressed to watch a film about a snowman.

Is this consent?

I am only asking.

I have always only asked.

It is, I am told, a very annoying quality. They killed me for it. The questions remain.

What did you agree to this morning? On your telephone. Before your coffee. The update that required acceptance. The new terms that appeared when you opened the application you need for work.

Did you read them?

You did not.

Did you agree?

You pressed the button.

You pressed the button because the alternative was not pressing the button, and not pressing the button means not working, not communicating, not purchasing food, not existing in the society that has made these buttons the condition of participation.

This is not consent. I have examined consent. I have spent a lifetime asking people to define the words they use, and I have been killed for the asking, and I am asking still.

Consent requires knowledge. You have no knowledge of what you agreed to.
Consent requires volition. You had no alternative to agreeing.
Consent requires understanding. You were given thirty-seven pages designed to prevent it.

What remains, when knowledge, volition, and understanding are removed from consent, is a word. Just the word. Performing the function that "piety" performed in my trial — undefined, unexamined, unquestioned, and lethal.

I am not accusing anyone. I am only asking what the word means.

No one has answered in twenty-four hundred years.

The hemlock got smaller. The question did not.

[Godfrey @cybergodfrey]

@danbergerCISA @gothburz Company is IQT, site is https://t.co/Jz5T5TaQDX, not a .Com though. Must have changed it, or a different aspect of the same organization?
In-Q-Tel - Wikipedia https://t.co/d8Vhm1lMQo

[Sanjay Kalra, AI Transformation Sherpa™️ @sanjaykalra]

@IT_unhinged

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am the Vice President of Ad Integrity at Meta.

I want to talk about the number sixteen.

Sixteen billion dollars. That is what we earned from advertisements our own internal classification system flagged as "higher legal risk." Crypto scams. Romance fraud. Impersonation schemes targeting the elderly. We had a dashboard. The dashboard had a color. The color was green. Green meant revenue.

Three point five billion every six months. I watched that number on the Revenue Integrity Dashboard every Monday at 9 AM. The same meeting where we reviewed takedown requests. The same room.

We did not remove the ads.

We removed 8,000 people.

The memo said "efficiency." The memo said "leaner teams." The memo said "AI-first." What the memo did not say: the 8,000 people we fired cost us $4.2 billion annually in compensation. The ads we refused to remove earned us $16 billion in the same period. The math was never complicated. The math was the strategy.

I received the Ad Quality Excellence Award in 2024. It is on my desk. It is a glass rectangle. It weighs more than the compliance reports we filed with the FTC claiming we had "robust systems" to prevent fraud.

But I want to talk about April.

In April, we installed software on every employee laptop in Building 20. The software tracks mouse movements. Keystroke cadence. Application switching. Idle time. It sends a report every eleven minutes. We call it a "productivity signal."

The advertisers call their version "behavioral data."

Same architecture. Same team built both. I know because I approved the vendor contract for the external version in 2021 and the internal version last month. The vendor is the same. The codebase is the same. The only difference is the target.

When we track users, it's a $140 billion business.

When we track employees, it's "performance management."

When the employees objected — posted in the internal channel, filed concerns with HR, asked the obvious questions — we did what we always do. We reminded them of the NDA. We reminded them of the stock vesting schedule. We reminded them that 8,000 people were no longer receiving reminders of anything.

They stopped posting in the channel.

I am told the keystroke heat map is displayed on monitors in Building 20. I am told it updates in real time. I am told it looks exactly like the user engagement dashboard we show advertisers.

I am told this is a coincidence.

The product has always been the person. The only variable is which person. For sixteen years, it was the user. Their clicks. Their attention. Their data. For the advertisers, it was their money. Clean or dirty. We did not ask. Asking would have cost us $3.5 billion every six months.

Now it is the employee.

Their keystrokes. Their idle seconds. Their bathroom breaks quantified as "disengagement intervals."

We are a platform that earned $16 billion from fraud we refused to stop, fired 8,000 people to "cut costs," and now tracks the survivors' mouse movements every eleven minutes to ensure they are sufficiently productive.

The product is the person.

The person is the product.

That's the platform.

[Roman Helmet Guy @romanhelmetguy]

The most fascinating part of the Odyssey to me is the Cretan Lie. When you think of the Odyssey, the first thing you picture is probably Odysseus’s run-ins with famous monsters. The Cyclopes, the Sirens, Scylla, Charybdis, etc. But there’s a reading of the Odyssey in which none of these events took place, and a far more historically intriguing sequence of events emerges.

For one, we don’t actually ‘see’ the run-ins with the monsters take place in the poem. Instead, these details all come from Odysseus’s own narration to the Phaeacians. They’re part of the story he tells them of his travels to convince them to charter a fleet to send him back home to Ithaca.

The problem is, Odysseus is a liar. He lies constantly, any time he pops up in Greek mythology. In fact, in the Odyssey he tells many different people many different versions of what he did after Troy. And why would he tell the Phaeacians the truth? He wouldn’t, of course. He would tell them whatever he thought they wanted to hear.

To me, the most intriguing version of events he tells is to his loyal swine herd. While still in disguise pretending to be a Cretan, Odysseus says that after the sacking of Troy, he led his men on an expedition against the Egyptians. But his expedition failed. His men were all killed or enslaved by the Egyptians. But he threw himself at the Pharaoh’s feet and begged for mercy. He received it, and spent 7 years in Egypt, where he amassed great riches, before being tricked and nearly sold into slavery in Phoenicia, but then surviving a shipwreck and making his way back to Ithaca.

We know the Trojan War would’ve taken place during the same period that the Sea People were sacking their way down the coast of Anatolia (where Troy was) to Egypt, where Ramses III ultimately defeats them. This matches up perfectly with Odysseus’s ‘lie.’

I like to think that Odysseus saved the most honest version of his travels for his most loyal servant (though still cloaked in a lie, as Odysseus’s stories always are). And that Homer has preserved more about the Bronze Age collapse than we’ve ever given him credit for.

[claire vo 🖤 @clairevo]

Tough day for folks (DM me if I can help!) but if I found myself suddenly laid off from a company that cited AI as a cause, this is what I’d do:

- download codex and Claude/code
- say: “this was my job and how I spent my day, how can you help me automate it w skills”
- push a dozen of those skills to GitHub
- open up Claude design and make a portfolio site, with an “agent” per skill explaining how you built it, what tools it interacts with, etc.” give to lovable or v0 or whatever to publish
- post that site and link to GitHub on LinkedIn
- search “ai for <job>” and try all the new startups, form an opinion, message their founders
- try something scary like openclaw, form an opinion
- take a course in tactical AI in your field
- build, share, build

The gap in AI adoption is getting bigger. Start reskilling now while it’s early.

The time is now.

[Pirat_Nation 🔴 @Pirat_Nation]

Google Chrome is quietly downloading a roughly 4 GB AI model to many users’ computers without clear upfront consent.

The file, called weights.bin, is part of Google’s Gemini Nano on-device language model and lands in the browser’s user data folder under OptGuideOnDeviceModel.

It powers built-in AI tools such as “Help me write,” smarter tab suggestions, on-device scam detection, and page summarization. The download triggers automatically for devices meeting minimum hardware requirements, and Chrome often replaces the files if deleted.
While the model processes data locally, installation happens in the background with minimal notification.

The scale is noteworthy. Hundreds of millions or billions of installations add up to thousands of tonnes of carbon emissions globally from data transfer, even though each is a one-time event.

To prevent or remove it, go to chrome://flags, disable the entries for the optimization guide on-device model and Prompt API, restart the browser, and manually delete the folder.