Wesley, Baron of Bean Curds

I eat soy, am a boy

[Wesley, Baron of Bean Curds @dubminar]

Parents are fine but how do I get a parent company they seem way better

[Elai @elaifresh]

Lmao would anyone even notice this in SF?

I want to hear more about wireflow honestly…

[john a @aarrgh_]

the year is 2037. i have finally qualified for my first PT, Pro Tour Return to Bikini Bottom. the format is the newly announced 7-Year Standard. the best deck is UR prowess. I finish 10th on tiebreakers. my prize is a $25 gift card to the Buffalo Wild Wings in Hammond, Indiana

[kit 🍋 @sourkrowt]

so my best friend sent me this song that Tyra Banks made herself for a dystopian young adult book she wrote over a decade ago and i'm being so serious i think she officially made the worst song of all time

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

USA. Summer. It is 95 degrees outside, and I am shivering inside a sandwich shop.

I have discovered how Americans forge strong souls.

Outside, the sun is trying to kill everyone. Inside this small restaurant, it is winter. My breath does not fog, but it is thinking about it. A man near me is eating a cold sandwich while wearing a jacket. In summer. Indoors.

In Japan we would simply turn it down. Americans do not turn it down. And now I understand them better than they understand themselves.

This cold is not an accident. This cold is a gift.

The owner has built, inside his shop, a second season. He invites you in from the brutal heat and hands you the one thing the sun has denied you all day: a reason to be cold. To endure it is to be tempered. You walk in soft and sweating. You walk out sharp and clear, a slightly stronger person than you were.

So I did not complain. I removed my outer layer and offered it to the woman at the next table, who was hugging herself. She said, "Oh, no, I'm fine, thank you." She was not fine. Her lips were blue. But she, too, understood the training. She would not break first. I respected her deeply.

The owner asked if everything was okay.

"It is perfect," I said, through my teeth, which were chattering. "Thank you for the winter."

He said, "...I can turn the AC down if you want?"

I told him no. A man does not ask the mountain to be shorter.

I stayed two hours. I ordered a hot coffee to survive. Then a second one, to hold. By the end I could no longer feel my hands, but my spirit had never been clearer.

So now, on the hottest days, I seek out the coldest rooms. I sit. I shiver. I sharpen.

And when I finally step back out into the summer heat, and it wraps around me like a warm bath, I feel it.

Reborn.

A man who has survived the winter, in August, indoors, for the price of a sandwich.

[𝒢𝒾𝓁𝒷ℯ𝓇𝓉 @AbakpaJob]

Twizzlers taste like as if someone was vaguely thinking of cherries whilst melting plastic bags into a pasta noodle press

[Fav ⛧ @Favwontmiss]

The best straight relationships are:

- Man who constantly gets gay allegations
- Woman who 300 years ago would have been accused of being a witch

[Mindset for Money @Mindset4Money_X]

Bro humans were down 3-0 and we just won game 7 this week 😭😭

[Sarah Dvojack @sarahdvojack]

Thank god there are so many pictures of him with bats

[Amanda Fortini @amandafortini]

Just saw this on Substack. The metaphor is spot on.

[Wholesome Side of 𝕏 @itsme_urstruly]

I’m like the opposite of AI. It took me over half an hour to write a simple email, and I didn’t consume a single drop of water all day.

[Mountain Ğeneral @MountainGenera]

Since Pope Leo XIV mentioned this in encyclical, this means if your employer is pushing you to use AI, you can cite religious conserns as a reason to not use it at work

[Edgar Allen Poe @allenakinkunle]

📌

[Alex Veremeyenko @alex_verem]

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it.

Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying.

Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence."

Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."

Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter.

They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created.

One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility."

Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies.

That's the metered intelligence business model.

And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.

[marcus @marcusyul]

> la IA contaba mal el inventario en Starbucks

> Microsoft bloqueó claude code para sus propios ingenieros

> Uber no encuentra el ROI después de gastar miles de millones en IA

3 derrotas de la IA esta semana en el sector laboral.

WE ARE SO BACK

[Raconteur Press, LLC @raconteur_press]

Yes.

[Elizabeth @suasoptics]

Hey lazy people: the Vatican made infographics for you

[ᴅᴏᴏᴍᴇɴɪᴄ @dinosaur_info]

spitting fire right out the gate

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Your kid goes quiet and glassy-eyed the second CoComelon comes on, then falls apart when you turn it off. There is a reason for both. The episodes are tested on real toddlers in a lab until they are impossible to look away from, and the speed they run at measurably dents a young child’s self-control.

A 2022 New York Times story laid out how the testing works. The company behind the show, Moonbug, puts a toddler in a room with two screens. One plays a CoComelon episode. The other plays something boring on purpose, like a grown-up doing chores. Every time the kid’s eyes drift to the boring screen, they mark that exact second and rework the episode until nothing pulls the child’s attention away.

CoComelon sits at number two on the whole platform’s most-watched list. Only one channel beats it. People have hit play more than 220 billion times, and an American company bought the thing for close to 3 billion dollars. All of that buys one goal: keep eyes on the screen. So the show cuts to a brand-new scene every one to three seconds.

Scientists at the University of Virginia measured what that kind of speed does. In 2011 they took 60 four-year-olds. Some watched nine minutes of a fast cartoon that switched scenes every 11 seconds, and the rest watched a slow, calm show or just drew with crayons. The minute it ended, the fast-cartoon kids did clearly worse at things like waiting for a treat and solving a little puzzle, the self-control a four-year-old is still building. CoComelon runs several times faster than the cartoon in that test. A separate study tracked more than 2,600 kids for years and found that each daily hour of TV before age 3 lined up with about a 9 percent higher chance of attention problems by age 7.

I want to be straight about the limits. That tracking study shows the two things travel together, and it cannot prove the TV caused the problems. The Virginia dip was short-term, measured minutes after watching, with no proof of lasting damage. Plenty of pediatricians add that every screen is built to grab a kid, and CoComelon is simply the biggest one pulling it off. The official advice has not moved: no screens before 18 months, apart from video calls with family.

It is the same scene the meme is built on. The kid is calm while it plays, then loses it the second the screen goes dark. The people who built CoComelon spent real money making sure it works exactly like that. The screaming when you turn it off is the product doing its job.

[Manosai @manosaie]

Beautiful essay on adult friendship