S K

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

I titled chapter 7 of Suicidal Empathy, "Govern Me Harder, Daddy!" Staying on this theme, I believe that the West has succumbed to a perverse collective form of a sexual fetish stemming from BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadism, and masochism). I call it "Islamize Me Harder, Daddy!" The more Islam takes over in the West, the more the suicidally empathetic express their Islamophilia. More Islam! Give it to me! More! Hurt me, daddy. Dominate me! Destroy my culture! Destroy my heritage! Destroy my religion! Destroy my children! More! I'm kind! I'm tolerant! I'm empathetic! I am delighted to self-erase! I need to commit Civilizational Seppuku in order to be fully sexually satisfied.

[Save this post. You heard it here first.]

[Incentivising @incentivising]

Game theory explains why improving yourself rarely fixes your outcomes. People keep treating their own skills and discipline as a dominant variable because it's the one they can consciously control. They end up running never-ending optimizations but leave the whole structure around them untouched. Suddenly, they are the shiniest object in the room, but it gets them nowhere. That's because a diamond in the mud is still part of the mud. Cleaning it and putting it back to where you found it changes absolutely nothing. Hence, you must change the structure. Swipe the whole room clean; toss out the junk. Ask yourself which environment converts what you already have into a return and what it would cost to move there. Don't spend a decade improving yourself while covered in filth. The structure around you either works for you or against you. There is no middle ground.

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

We cannot consider #AI to be morally neutral. In reality, every technical tool embodies choices and priorities through what it measures, ignores, and optimizes, and how it classifies people and situations. Ethical discernment cannot be limited to asking whether we are using a system for good or bad purposes. It must also examine how that system is designed and what vision of the human person and society is embedded in the data and models that guide it. #MagnificaHumanitas

[Mysk 🇨🇦🇩🇪 @mysk_co]

Thanks a lot for downloading Loupe and leaving these nice reviews. We have big plans for Loupe in the future. We would like to add support for widgets, watch app, and even CarPlay. Each of these extensions will capture more passive signals and bring them to your attention. ✌️

[Tristan Tate @TateTheTalisman]

Not sure who needs this today - but evil people exist in the world and that’s that.

Distance yourself, move on and stop caring.

There is no chance you can avoid encounters with them.

Take it as just a normal part of life and don’t waste one second trying to figure out why they are the way they are.

❤️🎉🥳

[Mysk 🇨🇦🇩🇪 @mysk_co]

You know how Apple’s default naming scheme for AirPods is like “Owner’s AirPods”?

Well, apps can see that when you have any Bluetooth headphones connected, and make a pretty good guess about your name without asking 🙃

[Mysk 🇨🇦🇩🇪 @mysk_co]

Introducing Loupe, our latest privacy app for iOS. Discover what apps can learn about you just by reading data your iPhone already exposes, such as your languages, installed apps, device sensors, and much much more

Loupe is free, private, and open source. Give it a try 👇

[Mysk 🇨🇦🇩🇪 @mysk_co]

Did you know that all apps installed on your iPhone can see your battery percentage and whether your iPhone is recharging or unplugged? No permission is needed for that. Soon you'll be able to try our new privacy-focused app on your iPhone to learn more. 👀

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

You just unlocked your phone. You don't remember why.

You opened it, your eyes scanned, nothing was there, and you locked it again. Less than four seconds. No memory of deciding to do it. By the time you finish reading this post, you will probably have done it once or twice more.

This is not a moral failing. It is not laziness. It is the most studied unconscious habit of the modern human body, and almost no one has explained it to you in plain language.

In 2015, a psychologist at Cal State Dominguez Hills named Larry Rosen ran an experiment on his own students. He had them install a tracking app for a full week. The app logged every unlock, every minute spent, every app opened. The results, published in his research and in Psychology Today, were the same across every group he tested.

The students were unlocking their phones, on average, every 15 minutes. All day. From the moment they woke up until the moment they went to sleep.

The strange part was not the frequency. It was that almost none of those unlocks were triggered by a notification. There was no buzz. No ding. No alert. The hand just reached. The thumb just authenticated. The eyes scanned a home screen with nothing new on it. The phone went back in the pocket. The brain had no record of any of it happening.

When Rosen took the phones away, the students became visibly anxious within ten minutes. Heart rate up. Hands moving toward an empty pocket. Eyes flicking to the table where the phone used to be. The behavior was not driven by what was on the phone. It was driven by the absence of the phone.

Newer surveys have only made the picture worse. A 2022 Asurion survey found Americans were reaching for their phone an average of 352 times a day, once every 2 minutes and 43 seconds of waking life. A separate Reviews. org survey put the average at 144 phone checks per day in 2023, climbing to 205 in 2024. About 80% of people now check their phone within ten minutes of waking up. About three quarters take it into the bathroom.

These are not addicts. These are everyone. Your mother. Your boss. The person across from you on the train who claims they "barely use it." The teenager who insists they only check social media "once or twice a day."

Here is what is actually happening inside the body during these zero-content unlocks.

The brain has two attention systems. One is voluntary. You decide to check the time, you check it. The other is automatic. It runs underneath conscious thought. It is the same system that scratches an itch you didn't know you had, that makes you cross your legs at a meeting, that makes you tap a pen while reading. When a behavior is performed thousands of times in the same context, with even an occasional reward, that behavior gets handed off from the voluntary system to the automatic one. The hand starts reaching before the mind decides.

The reward in this case is what behavioral psychologists call a variable-ratio schedule. Sometimes you unlock the phone and there is a message from someone you love. Sometimes there is nothing. Sometimes there is a like. Sometimes there is a stranger being mean to you for no reason. The unpredictability is the entire point. It is the same schedule that makes slot machines the most addictive machines ever invented. It is also the schedule that makes pigeons in a Skinner box peck a button until they die of exhaustion.

Your phone is the slot machine. Your pocket is the casino. You are the pigeon, and the lever is your own thumb.

The companies who design the operating system know all of this. They have known since the first iPhone. The lock screen, the badge counts, the haptic buzz, the pull-to-refresh gesture, the red dots — all of these were tuned, A/B tested, refined, and shipped because they increase the probability that your hand reaches into your pocket without your permission. The behavior is not a bug. It is the product.

Now the part nobody tells you.

The fix is not a digital detox. Detoxes fail because the moment you reintroduce the phone, the automatic system picks the habit right back up. It was never gone. It was waiting.

The only thing that breaks the loop is removing the cue, not the device. The cue is the phone in your pocket, on your desk, on your nightstand, in your hand while you watch a movie. As long as the phone is within reach of the automatic system, the automatic system will reach for it. That is what automatic means.

A 2017 study from the University of Texas at Austin tested this directly. They had participants take a cognitive test with their phone in three different positions. Phone face-down on the desk. Phone in a bag in the same room. Phone in another room entirely. Performance got measurably better at each step, even though the phone was off and silent in every condition. The participants who left the phone in another room scored highest. They also reported that they "barely thought about the phone." They were wrong about that. Their brains were thinking about it the entire time. They just used less mental fuel doing so when it was further away.

So the real five-rule reset is not about willpower. It is about distance.

One. Charge the phone in another room at night. Not on the nightstand. Not in the bed. Another room with a door between you and it. Buy a 12-dollar alarm clock if you need one. The first night will feel like the first night you ever quit anything. By night four, you will sleep better than you have in years.

Two. When you sit down to do anything that requires your brain — writing, reading, eating with a person, watching a film — put the phone in a drawer or another room. Not face-down on the table. The face-down phone still costs you about 10% of your working memory, according to that Texas study. The drawer phone costs you almost nothing.

Three. Delete the apps you check unconsciously from the home screen. Move them into a folder three swipes away, or remove them entirely and use the browser version. Every extra second of friction between thumb and feed gives the conscious mind one more chance to ask "wait, why am I opening this?"

Four. Turn off every notification that is not from a human being you actually know. No app updates. No "your week in review." No news. Nothing red. Nothing buzzing. Your phone should be silent unless a person is trying to reach you.

Five. The first thirty minutes of your morning are sacred. No phone. Not for the weather. Not for the time. Not for "just one quick thing." Use those thirty minutes to put your feet on the floor, drink water, see daylight, and let your nervous system come online without being hijacked. You will feel different by day three. By day seven, going back to the old way will feel insane.

That is the whole protocol.

There is no app that fixes this. There is no premium feature. There is no $80 distraction-blocker that will save you. Every one of those products is sold to you by the same industry that engineered the problem in the first place. The cure is just space. Physical, literal, measurable distance between your hand and the device.

The next time you catch your hand reaching into your pocket for no reason, do not feel guilty. Do not lecture yourself. Just notice it. That moment of noticing, repeated a few hundred times, is the first thing the automatic system has not seen before. It is the first crack in the loop.

Send this to one person who you have watched do that exact pocket-reach in front of you and not even know they did it.

[Kpaxs @Kpaxs]

Every moment of attention is a double-entry in your life’s accounting system.

The ledger is always balanced. You never “just” do something with your attention. You’re always making a trade.

The horror is that it’s ruthlessly fair. It doesn’t care about your intentions. It doesn’t grade on a curve. If you spend three hours practicing outrage detection, you get three hours better at outrage detection, and three hours worse at everything you didn’t practice.

You can’t cheat it. You can’t game it. You can’t “just this once” your way out of it.

[Kpaxs @Kpaxs]

Ask yourself: “what am I actually trying to accomplish, and is this game the most effective path to that?” Not “how do I win this game?” but “should I be playing it at all?” This question is surprisingly rare, because the game’s existence creates a powerful illusion of necessity.

[Kpaxs @Kpaxs]

You can’t just “follow the rules” and expect good outcomes. you have to understand the game: the unwritten rules, the common knowledge, the Schelling points, what everyone actually does vs what they say they do.

[Kpaxs @Kpaxs]

We went from one guy flipping the bird to a machine that generates an infinite parade of guys flipping the bird ranked by how angry each specific bird makes you personally.

• 100 000 BC: maybe one or two genuine threats per day. A predator. A rival tribe. A weird berry. Your negativity bias fires occasionally and accurately.

• 1950: threats plus the evening news. Thirty minutes of curated negativity. Your bias fires for an hour then you go to bed.

• 2000: threats plus 24-hour cable news. the bias fires all day but you can still turn off the TV.

• 2026: threats plus algorithmic feeds that have learned your specific negativity bias and serve you a personalized stream of exactly the things that trigger your threat detection system most efficiently.

[Mysk 🇨🇦🇩🇪 @mysk_co]

Announcement: we are working on a new #privacy app for iOS that raises awareness about which device signals and data a native app can see once installed on the iPhone even without requesting any permission. The app is going to be free and open-source.
#Apple #iOS

[Dr. Kohan🏛🏛🏛 @kohantoys]

Las primeras dos imagenes son de las salas de control del Manhattan Project.

Saben por qué estaban pintadas de esa tonalidad de verde?🧵

[White Noise @whitenoisechat]

11/ Anonymity and identity were never opposites.

Every citizen deserves access to both. One for their public life. One for their private thoughts, dissent, experimentation, and safety.

They are the Yin and Yang of digital existence. ☯️

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

They attacked wool. We got polyester.
Half a million tonnes of microplastic fibres enter the ocean from synthetic clothing annually.
Microplastics are now in human blood, lung tissue, and placentas.
Wool biodegrades in months.
Polyester persists for centuries.

They attacked leather. We got PVC.
PVC production releases dioxins.
The vegan leather peels within two years.
Both require petroleum.
Leather is a byproduct of food production.
It lasts decades.
It biodegrades.
The ethical alternative requires an oil well.

They attacked butter. We got margarine.
Trans fat disease for a generation.
Now on its third formulation.
Butter contains vitamins A, D, E, and K2.
Margarine contains seed oils and an ingredients list.
The butter never changed.
The butter never needed to.

They attacked beef. We got plant-based burgers.
Pea protein extracted with hexane.
Seed oils. Nineteen other ingredients. A supply chain across multiple continents.
Soy driving deforestation in Brazil at a scale that dwarfs British cattle farming.

Beef on British marginal land grows on hills that cannot grow crops.
Sequesters carbon. Fertilises without a factory.
Complete protein. Every fat-soluble vitamin. No dead zone.

In every case: the traditional animal product was nutritionally superior, environmentally lighter, and cheaper to produce.
In every case: the ethical replacement was industrially complex, petrochemically dependent, and worse for the body using it.

The ethics were the marketing.

[World of Statistics @stats_feed]

HOW MANY OF THESE THINGS HAVE YOU NOTICED:

1. Supermarkets place essentials like milk at the back so you walk through the store and pick up things you didn’t plan to buy.

2. Grocery stores fill the air with the smell of fresh-baked bread (or vanilla/citrus scents) so you get hungry and buy more on impulse.

3. Restaurants play fast, upbeat music so you eat quicker and leave sooner… Making space for the next customer.

4. Supermarkets put expensive brand-name items at eye level so you grab them first and skip the cheaper options lower down.

5. Malls don’t have windows so you won’t realize it’s already dark outside… You lose track of time and stay longer.

6. Checkout lanes are lined with candy, magazines, and small gadgets so you add impulse buys while you wait in line.

7. Cafés play slow, relaxing music so you stay longer and end up ordering more.

8. Bars don’t display clocks so you don’t notice how long you’ve been there… You keep drinking, spending more.

Everything is intentional. Nothing is random.

[Kpaxs @Kpaxs]

Defaults rule the world and you re living in someone else's defaults.

Defaults aren't neutral. Every default was designed by someone. For a reason. The default structure of social media is infinite scroll. why? Because the platform profits from your time.

You are living inside a system of defaults that were designed by people whose incentive is to capture your behavior, not to improve your life.

So every time you "fail" at a downstream decision, you're not failing. You're complying with someone else's upstream design. The game is rigged at the level of defaults.

Every default you change is a small act of sovereignty. Every default you accept is a small act of surrender.

[No filter Skin @NoFilterSkin]

the next time your cat stares at something you cannot see

or your dog refuses to enter a room

or an animal finds you in a moment you needed to be found

pay attention. they are perceiving something your thinking mind has been trained to ignore.