Read about how @JDVance and others fell for a lie about Volodymyr Zelensky concocted by agents of Russia's Presidential Administration. And how the Vice President's falling for it was collected in a file sent directly to the Kremlin. Inside Putin's "Doppelgänger" operation, based on leaked correspondence between the PA and Russia's Agency for Social Design: theins.press/en/inv/298359

2026: a hospital TV says 300 million jobs are gone to AI. 2050: she shows her mum what it all became. "WAIT TILL YOU SEE IT" — a Slopcore ballad. Made by AI. Zero human edits. Just prompting. Bring tissues. I brought film grain. 💙

Banning superhuman rogue AI is actually pretty mundane. The international community has been here before, many times. Infobop enclosed:

Are we approaching the greatest moment in human history? Wild pod this with futurist, AI expert, transhumanist and co-founder of Symbian @dw2. Full episode 👇👇👇

There are certain decisions that will go down as history-defining moments. This is one of them. It's a terrible misjudgment of Putin, who has made it clear he wants to destroy the West. We shouldn't help him do it.

She passed every AI safety test. She was lying. KILL SWITCH — a Slopcore music video. Made by AI. Zero human edits. Just prompting. Huge love to @anabology for the inspiration. Your work made me want to join the Slopcore. I added an irresponsible amount of film grain. 💙

EXCLUSIVE: Elon Musk came to Donald Trump with the plan to throttle Ukraine’s use of SpaceX’s Starshield satellite internet network, sources have told the Telegraph. The tech billionaire made the proposal during the US President’s row with Volodymyr Zelensky over strikes on Russian oil refineries. ‘The reality is that they were both in it,’ a senior source said of Musk’s and Trump’s involvement. But after a night of carnage in Kyiv caused by the slowdown, Musk was alarmed about the possibility of adverse consumer reaction in Europe. The SpaceX boss then proceeded to tweet, blaming the US administration, and ultimately, President Trump for authorising the slowdown. ‘He tweeted out that he was innocent and that it was the US administration that did it,’ the source said.

Trucks are a scam because they exert a huge amount of horsepower, but no matter how hard you look and look, you'll never find a horse in them. So let's keep using real horses to haul stuff instead.

I cannot let a steam engine analogy go by without bringing up John Wilkinson, perhaps the most underappreciated engineer of the Industrial Revolution. Watt had figured out how to dramatically improve the steam engine, but he spent years struggling to actually manufacture one. The problem was embarrassingly simple: nobody could make a sufficiently round cylinder. The casting and machining tolerances were atrocious. Watt complained that one 18-inch cylinder was out of round by as much as THREE-EIGHTHS OF AN INCH. Steam leaked past the piston. He tried packing the gaps with cork, oiled rags, paper, and apparently even old hats. Nothing worked particularly well. Enter John Wilkinson, a British ironmaster whose immediate concern was manufacturing better cannons. At the time, iron cannons were commonly cast around a core, introducing defects and misalignment that could make the barrels inaccurate or dangerously weak. Wilkinson developed a process for boring cannons from solid castings, and in 1774 patented a vastly improved boring machine. The key innovation was almost comically mechanical: a massive, rigid boring bar, supported at both ends, that could cut a genuinely straight, circular hole instead of following the irregularities of the casting. He adapted this technology to Watt's cylinders. By 1776, Matthew Boulton was boasting that Wilkinson had bored a FIFTY-INCH cylinder accurate to within the thickness of an old shilling. Suddenly, the steam engine was a commercially viable machine. And the story gets better. Wilkinson became one of Watt's first customers, buying an engine to drive the blast machinery at his own ironworks. The steam engine was now helping manufacture the iron that made more steam engines possible. I find this whole episode absolutely extraordinary. The Industrial Revolution was, for a critical period, bottlenecked on the ability to make a sufficiently round hole. We remember Watt, and rightly so. We remember the invention of the steam engine and the subsequent development of thermodynamics. But the man who made the machinery that made the whole thing possible is practically a footnote. I think we consistently underestimate how much of scientific progress is actually downstream of advances in tooling, measurement, and manufacturing precision. It's not just that technology precedes theory. Sometimes the decisive breakthrough is that someone finally figures out how to build the thing the theorists have been talking about for twenty years. Anyway, I think John Wilkinson deserves considerably more credit for modern civilization than he gets.