Herman.

Four-month-old babies , who can barely hold their heads up , already seem to agree with adults about what's beautiful . Researchers tracked the eyes of infants from 4 to 24 months while showing them little clouds of moving dots . Adults had rated some of the motion patterns beautiful and some not . The babies stared longer at the same ones the adults liked , even the youngest group . The shape of the looking is the neat part . Ugly motion got a quick glance and a move-on . Beautiful motion got a slower , longer stare , like a second system kicking in . So some chunk of taste may come factory-installed (nobody's teaching art theory in a crib) . Your uncle who says modern art "looks like nothing" might just be running the infant firmware with zero updates . stevestewartwilliams.com/p/a…

Gallium melts at 29.76°c and your body runs at ~37°c , so the needle is rigid going in and turns soft once it's inside , It’s basically a metal that melts in your hand . Kaist published it in nature biomedical engineering in oct 2023 , gallium frame wrapped in ultra-soft silicone . and the single-use bit comes from supercooling : once it melts , the gallium stays soft even back at room temp , so it can't stiffen again and get reused or stab a nurse by accident . needlestick injuries and reused needles solved by one melting point tbh

France's €0.055 per GB tax looks tiny until you do the division . The authors expect it to raise €10 billion a year . €10B / €0.055 = ~182 billion GB . Divide by ~68 million French people and that's ~€147 per person a year , on data they already pay their ISP for . A single 2 hour 4K Netflix movie is ~14 GB , so ~77 cents of tax on one movie night . And you really think Netflix eats that instead of passing it on lmfao . Best part : it passed 11 to 10 with 14 abstentions . 35 deputies out of 577 showed up to vote on a €10B tax . Not law yet , but that's how Europe legislates now. 🤷 teapawt.org/levelsio/status/211648…

The gap between people who use ai and people who build with it is about to be the new digital divide . one group asks it questions , the other group has it running their invoices , emails and code while they sleep Which side are you on rn , be honest

Across 41 cultural groups , only 21 ranked foreign citizens and political opponents above coral reefs and old-growth forests in moral concern . The rest put the reef first . Haidt's group already showed this splits by ideology : liberals draw the moral circle wide and loose ( world over nation , nonhumans alongside humans ) , conservatives keep it tight ( family , then community , then nation ) . The wide circle feels more virtuous , but concern isn't infinite . Spread it thin enough and a forest outranks a human being , and the people who actually depend on you get the same share as an abstraction . Universal love in theory , diluted love in practice . Roots before horizons teapawt.org/PsyPost/status/2116487…

JUST IN : Scientists just found a giant virus carrying a working potassium channel gene , the same kind of protein your neurons use to fire every thought you have . The new PNAS study suggests it started IN the virus , not stolen from a host . So viruses may have helped build some of the core machinery of complex life and the brain . phys.org/news/2026-10-giant-…

I’ve come across posts by of these two folks mocking the assassination of Charlie Kirk. What makes this particularly concerning is that the individuals involved appear to have professional affiliations with established organisations. Not simply any business but assuming a law firm and other working for the city itself. Mocking someone’s assassination is not a political statement but a spectacle of someone’s cold blooded murder ; in this case Charlie Kirk a loving father of two who was brutally murdered. Mark Jay is associated with the City of Port Phillip @cityportphillip while another individual is associated with @YouCanCountOnMB, a law firm. I’m tagging both organisations because I think this warrants a direct question, not because I’m presuming they endorse the conduct of people associated with them. Where do you stand on this? Does the City of Port Phillip consider public mockery of an assassination acceptable conduct from someone professionally associated with the municipality? Does @YouCanCountOnMB consider this consistent with the standards and professional values it expects of someone associated with its firm? Nobody is suggesting that an employer is automatically responsible for every personal opinion expressed by an employee. That’s not the point. The point is that publicly celebrating or ridiculing someone’s murder is not an ordinary political disagreement, and it is entirely reasonable to ask organisations whether they consider such conduct acceptable. You cannot spend your professional life operating within institutions that depend on public trust, accountability and basic standards of conduct while expecting those same standards never to be questioned when your public behaviour becomes uncomfortable. I’m interested in hearing the organisations’ actual positions. Not silence, not deflection, and certainly not an attempt to reframe the question as a disagreement over Charlie Kirk’s politics. You do not have to agree with a person’s politics to recognise that mocking their assassination is reprehensible and thanks to @DrewPavlou for bringing this up.

Got banned from claude once for literally no reason and it's still my favourite model. No reason why assuming VPN. What’s the dumbest thing an ai has refused to help you with?

A 1 in a million chance happens to roughly 340 people in the us every single time "rare" stops meaning anything at scale , which is why your feed is wall to wall freak accidents ; what's the most 1 in a million thing that's happened to you

Tried this for fun and turns out asking for a website developer or saying that I need a web designer on X is an excellent way to discover just how many automated spam accounts exist on this platform.

Steve Jobs , October 2010 , on touchscreen laptops : "We've done tons of user testing on this , and it turns out it doesn't work . Touch surfaces don't want to be vertical ... after an extended period of time , your arm wants to fall off ... it's ergonomically terrible ." 16 years later Apple ships a touchscreen MacBook Pro starting at $2,899 ? His argument was ergonomics , not tech , and nobody's arm got stronger since 2010 . So either the testing changed or the iPad generation just never learned the trackpad teapawt.org/9to5mac/status/2116534…

Microsoft reportedly offered voluntary buyouts to around 60,000 employees this week , and at the same internal Q&A the company said it "will continue to bring global talent" . Read that twice . Pay Americans to leave , keep the visa pipeline running . Meanwhile in North Carolina , a White House anti-fraud task force just suspended eight H-1B employers from the green card program . Between them they'd filed at least 32,311 H-1B applications in that one state over a decade . DHS also wants to stop rubber-stamping renewals just because a petition got approved once before (comments close Nov 13) . The program was pitched as a way to bring in rare talent nobody here could supply . The shortage is apparently so severe that the cure ships in bulk .

"First-ever associate member" isn't a thing the EU treaties have . Association without accession is literally Article 217 TFEU , used since Greece in 1961 and Turkey's Ankara Agreement in 1963 . Norway , Iceland and Liechtenstein have had single-market access without membership via the EEA since 1994 , and Canada itself has run CETA provisionally since Sept 21 , 2017 . What's new would be the branding (and maybe a seat near the table , not at it) , not the concept .

Rome might have dumbed down Europe by a few IQ points , not with bread and circuses , but with silver . McConnell et al. (PNAS , 2025) used Arctic ice cores and atmospheric modelling to show Pax Romana smelting raised kids' blood lead ~2.4 µg/dL above Neolithic baseline , ≈2.5–3 IQ points lost across most of the empire . For scale , 1970s US kids averaged 15.2 µg/dL . Leaded gas was our Rio Tinto doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2419630…

//Your phone's blue dot quietly depends on quasars billions of light years away //. GPS satellite orbits are tracked against space , but you live on a planet that wobbles and whose day length drifts by around a millisecond . The equator spins at ~465 m/s , so 1 ms of error is ~46 cm of error on the ground . The only technique that measures all of Earth's orientation at once is VLBI : radio telescopes on different continents timing the same quasar with hydrogen maser clocks . Turn it off and GPS keeps working , but slowly drifts out of accuracy teapawt.org/Rainmaker1973/status/2…

“The sand isn't the filter . The slime is “. Slow sand filters work because of the Schmutzdecke ( literally "dirt blanket" ) , a few millimetres of biofilm on top made of bacteria , fungi , protozoa and rotifers that literally eat the contaminants . It takes 10–20 days to grow , and Dutch research found a mature layer improves E. coli removal by about 100x versus the same sand without it . London has run on this since James Simpson built it for Chelsea Waterworks in 1829 , and London still uses slow sand filters today . The catch is speed : ~0.25 m per hour , so a square metre gives ~6,000 litres a day . Cheap , no chemicals , no power , but it needs a lot of land teapawt.org/Rainmaker1973/status/2…

Looking for a web designer to help me on an ecommerce build + data migration . Moving products , customers and order history over and need someone who's done this before and won't break SEO in the process . Paid , remote , $30K budget