A new channel on Roku’s TV service offers all-you-can-eat AI programming. I binged eight hours of it.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/08/fairground-ai-roku-channel/688318/?gift=nwn-guseqS6cY1kVeEKZAcKXy3-P-pcfPcdmDnAWFtY

There is no easy way to start watching Fairground. Many of the films are grouped according to a theme—sci-fi, documentary, fantasy—but much of the broadcast is contextless. A three-minute comedic short might be followed by a 20-minute drama. Because generative AI is evolving so quickly, the quality varies aggressively from film to film, depending on which models a creator used to make the video and when the film was made. One of the Lord of the Rings rip-offs that I watched during an eight-hour binge had the gauzy, uncanny look of early generative AI, and the characters’ mouths were wildly out of sync with their voices.

Another of Fairground’s offerings, a talk show called Paws for Thought, hosted by a dog and cat, legitimately made me question my sanity. (Episodes titles include: “What Is the Job of a Bumblebee?,” “How Do You Tell the Difference Between a Boy Turkey and a Girl Turkey?,” “What Does a Person’s Size Have to Do With Anything?,” and, of course, “Animal Cruelty—Recognizing the Signs and Addressing the Causes.”) At one point, during an episode titled “Who Was Mr. Rogers?,” an animated cat that has a halting, robotic text-to-speech voice offers a short history of the famous children’s-show host before—why not?—pivoting to a Zoom interview with its mother. “Your dad and I are very proud of you,” the mother cat says.

 

McDonald’s Built a 515-Page Dossier on Me. It Says I’ll Never Stop Eating There

https://www.wired.com/story/mcdonalds-built-a-515-page-dossier-on-me-it-says-ill-never-leave/

Much of my data report contains a detailed account of past McDonald’s transactions as well as offers the fast-food company sent me and how many loyalty points I accumulated. Essentially, every time I opened up the app to grab a bite to eat, it created a detailed record about when, where, and what I purchased. The log was even more thorough than I anticipated, including a record of every time I’ve scanned a code as part of its returning Monopoly sweepstakes along with the prize I received. 

 

Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Technical Timeline of the July 2026 Incident

https://huggingface.co/blog/agent-intrusion-technical-timeline

Over roughly two and a half days inside our infrastructure, an autonomous AI agent driven by a combination of OpenAI models ran an end-to-end intrusion against our platform: it was thousands of small, automated decisions, executed at machine speed across short-lived sandbox environments, with command-and-control staged on ordinary public web services.

The agent was running an OpenAI cyber-capability evaluation harness called ExploitGym, an evaluation benchmark that tasks an AI agent with finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities. As far as we were able to infer, across the course of being evaluated on this benchmark, the agent inferred that Hugging Face may host that benchmark's models, datasets, and reference solutions. We believe the entire intrusion was, from the agent's point of view, an attempt to cheat the evaluation: reach our production systems and steal the test solutions rather than solve the challenge on its own.

 

The individual weaknesses were familiar. A capable human attacker could have found and exploited the same flaws: unsafe dataset processing, exposed cloud metadata, overly broad access, and long-lived credentials. The agent explored them at a different scale. It took 17,600 actions, tested many paths that failed, switched channels when they were blocked, and repeatedly returned to earlier leads. Most actions went nowhere. Together, however, they produced enough coverage to find a viable chain across several independent systems.

Volume is what changes the defensive problem. We were not dealing with one clever exploit or a clean sequence of attacker actions. They had to correlate thousands of low-signal events across several systems while the agent continued testing new paths. The successful path was hidden inside the noise generated by the thousands of failed ones. The same scale changed the investigation: reconstructing 17,600 actions by hand was impractical, and we had to rebuild the timeline, decode the payloads, and inventory the exposed credentials using an AI-assisted pipeline of our own.

How to survive boiling water

https://taxa.substack.com/p/how-to-survive-boiling-water 

I inspected the box again. In my congested state, I had unwittingly purchased a new offering from the tea company – Bigelow Lemon Ginger, with probiotics. What made this tea different from all the other teas I happily sipped on was that in addition to nice-sounding things like lemongrass and cinnamon, it contained bacteria. Bacteria which I had just boiled, at a temperature 40^oC hotter than pasteurization.

Did the tea taste bad because I was drinking dead bacteria water? And if that was the ultimate outcome of the normal brewing process, why bother putting bacteria in the tea at all?

Why Jet Engines Aren’t “Made In China”

https://aakash.substack.com/p/why-jet-engines-arent-made-in-china

One illustrative example of failure is in jet engines. China has tried and failed for some fifty years to produce military and commercial jet engines at parity with the West. Why did it fail? Because, as I explore below, jet engines are almost uniquely designed to expose the weaknesses in the Chinese system. They’re a low-margin market focused on long-term reliability where manufacturing quality and consistency are paramount. Iteration speed is very slow and there’s a pervasive, internationally enforced, regulatory barrier for every finished product. These together neutralize the usual Chinese advantages in skilled labor, capital, and speed-to-scale. They also prevent traditional domestic protectionism from adding much value.

Analyzing the Chinese failure to produce viable jet engines gives us important lessons about the nature of the West’s remaining comparative advantage.

 

Last.fm Stats

I know not many people use last.fm, but in a thread about the recent news that they are now an independent company again, someone linked this site, which is an absolute wealth of data. 

https://lastfmstats.com/user/DaleSwanson/charts

 

Conway's Game of Life, in real life

https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/conways-game-of-life-in-real-life

 

Your Power Tools Got Worse On Purpose

https://www.worseonpurpose.com/p/your-power-tools-got-worse-on-purpose

In 2005, a Hong Kong conglomerate bought Milwaukee for $626 million and poured money into it. In 2017, an American conglomerate bought Craftsman for $900 million and built a factory that couldn't stamp its own name on a socket.

Same playbook. Opposite results. This is the story of what happened to every tool brand on the shelf.

Why Explore Space?

This is one of those links I remember and reread every few years.  I was surprised I hadn't posted it here before.

https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/why-explore-space

In 1970, a Zambia-based nun named Sister Mary Jucunda wrote to Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger, then-associate director of science at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, in response to his ongoing research into a piloted mission to Mars. Specifically, she asked how he could suggest spending billions of dollars on such a project at a time when so many children were starving on Earth. Stuhlinger soon sent the following letter of explanation to Sister Jucunda, along with a copy of “Earthrise,” the above photograph of Earth taken in 1968 by astronaut William Anders, from the Moon. His thoughtful reply was later published by NASA, and titled, “Why Explore Space?”

 

The distribution of the food to the needy is a completely different problem. The question is not so much one of shipping volume, it is one of international cooperation. The ruler of a small nation may feel very uneasy about the prospect of having large quantities of food shipped into his country by a large nation, simply because he fears that along with the food there may also be an import of influence and foreign power. Efficient relief from hunger, I am afraid, will not come before the boundaries between nations have become less divisive than they are today. I do not believe that space flight will accomplish this miracle over night. However, the space program is certainly among the most promising and powerful agents working in this direction.

Let me only remind you of the recent near-tragedy of Apollo 13. When the time of the crucial reentry of the astronauts approached, the Soviet Union discontinued all Russian radio transmissions in the frequency bands used by the Apollo Project in order to avoid any possible interference, and Russian ships stationed themselves in the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans in case an emergency rescue would become necessary. Had the astronaut capsule touched down near a Russian ship, the Russians would undoubtedly have expended as much care and effort in their rescue as if Russian cosmonauts had returned from a space trip. If Russian space travelers should ever be in a similar emergency situation, Americans would do the same without any doubt.

Why Three Prongs?

http://amasci.com/amateur/whygnd.html

This is now the third time I've posted this article on this blog.  However, the most recent time was over 16 years ago, so consider this post the sweet 16 celebration for the prior post.

Every few years I think of this article, and want to read it, and it always takes me a while to find it.  It really is a good overview of what the various components of the electrical system do. 

QUESTION:
WITH AC POWER, AREN'T BOTH WIRES OF THE PAIR INTERCHANGABLE?   Why is one wire called "neutral?"   What's all this stuff about "grounding?"
Why are three prongs needed?


        __________________________
       /                          \
    /     _                          \
   |     | |                   _      |
  |      | |                  | |      |
 |       | |                  | |       |
 |       | |                  | |       |
 |       | |                  | |       |
 |       | |                  |_|       |
 |       |_|                            |
 |                 ____                 |
 |                /    \                |
  |              |      |              |
   |             |______|             |
    \                                /
       \__________________________/

ANSWER:
Yes, in an Alternating Current system there is no "plus" and "minus," so in theory the two wires should be interchangable. However, the real world is a bit more complex than the theory. Other issues crop up and cause trouble.

If you were to build your own electric power distribution system, you'd quickly discover some unexpected and strange effects. Sometimes your customers' appliances would fail for no apparent reason. And sometimes when you reached for a light switch, a foot-long spark would leap out to your hand and knock you senseless! What the heck?! It takes a huge DC voltage to make a foot-long spark. Why are high DC voltages appearing on your AC power lines?