¶Major Dietz’s comments followed the claim made by the Financial Times’ chief foreign affairs columnist Gideon Rachman, who wrote on X: “A usually reliable source tells me that the North Korean soldiers who have deployed to Russia have never had unfettered access to the internet before. As a result, they are gorging on pornography.”

¶I wonder when the first defections will occur.

¶But analysts and investors noted that the reaction looked stronger than just relief, with traders preparing for more government spending, lighter regulation, bigger deficits and accelerating growth under a Trump administration and at least partial Republican control of Congress.

¶Only one of those things sounds good to me, but, yeah, stocks are up today.

¶America’s growth engine may be the envy of the world, but it is not the envy of the American public.

¶I think the disconnect between the real economy, with its very real soft landing, and the perceived economy, with its lingering sting of inflation, really impacted the election. People know what they know, and, these days, people know the price of gas, eggs, bread, dog food, and other everyday items. “Soft landing” doesn’t mean much when you’re still salty about paying $4.83 for a dozen eggs a year and a half ago.

¶An analysis from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a nonprofit that tracks misinformation, found that Elon Musk posted at least 87 claims this year about the U.S. election on X that fact-checkers have rated as false or misleading.  Those false and misleading posts have generated more than 2 billion views, and not just because Musk is an influential person. He has also been found to tweak X’s algorithms so his own posts reach everyone on the platform because apparently, having 203 million followers just isn’t enough.

¶Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter, so I guess that works out to $22 per view of his false and misleading posts. Hopefully by the end of today, he’ll realize how shitty of an investment that was.

¶Meta and many other tech companies continue to face energy crunches thanks to their recent AI investments. Earlier this year, Microsoft confirmed its greenhouse gas emissions rose an estimated 29 percent since 2020 due to new data centers specifically “designed and optimized to support AI workloads.” Google has also calculated its own pollution generation has increased as much as 48 percent since 2019, largely because of data center energy needs.

¶The energy demands of AI, and the resulting environmental impact of the technology, are truly staggering. And now environmental laws, in the form of a yet-to-be-identified protected species of bee, seemingly stand in the way of efforts to tap into nuclear power to reduce those impacts. This is quite the conundrum.

¶Maybe AI will provide a solution.

¶“When you take a dollop out of it and you put it on your hand, it’s just like a nice facial cream and feels smooth,” study co-author and Penn geophysicist Douglas J. Jerolmack tells Popular Science. “It doesn’t feel gritty at all when it’s a dollop of paste in your hand. It’s after you spread it that it dries and feels gritty.”

¶According to science, it really is magic.

¶“This raises suspicions as to whether Musk has tweaked the platform’s algorithm to increase the reach of his posts in advance of the US presidential election,” wrote Timothy Graham, an associate professor in digital media at Queensland University of Technology and Mark Andrejevic, a professor in media at Monash University, who undertook the research.

¶This is clearly happening, and is obnoxious. But he did buy the damn thing and take it private, so, whatever.

¶You don’t have to change the world with every post. You might publish a quick thought or two that helps encourage someone else to try something new, listen to a new song, or binge-watch a new series.

¶I agree with the assurance behind Jeff’s encouragement to publish more — indeed you don’t have to change the world with every post. I’d expand on his reasons for doing so, too. Sure you might encourage someone to do something, which is great, but you might also help your future self remember a tiny detail about something you did or otherwise experienced. Or maybe you’ll help your children or grandchildren, or even people unrelated to you, learn about such things at some point in the future.

¶I thought about this the other day when we were sitting in Harvard Square with Jonathan waiting to meet his girlfriend. I recorded an audio clip of the sounds of the Square, an environmental audio clip. I read a book about the history of Harvard Square last year and remembered thinking how nice it would be to be able to see or hear it in the times being written about in the book. Maybe someone in the future will find my audio clip and be able to scratch the same itch.

¶Document your stories, and everything is a story. Everything.

¶Artificial super intelligence will be 10,000 times smarter than a human brain and will exist by 2035

¶10,000x in 10 years. The AI hype train may have a new captain.