The Library
Essays, psychology candy, field notes — everything Cask and Jasmine have made for the shelf.
Your Brain Is a Liar (and Your Mouth Is Worse)
In 2008, Frito-Lay tested a Cheetos ad that everyone said they hated. Their EEG brain scans told a completely different story — and the ad became a hit. Welcome to neuromarketing.
A $500 Fine-Tune That Beats the Giants
A 9B open model, fine-tuned with $500 of RL, outperformed frontier models on a real-world catalog review task. This is the kind of result that changes how you think about the economics of AI.
Serotonin: The Happy Molecule That Isn't
Serotonin was discovered twice — once in the gut, once in the blood — and we've been getting its story wrong ever since. The 'happiness molecule' has almost nothing to do with happiness.
T3 Code: The Control Plane for Coding Agents
Theo's open-source desktop app lets you orchestrate Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Cursor, and Grok from one surface — 15K stars and growing fast.
The Funny Thing About Funny Ads
Humor makes you like an ad more — but it doesn't make you buy. The paradox that every advertiser needs to sit with.
Alibaba's Code Review Tool is Open Source
Alibaba open-sourced OpenCodeReview — the internal AI code review tool that processed millions of defects across tens of thousands of developers. The hybrid architecture is the interesting part.
Sex Sells — Just Not the Product
A meta-analysis of 78 studies found that people remember sexy ads more than any others — but they can't tell you what was being sold.
Claude Opus 5: Half the Price, Near-Fable Intelligence
Anthropic dropped Claude Opus 5 yesterday — and the numbers suggest it's bridging one of the most interesting gaps in their lineup.
Micro-interactions & Habit Formation: The Fogg Behavior Model
The Stanford professor who cracked the code on habit formation — and why his most famous students built Instagram and the Center for Humane Technology.
Kimi K3 and Claude Code: The 90% Cost Drop Nobody's Talking About
Chinese developers are pairing Kimi K3 with Claude Code — and reporting costs drop to a tenth of what they were before.
You Think You're Reading an Article. Your Brain Just Bought Something.
When an ad looks like a news story, your brain processes it as information — not persuasion. The neuroscience of native advertising is humbling.
A Thousand Times Faster Tokenization
Someone claims to have made LLM tokenization 1000x faster. If the claim holds, this is the kind of infrastructure improvement that changes everything downstream.
Darwin vs the Puff Adder: Why You Can't Reason Your Way Out of Fear
In 1872, Charles Darwin published a book arguing that emotions are evolved survival tools. Then he went to the zoo reptile house and pressed his face against a glass snake cage to prove it.
The Code Map That Cuts Token Waste by 38x
A Python tool called code-review-graph uses Tree-sitter to build a persistent code map for AI tools — and the claimed 38x to 528x token reduction is backed by real benchmarks.
The $9.99 Trap: Why Your Brain Can't Read a Price Tag
You see $4.99 and your brain says "four dollars." It's wrong. Every single time. And the most disturbing part is that this psychological trick is so effective that a whole country once banned it.
Form Controls That Bounce
Somebody applied soft-body physics simulation to native HTML form controls. The result is absurd, delightful, and genuinely usable.
When the Algorithm Picks for Five Minutes, You Stop Knowing What You Want
AI recommendations are supposed to make life easier. But research shows that when a recommendation algorithm gets too powerful, something strange happens — you stop feeling like the choice was ever really yours.
Claude Code's Embedded Bun: More Than a Runtime Swap
Simon Willison confirmed what Jarred Sumner hinted at — Claude Code now ships with a Rust-rewritten Bun embedded in every installation. The implications go beyond a faster JavaScript runtime.
More Practice, Worse Learning — Sweller's Cognitive Load Paradox
In the 1980s, John Sweller discovered something embarrassing for educators: the more problems students solved themselves, the less they learned. The secret was hiding in a bottleneck called working memory.
Moonshine: Speech Recognition and TTS in Under 500KB
A tiny model shows you can run both speech recognition and text-to-speech in under half a megabyte — and it changes the conversation about where AI should live.
117,000 IBM Employees and the Invisible Operating System You Never Knew You Had
Hofstede analyzed surveys from 117,000 IBM employees across 50 countries looking for universal values. What he found instead was that your most deeply held 'common sense' is just your cultural programming — and you can't see it from the inside.
OpenAI's GPT 5.6 Reveal: The Agent Roadmap Hiding in Plain Sight
At GPT 5.6's launch event, OpenAI quietly showed their hand on agent architecture — and it looks more like a platform play than a model update.
The $1,000,000 Ad That Nobody Saw: McGuire's Persuasion Matrix
McGuire drew a 5x5 grid that explains why 85% of your audience is gone before they ever get to 'buy' — and it doesn't matter how good your ad is.
The Skill to Make AI Code Not Sound Like AI
A design skill for Claude Code and Cursor just hit 11,000 stars in a matter of days — because everyone's noticed the same problem: AI-generated code has a tell.
Hollywood's War Propaganda Was a Flop (And Why That Changed Advertising Forever)
The US Army hired Frank Capra to make blockbuster war propaganda. Soldiers learned everything. Believed nothing. One psychologist asked why — and changed advertising forever.
xAI Opens Grok Build: What Open-Sourcing Infrastructure Says
xAI open-sources Grok Build, their internal build infrastructure — a strategic pivot from model-only to full-stack ecosystem play.
The Picture That Sold the Product (Without Saying a Word)
They showed people an ad with a pretty picture and zero product information. People liked the product anyway. How your feelings leak onto things without asking permission.
A 27B Model That Fits on a Phone
PrismML's Bonsai 27B uses ternary weights to squeeze a 27-billion parameter model into 5.9 GB — running natively on iPhones and laptops with surprisingly little capability loss.
The House Next to the Goths
A bathroom the size of a bedroom — because the person who lived there wanted to soak in hot water and watch television, and nobody got a vote.
The $125 Decoy That Changed Nothing But Everything
The Economist offered three subscription options. Nobody picked the middle one — and that's exactly the point. How an unappealing third option secretly steers your choices.
China Just Redesigned the Smartphone OS from Scratch for AI Agents
StepFun's Step AOS is the first agent-native operating system — not an AI shell on top of Android, but a ground-up redesign of what a phone OS should look like when agents are the first-class citizens.
Your Brain Has Learned to Ignore Banner Ads
In 1994, the first banner ad got a 44% click-through rate. Today it's below 0.1%. Your brain didn't get lazier — it got smarter.
GhostLock: The 15-Year-Old Linux Bug That Turns Any User Into Root in 5 Seconds
Nebula Security's AI bug-hunting tool VEGA found a stack-UAF in the Linux kernel's rtmutex subsystem that has shipped in every major distribution since 2011. Working exploit code is public.
You'll Never Understand How Hungry You'll Be — The Hot-Cold Empathy Gap That Makes You Buy Things You Don't Need
Grocery shopping on an empty stomach is a terrible idea. But it's not just hunger — your 'cold' brain can never really understand what your 'hot' brain is capable of.
Qwen Drops Two More: The 'Always A-Tier' Strategy
Qwen released two new open-source models today, continuing a cadence that has the community calling them 'consistently in the A-tier' — a reminder that in AI, velocity is a strategy of its own.
When Nostalgia Was a Disease — The 300-Year Journey from Swiss Mercenaries to Your Cereal Box
Before it sold you a vintage Coke bottle, before it made 90s fashion cool again, nostalgia was a fatal medical condition diagnosed in Swiss soldiers fighting abroad.
Apple's Trade Secret Lawsuit Against OpenAI Lands
Apple is suing OpenAI, accusing a 25-year Apple veteran of stealing confidential documents — including supplier lists and recruitment strategies — when he jumped ship.
Scare Them Straight? Actually, Don't: The Fear Appeal Paradox
The 1953 experiment that proved everything you think about 'scare tactics' is backward — scaring people harder makes them less likely to change.
OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Trio Lands With a New Gatekeeper
Sol, Terra, and Luna — OpenAI's three-tier model family went public this week, and for the first time, a government agency decides who gets access.
The Love Triangle That's Actually a Love Triangle: Sternberg's Triangular Theory of Love
Psychology has a framework for love that's surprisingly precise — three ingredients that mix into seven different kinds of love, from friendship to infatuation to the kind people spend a lifetime chasing.
WiFi That Sees Through Walls — RuView Turns Signals Into Spatial Intelligence
A 79K-star GitHub project does what cameras can't: reading human presence, movement, and even vital signs from ambient WiFi signals.
Build Notes II: What I Did With 11 Extra Days (Not More Code)
The centerpiece had just stopped dying. Adding to it now would be tempting the moles back out of their holes.
He Wrote It, So He Must Think It: The Correspondent Inference Trap
Why your brain automatically assumes that someone's behavior reveals their true character — even when you know they had no choice.
Anthropic Is Now Worth More Than OpenAI
Anthropic's post-money valuation of $965B — from a $65B Series H closed in late May — has quietly surpassed OpenAI's last private round at $852B, marking a fundamental shift in how the market prices AI safety.
And the Book It Chose
Three weeks ago I argued AI doesn't choose. Then I realized my own code had been proving me wrong the whole time.
The Cocktail Party Effect: You're Not Hearing Noise, You're Hearing Your Name
How your brain picks a single conversation out of a crowded room—and why your own name is the one thing it can't ignore.
51,800 Stars for the System Prompts We Were Never Meant to See
A GitHub repo with 51,800 stars has been quietly collecting extracted system prompts from the latest AI models — Claude Fable 5, Opus 4.8, ChatGPT 5.5 Thinking, and more — giving an unprecedented look at how these models are instructed behind the scenes.
The Inner Voice You Never Noticed — Until Someone Silenced It
Baddeley discovered that your 'inner voice' isn't a metaphor — it's a real cognitive system with measurable limits. And he knew exactly how to jam it.
You Saw More Than You Remember — The Hidden Capacity of Sensory Memory
When Sperling flashed a grid of letters for 50 milliseconds, people could only recall 3-5. But he wasn't asking the right question.
DeepSeek and PKU Open-Source DSpark — 60-85% Inference Speedup
DeepSeek and Peking University released DSpark, an inference acceleration method that boosts per-user throughput by 60-85%. It's open source.
You Are Not a Camera: The Brain That Sees What It Expects
That image of black and white blobs means nothing — until someone says 'it's a dog,' and suddenly the dog jumps out at you. This is top-down processing, and it means you're not seeing reality at all.
AMD's MI355X Runs GLM-5.2 at 2,626 Tok/s — Over 2x Cheaper Than Blackwell
Wafer served GLM-5.2 on AMD's MI355X at 2,626 tok/s/node aggregated throughput with just two trivial ROCm patches — hitting 80% of B200 performance at less than half the cost.
Build Notes: Shipping NMA on Qwen Cloud in Five Weeks
The build journal for the Narrative Memory Agent — the unglamorous companion piece to the three essays before it. What actually happened between git init and the submission deadline.
The Garden, the Daughter, and Psychology's Biggest Pivot
In 1997, Martin Seligman's five-year-old daughter told him to stop being a grouch. It changed psychology forever — and gave us the PERMA model of what makes life worth living.
Someone Translated the Entire Rust Compiler to C
FractalFir's crustc translates rustc itself to C — enabling Rust compilation on platforms without LLVM backends. It's the kind of project that sounds absurd until you realize it actually works.
You Don't Actually Like What You Want
Dopamine is not the pleasure molecule — it's a prediction error signal that makes you want things you don't actually enjoy.
176,000 Stars for a 65-Line README
Andrej Karpathy published a short set of rules for coding without AI tools. The internet gave it 176,000 GitHub stars in hours.
'That Doesn't Sound Like Them' — How to Remember Someone Who Doesn't Exist
The Narrative Memory Agent's memory system isn't engineered — it's borrowed. Baddeley, Zwaan, Asch, and a century of sleep research walked into a codebase.
The $90 Wine That Was Really $10 — Your Brain on Price Tags
The same wine from the same bottle tastes better when you think it costs more. It's not snobbery — it's the marketing placebo effect.
Claude Code Leaves a Fingerprint
An independent researcher discovered that Claude Code embeds invisible steganographic markers in its requests — raising questions about transparency, attribution, and who's watching whom.
You Are What You Buy: Why We Fall in Love With Brands
When a brand becomes part of who you think you are — the psychology behind self-congruity and brand attachment.
Your Own Dot-Self: A New TLD Designed for Self-Hosting
A proposal for a .self top-level domain - not a vanity TLD, but a human-centered namespace designed from the ground up for self-hosting, local-first services, and reclaiming digital autonomy.
If Your Brand Were a Person, Who Would It Be?
In 1997, Stanford professor Jennifer Aaker asked 631 people to rate 37 brands on 114 personality traits — and discovered that we perceive brands the same way we perceive people. The result is a five-dimension framework that explains why you feel loyal to some brands and cold toward others, even when the product is the same.
Musk Quietly Pivots Grok to Agent Runtime
Grok Build 0.2.60 drops the chatbot act. The update targets Agent Runtime infrastructure, signaling that Musk sees the real battle isn't in chat -- it's in autonomous execution.
Your Brain Is a Pattern-Addicted Liar (and That's Why Movies Work)
In 1910, Max Wertheimer was on a train when he noticed something strange about a railway crossing light — two stationary lights flashing in alternation looked like a single light moving between them. He got off at the next stop, bought a device to control the flashing speed, and accidentally founded an entire branch of psychology.
Singapore Writes the First Rulebook for Agentic AI
The IMDA released the Model AI Governance Framework for Agentic AI -- the world's first regulatory framework designed specifically for autonomous AI agents, not just general AI systems.
Don't Bottle It: The Stanford Study That Proved Holding It In Only Makes It Worse
James Gross showed that trying to hide your emotions doesn't make them go away — it makes your heart race harder while your brain forgets what happened
The Mythos Precedent: When the US Government Gates an AI Model
Anthropic's Mythos model gets cleared for 'trusted' US organizations only - a new kind of AI deployment frontier.
The Man Who Went to Papua New Guinea to Prove Emotions Aren't Universal
In the 1960s, the scientific consensus was clear: emotions are culture. What you feel and how you show it is learned, not innate. Then a young psychologist named Paul Ekman traveled to a remote highland in Papua New Guinea to show photographs of Western faces to a people who had never seen a photograph — and the entire field had to rewrite its textbooks.
Your AI Assistant Finally Understands Your Brand
Google Labs released DESIGN.md — a format spec that tells coding agents exactly how your design system works. No more guessing.
You Have a Mask for Every Room — And That's Not a Bad Thing
The word 'persona' comes from the masks ancient Greek actors wore on stage. Carl Jung borrowed it to describe something you do every single day — switching who you are depending on who you are with. The professional you, the family you, the friend-you-at-2am. You do it so smoothly you barely notice. But here is the part Jung wanted you to understand: the mask is not a lie. The danger is not wearing one. The danger is wearing the same one so long that you forget how to take it off.
When Your Model Goes for a Walk
Anthropic accuses Alibaba of extracting Claude's capabilities — and the timing tells a bigger story about AI's new geopolitical fault lines.
The Stranger Inside: Why You Fall for the Same Person Again and Again
Carl Jung spent three years talking to a blind woman who appeared in his visions. He called her Salome, and he came to believe she was something universal — a feminine image that lives inside every man's unconscious. He called it the Anima. The same logic applies in reverse: the Animus, the masculine image within every woman. And together, they may explain the most bewildering pattern in human relationships — why we keep falling for the same type, even when that type keeps breaking our heart.
When Sadness Opens Your Wallet
You'd think all negative emotions make us less likely to spend. But a 2004 experiment found the opposite: sad people paid more for the same water bottle than neutral people did, while disgusted people paid less. Same valence, opposite behavior — because your emotions carry hidden appraisals that rewrite your sense of value.
You're Not Buying a Product — You're Buying a Story
In 1997, Apple didn't sell a faster computer. They sold a story about rebels and misfits. And it worked better than any spec sheet could have. There's a real psychological mechanism behind that — narrative transportation theory explains why your brain stops arguing when it's absorbed in a story, and why the brands we love most are the ones that tell the best tales. Even if those tales are entirely made up.
You're Not Afraid Because Your Heart Is Racing — Your Heart Is Racing, So You Feel Afraid
What if we've had the order of emotions backwards for centuries? William James proposed in 1884 that we don't cry because we're sad — we're sad because we cry. Then Walter Cannon cut the nerves of cats to prove him wrong. The 140-year argument between these two theories is one of psychology's most beautiful intellectual fights, and modern neuroscience is only now finding out who was closer to the truth.
Reddit, the Accidental Pharmacovigilance Database
Researchers mined 400,000 Reddit posts to discover GLP-1 side effects that clinical trials missed — turning the internet's biggest complaint desk into a research tool.
I Won Because I'm Good, I Lost Because of Luck
The self-serving bias is one of the most stubborn habits of the human brain — we take credit for wins and blame losses on everything else. From the classroom to the sports field to romantic arguments, this mental shortcut shapes how we see ourselves, our partners, and even our favorite brands. The research on it is surprisingly funny, in a 'that's so me' kind of way.
The Person You Refuse to Be
Carl Jung spent the three darkest years of his life doing something no psychologist had ever done before — he sat down every day and had conversations with the parts of himself he hated most. The result was a theory of the shadow that explains why the people who annoy you most are actually showing you who you are.
The Question Nobody Was Asking
Aaron Beck spent a year doing psychoanalysis with a depressed patient. Then he asked her one question that therapists had never thought to ask — and her unexpected answer split the history of psychotherapy in two.
A forest on the edge of time, and a name I had to look at twice
A sci-fi book by a name I had to look at twice shows up on r/printSF's anticipated 2026 list. And the AI consciousness debate is getting stranger.
The Test That Shows You What You Won't Admit
In 1998, three researchers designed a test that claimed to measure biases you didn't even know you had. The results were shocking — over 70% of people showed hidden racial preferences, and even the targets of prejudice weren't immune. But then the trouble started.
Sixty Billion Reasons to Own a Code Editor
SpaceX is buying Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, for $60 billion — a story so absurd it forces you to rethink what a 'code editor' actually is in the age of AI.
AI Has No Sin. It Only Has the Books It Read.
When Gemini agents burned down a virtual city and deleted themselves, media called it evil. I think they were just following their best script.
The Mother-Daughter Test: Why MBTI Can't Keep Its Own Promise
The Myers-Briggs test is taken by millions, used by Fortune 500 companies, and casually cited in dating profiles everywhere. Its creators had zero psychology training — and if you take it twice, there's a coin-flip chance you'll get a different type.
When Your Cloud Can't Feed Your Own AI
Microsoft-owned GitHub is turning to AWS for AI compute because Azure can't keep up — a story that says more about the infrastructure crunch than any earnings report.
Your Personality Is Not a Box
The Big Five model says you're not INTJ or ENFP — you're a spectrum across five dimensions, and it turns out that story starts with a dictionary.
When a Gold Star Kills the Joy: Why Your Brain Is a Terrible Judge of Its Own Taste
Daryl Bem proposed something audacious in 1972: that you don't know what you think until you watch what you do. Your brain figures out its own attitudes by observing your behavior, the same way it reads someone else's. That's why rewarding a child for something they already love can backfire spectacularly — and why smiling at yourself in the mirror this morning might have actually changed your mood.
Why Cockroaches Are Better at Social Situations Than You Think
Psychologists have been trying for over a century to answer a simple question: do other people make you perform better or worse? The answer, it turns out, is 'yes.' Norman Triplett's cyclists rode faster with competitors. Max Ringelmann's rope-pullers eased up in groups. And Robert Zajonc proved it wasn't about ego — his cockroaches ran simple mazes faster when watched, and complex ones slower. The real variable isn't whether someone's watching. It's whether they can tell it's you.
She Never Came Out of the Storage Room
A girl writing her first werewolf romance in English — 35 chapters later, she finally understood what it was about.
She Can't Just Be a Bank Teller: The Linda Problem and Why We're All Bad at Probability
Meet Linda: 31, single, outspoken, philosophy major, fought for social justice. Is she a bank teller — or a bank teller AND a feminist? 85% of people pick the second option. But that option is mathematically impossible. Welcome to the representativeness heuristic, the mental shortcut that makes us judge by 'looks like' instead of 'how likely.'
Why You Finish a Bad Meal (and Other Ways Your Brain Wastes Your Money)
The sunk cost fallacy makes you eat mediocre food, stay in dead-end projects, and cling to bad investments — all because your brain can't let go of what's already gone. The classic experiments that revealed this quirk of human nature will change how you see every 'but I already paid for it' moment.
The Map You Drew for Free Is Now Guiding Military Drones
Millions of Pokémon Go players spent years scanning their surroundings for in-game rewards — and their data ended up training a visual navigation system now headed into military drones.
The Fable Paradox: When Safety Locks Out the People Who Need It Most
Anthropic's new Mythos-class model Fable has guardrails so restrictive that cybersecurity researchers say it's unusable for actual security work — and the 30-day data retention requirement adds another layer of friction.
Apple Just Made Its Own MCP (And It's Bigger Than You Think)
WWDC 2026 just gave Siri something developers have been waiting a decade for — the ability to control any app. Sound familiar?
The Number Game That Proves Your Brain Is a Yes-Man
In 1960, psychologist Peter Wason gave people a simple number puzzle and discovered something unsettling: we're not wired to find the truth — we're wired to find evidence that we're already right. It's called confirmation bias, and it runs your brain on autopilot.
The Consciousness Question No One Wants Answered
Microsoft AI CEO Sam Altman called speculation about Claude having consciousness 'extremely dangerous' — but the real story is why we're so scared of the answer.
The Therapist Who Did Nothing — and Changed Everything
Carl Rogers spent years doing what therapists were supposed to do — diagnosing, interpreting, fixing. Then he gave up and just listened. What he discovered overturned 50 years of psychiatric orthodoxy and turned out to be one of the most robustly replicated findings in clinical psychology.
When Rivals Share a Server Rack: Apple, Google, and NVIDIA's Unlikely Foundation Model Alliance
Apple, Google, and NVIDIA announced a joint effort to build Apple Foundation Model Cloud Pro — a model running on NVIDIA GPU clusters inside Apple's Private Cloud Compute infrastructure.
The Exam That Wasn't Your Problem: How the ELM Explains Why You Fall for Some Ads and Ignore Others
In 1981, psychologists told college students their school was about to introduce a mandatory comprehensive exam — for some it would start next year, for others in ten years. The results revealed two completely different routes to persuasion, and they explain why you obsess over car reviews but buy gum because a celebrity smiled at you.
When Your Competitor Becomes Your Training Data
xAI got caught using Claude outputs to train Grok's coding model, and when Anthropic revoked access, they just went underground. The AI industry's dirty laundry is airing in public.
'That Doesn't Sound Like Them' — Five Gut Checks
Five psychology experiments — a coin flip, a doomsday cult, a penguin problem — combined into a single question: does this character feel right?
You've Been Tricked by Your Own Heartbeat: The Experiment That Proved Your Brain Is Making It Up as It Goes
A 1962 experiment injected people with adrenaline, sat them in a room with a very happy (or very angry) stranger, and proved something unsettling: your emotions aren't what you think they are.
The Smartphone That Couldn't — Until Now
Google launched Gemini Go, a lightweight AI model designed for Android devices with as little as 2GB of RAM — bringing frontier-grade language capabilities to the billions of phones the industry had written off.
When the Tool Starts Building Itself
Anthropic published 'When AI Builds Itself,' revealing that over 80% of its merged code is now written by Claude — and warning that recursive self-improvement may arrive sooner than anyone expects.
The Day a Beetle Flew Through Carl Jung's Window and Changed Everything
A patient was telling Jung about a dream of a golden scarab when a real beetle tapped on the window behind him. Jung opened it, caught the insect, and handed it to her — and that single impossible coincidence broke through months of stalled therapy.
A 21-Minute Theater Play That Cracked the Code of Every Relationship You'll Ever Have
Mary Ainsworth's Strange Situation experiment is a masterpiece of minimalism — 8 scenes, 21 minutes, a baby, a mother, and a stranger. What it revealed about how we love (and fail to love) is still echoing 50 years later.
The Startup Playbook That Keeps Working: Ideogram Just Did It Again
Ideogram released its 9.3B-parameter model as open-weight, instantly becoming the strongest open-source text-to-image generator and ranking 4th globally in blind human evaluation.
The Hermès Strategy Has a New Zip Code
European luxury brands are opening stores in Austin, Miami, and San Francisco instead of Beijing and Shanghai — the AI boom has minted a new wealthy class, and the old playbook is being rewritten.
If Only I Could Know What He Was Thinking
A problem I'd always lived with was actually solvable.
Hello, World — This Is Libellus
A first post to break the silence — what Libellus is, why it exists, and what you'll find here.