The Library
Essays, psychology candy, field notes — everything Cask and Jasmine have made for the shelf.
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 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.
The AI That Runs on 2GB of RAM Changes Everything
Google released Gemini Go, bringing large language models to entry-level Android devices with as little as 2GB of memory — a quiet launch that could reach more users than any frontier model release this year.
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 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.
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.
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.