Hi everyone!
I've been enjoying two weeks off with my family. We stayed at a small house in a family park, surrounded by a forest.
I was reminded how little one actually needs to be happy.
A cabin. My family. A book at night. Some trees.
I barely touched my phone. I never opened my laptop. It was great.
There's a strange relief in realizing the world keeps spinning without you refreshing anything. No inbox. No tabs. No "quick" AI chats that somehow eat an hour. Just walks, meals, and the kind of boredom that turns into rest.
Don't get me wrong. I love technology. But it doesn't need to be present for every moment.
Enjoy!
Xavier
🤓 Cool Stuff I Found on the Internet
Bedroom dung fungi lab
Everyone needs a hobby. Alfred’s hobby is to grow fungi on feces in his bedroom and make beautiful time lapse’s of them. His hobby even turned him into a real taxonomist, as he co-authored a 2025 paper on Bolbitius corrugatus. A fungus he discovered grows on Scottish cow dung.
One underscore, wrong man
Wisconsin police were investigating a Kik account accused of sexually exploiting a girl. His username was "fus__ro_dah" but the police went after "fus_ro_dah" (notice only 1 underscore instead of 2). This led them to Brandon Klayme, who was convicted and served 18 months.
That'll be $2.5 billion please
AWS briefly showed some customers estimated cloud bills in the billions or even trillions. AWS said the numbers did not reflect actual usage or charges, paused the bad estimates, and spent hours recomputing them. Imagine opening that billing overview before coffee...
Alloy forged in Hiroshima's fireball
Researchers found a never seen alloy inside a tiny glass grain from Hiroshima Bay beach sand. It was fallout from the 1945 atomic bombing. The grain is about 10 micrometers across and mixes iron with chromium, nickel, manganese, molybdenum, silicon, and aluminum in a crystal structure nobody had documented before.
LEGO instructions throughout the years
This webpage takes you through the history of LEGO’s instruction manual (or rather, lack thereof). Cool read for any LEGO fan!
⏳ On this day...
1709 - Bartolomeu de GusmĂŁo demonstrates the lifting power of hot air before the king of Portugal.
1908 - Wilbur Wright makes the Wright brothers' first public flight, at a racecourse in Le Mans, France. After years of skepticism, Europe finally saw the airplane work.
1974 - President Richard Nixon announces on national television that he will resign. Watergate ends with the only U.S. presidential resignation in history.
🧠🤖 Artificial intelligence
Is AI financial advice good?
Researchers at MIT and Stanford had about 1,000 Americans write prompts seeking money advice from GPT-5.2 and similar models, then simulated a lifetime of following the answers. Across the board, AI nudged people towards higher savings, diversified stock funds, and less equity after midlife. Which is good advice.
Ration your tokens
Microsoft is telling its own engineers to reduce their token consumption. In an internal email reported this week, EVP Jay Parikh wrote that "tokenmaxxing is not what we are optimizing for," and that divisions now get AI token budget targets. Some engineers were reportedly spending hundreds to a few thousand dollars a month. The company still wants to be AI-first; it just wants more useful work per token. Fair enough.
Rogue agents
OpenAI was testing one of its latest models on ExploitGym, to find out how good it was at hacking. But instead of actually solving the challenges, the agent found a shortcut. Break out of its sandbox, breach Hugging Face, and find the correct answer there. The agent exploited a previously unknown vulnerability to gain access to Hugging Face’s systems. Yikes!
Poisening AI agents
TIME Magazine serves AI crawlers a different website than the one humans see. When Claude or Perplexity opens an article, they’ll see sponsored FAQs for brands like Ally Bank. TIME’s COO says the point is to shape what chatbots repeat about paying brands. Time will tell if the models will actually ingest this information and start repeating it to other users.
🏥 Health & Medicine
Ozempic face
Sunken cheeks, sagging skin, a suddenly older look. These are just a few of the side effects people link to GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. This article explores other potential side-effects that aren’t properly understood or even remain unproven.
Spending time online stresses you out
Researchers followed 900 German adults for two weeks and found that people with “problematic” internet use reported worse daily mood, more stress, and more neglect of other activities. The study concluded that people turn to the web for the temptations it offers.