Can't stop grooving to 'Baby It’s Both (Tick-Tack English Ver.) Feat. Ava Max' 💃🏻🕺🏾 with @applemusic #FridayFeeling# 🪩 💿 #ILLIT# #아일릿# #I_LL_LIKE_YOU# #Baby_Its_Both# #Tick_Tack#

Almost two years ago, the Carroll Gardens Thai restaurant Ugly Baby announced that it would be closing. Now it has returned, in Williamsburg this time, in a window-lined, B.Q.E.-adjacent space more than twice the size of its former digs. Its new menu, which comes as New York is in the throes of a Thai-spiciness rapture, is divided into three categories, in ascending order of spiciness: the Laughs, the Cries, and the Ugly. While the menu centers on spice, “Ugly Baby—both before and now—is more than just a place to show off your oh-so-manly pain tolerance, or to punish your digestive tract,” Helen Rosner writes. Read her full review:

She pushed her two youngest children out the front door. Then she locked it from the inside. Not to keep them in. To keep them from following her back into the fire. It was just after midnight on September 3, 2019, in Edsbyn, Sweden. Emma Schols woke to terrified screams coming from downstairs. Her youngest sons, four-year-old Albin and three-year-old Oliver, had wandered into the television room. By the time Emma reached them, flames had already swallowed much of the ground floor. Thick black smoke filled every breath. She threw herself over the boys and fought toward the front door. The moment it opened, fresh air rushed inside. The fire exploded. Heat tore across her back as she forced both boys outside to safety. Then she closed and locked the door behind her. Four more children were still trapped upstairs. She refused to let panic pull anyone back into the burning house. The staircase was already engulfed in flames. Emma climbed it anyway. Every step felt impossible. The heat was so intense that the soles of her feet began to burn away. She later recalled feeling them hang like threads as she climbed. Still, she kept moving. At the top of the stairs, she found that her nine-year-old daughter, Nellie, had already jumped from the balcony to get help. Her eleven-year-old son, William, had lowered a ladder for the others. Emma counted her children. One was missing. Mollie. Just one year old. Still inside. Her older children begged her not to go back. The smoke was too thick. The fire was out of control. Emma turned around without saying a word. She crawled back into the house. Smoke blinded her. Her lungs struggled for air. Every movement pushed her burned body beyond its limits. Then she heard crying. Through the smoke she saw little Mollie standing in her crib, frightened and alone. Emma later said she thought she had nothing left to give. But the moment she saw her baby, strength she never knew she possessed returned. She stood, lifted Mollie into her arms, and carried her toward the balcony. Outside, William still held the ladder in place. Emma climbed down with her daughter pressed tightly against her. Only after both feet touched the ground did her body surrender. She collapsed onto the grass. Every one of her six children had survived. Emma had not escaped unharmed. Burns covered ninety-three percent of her body. Doctors knew the injuries were among the most severe a person could survive. She spent weeks on a ventilator, underwent more than twenty surgeries, and faced months of painful rehabilitation. Before losing consciousness, she had made one promise to her children. She would come home. When she finally woke, she did not ask about herself. Her first question was simple. “Are my children alive?” They were. Returning home brought new challenges. Her scars had transformed her appearance so dramatically that some of her children were frightened at first. Little Mollie, the baby she had carried through the fire, did not immediately recognize her. But Emma refused to give up. She learned to walk again. To use her hands again. To hold her children again. In 2020, Sweden honored her as Lifesaver of the Year. Her son William later said there were moments he feared he would never see his mother again, and that simply having her home made him happy every day. People often call Emma a hero. She answers with the same simple conviction. “If I gave birth to six children, I will get all six out.” She has since shared her story publicly, embraced the scars that cover her body, and rebuilt her life with her family. To many people, those scars tell a story of pain. To Emma, they tell a different story. They are proof that on one terrible night, a mother’s love became stronger than fire. She never entered that burning house because she believed she was fearless. She entered because, in her heart, the decision had already been made. All six children would leave that house alive. And somehow, against every expectation, they did.

Today I am announcing META-Bench, the first pure intelligence benchmark for AI. It leverages the hit auto-battler strategy game, TFT. I SWEAR I AM NOT TROLLING let me explain. The industry suffers from labs overfitting and giving us models that score high despite being fundamentally low IQ. Over the years there have been many attempts at benchmarking AI with competitive gaming. I am going to explain the failure points, and why META-Bench is truly the first of its kind. Chess. When picking a game to benchmark with, chess is the obvious first choice. It has clear rules, large player base, and a well defined elo system. The issue with static rule games though is that the best strategies can be figured out ahead of time and baked into the model during the training process. Too easily hacked. Memorizing more strategies is not a proof of intelligence. Dota2/ League. We’ve all heard of OpenAI Five. The issue with benchmarking on a MOBA is that reaction speed is a meaningless metric. We do not need our highly intelligent AI to be able to respond at the speed of top human pro players. And truth be told, we are years away from a LLM that is able to play MOBAs at the highest levels off of vision alone, even though the problem is seemingly solved years ago. What we need is a game that: - Has defined rules but cannot be results hacked during the training process - Large ecosystem of human players - Clear cut results and an elo system - Results that is not reaction time dependent There is only ONE game in the world that meet all the requirements needed for this benchmark. Teamfight Tactics. For those unfamiliar, TFT is a strategy based auto-battler created by Riot Games with ~100 million monthly active players worldwide. It is a highly competitive multiplayer turn based game. It’s as if Chess and League of Legends had a baby that’s born to be an AI benchmark: - There is a new set released every 3 months. - Time limitations in the 10-40 second range rather than the milliseconds required for MOBAs - Skill based enough for esports yet uncertain enough to require reasoning over hard scripts “Can’t labs just train models to be good at TFT?” Nope and the reason why it’s unhackable comes down to how the benchmark itself is set up. Due to the fact that the entire game is changed every 3 months and patched every 2 weeks, any data on a previous TFT set is effectively useless when it comes to raw pattern recognition. Strategy wise, there are core concepts that carries over from set to set. That’s why we have the same players hitting the highest elo every season even though each set is so different. Any efforts at overfitting here can be fully negated if the benchmark harness used for all models has every core strategy built in. You are never going to beat a carefully curated harness layer with strategy training at the model layer. By presenting the models in the harness with the same core strategic concepts, the only difference in outputs will be its ability to reason across the different scenarios of each game. The luck elements of TFT already ensures that no 2 games will be the same in the reasoning required. Run the models against each other enough times and you will have a clear winner. Aka, the world’s first true IQ test for AI. I really, really want to know which AI model would win this. So I am going to build this. Not too sure how I’m going to fund it yet so if you would like to invest HMU. I’m also looking to put together a small team of individuals who are both high elo in TFT and highly experienced with agentic AI. And if you are even remotely curious on the results, like and help share this post 🫡

Princess Alexandrine: The Royal Child History Tried to Forget In 1915, a princess was born into one of Europe’s most influential royal dynasties with Down syndrome. At the time, society expected families like hers to do one thing: conceal her existence. Children with disabilities were often sent away, hidden from public life, and quietly erased from family histories. But her family chose a different path. A decision that would ultimately help preserve her life. On April 7, 1915, Princess Alexandrine Irene of Prussia was born into the House of Hohenzollern. She was the granddaughter of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last German Emperor, and the daughter of Crown Prince Wilhelm. Soon after her birth, her parents realized she had Down syndrome. The world she entered was not kind to people with disabilities. Across Europe, eugenic ideas were gaining popularity. Disabled individuals were frequently viewed as burdens rather than human beings deserving dignity and care. Many wealthy and aristocratic families kept disabled children out of sight, placing them in institutions where they often disappeared from public memory. Alexandrine’s parents refused to do that. Known affectionately as “Adini,” she remained at home with her family. She appeared openly in official family photographs alongside her brothers. Rather than treating her as something to be hidden, her family embraced her as a cherished member of the household. Her mother lovingly described her as “the sunshine of our home.” At a time when visibility itself was an act of courage, their decision stood out. Then history took a dramatic turn. In 1918, the German monarchy collapsed. The imperial family lost its throne, influence, and much of its former position. Yet one thing remained unchanged: their commitment to Alexandrine. As a teenager, she attended the Trüpersche Sonderschule in Jena, one of Europe’s earliest schools dedicated to educating children with disabilities. There she was able to learn, socialize, and develop in ways that would have been impossible had she been hidden away. But an even darker chapter was approaching. When the Nazis came to power, disabled people became targets of one of the regime’s most horrifying programs. Under Aktion T4, thousands of disabled Germans were identified, removed from institutions, and systematically killed. The program eventually claimed the lives of more than 200,000 disabled people. Many victims were selected directly from care facilities and institutions. Alexandrine was not living in one. She remained with her family in Bavaria, surrounded by people who valued and protected her. The choice her parents had made decades earlier—to keep her visible, loved, and integrated into family life—helped shield her during a period when people exactly like her were being targeted for extermination. While countless others perished, Alexandrine survived. The years brought both tragedy and change. Her brother Wilhelm was killed during World War II in 1940. The empire her grandfather once ruled disappeared forever, replaced first by dictatorship and then by devastation. Yet Alexandrine continued on. After the war, her brother Louis Ferdinand remained devoted to her. Long after the family had lost its royal power, he regularly traveled to visit her near Lake Starnberg, maintaining that bond year after year until he became her last surviving sibling. On October 2, 1980, Princess Alexandrine Irene passed away peacefully in Bavaria at the age of 65. Her life was remarkable for another reason. When she was born in 1915, people with Down syndrome were often expected to live fewer than ten years. Alexandrine lived through two world wars, the fall of an empire, the rise and collapse of Nazi Germany, and decades of social change. She far exceeded the expectations of her era. She was later laid to rest beside her parents at Hohenzollern Castle. The photographs remain. A baby wrapped in christening garments. A smiling child standing beside her brothers. A young woman dressed for her confirmation. In every image, she is present—not hidden, not forgotten, not excluded. Her family was far from flawless. Like many members of Europe’s aristocracy, they carried their own complicated history and mistakes. But in one crucial respect, they defied the attitudes of their age. When society urged them to hide their daughter, they welcomed her into the light. When others questioned her worth, they treasured her. Alexandrine never led a political movement or changed national policy. Her legacy is quieter than that. She lived a life filled with care, acceptance, and belonging. And that may be the most powerful lesson of all. Because the choice her family made in 1915 was not merely an act of compassion. It was an act of recognition. They saw her value when many others could not. In a century that often denied humanity to people with disabilities, Princess Alexandrine Irene was allowed to be exactly what she always was: A beloved daughter, a cherished sister, and a woman whose life mattered. That simple decision—to love her openly and without condition—shaped the course of her entire life and, very likely, saved it.

"In 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a 17-year-old girl gave birth to a son. The school administrators had told her she couldn't finish high school. She pushed back anyway. Her name was Jacklyn Gise. And the baby she was determined to raise would one day become one of the most influential people on Earth. Being a pregnant teenager in 1960s Albuquerque wasn't just difficult — it was scandalous. When Jacklyn tried to return to school after giving birth, the administration told her no. She didn't accept that answer. ""I pushed back and I kept on pushing back,"" she would later recall. ""Eventually the school relented."" But there were conditions. She couldn't talk to other students. She couldn't eat in the cafeteria. She had to arrive and leave within five minutes of the bells. She agreed to all of it. And she graduated. Her marriage to her son's biological father, Ted Jorgensen, didn't survive. They were both teenagers when they married. He struggled with alcohol. They divorced before Jeff was even two years old. Suddenly, Jacklyn was a single mother with no money. She found work as a secretary, earning $190 a month. It was barely enough to afford rent. She couldn't even pay for a telephone. Her father rigged up a walkie-talkie system so she could check in with her parents every morning at 7 a.m. ""That's how we were able to stay in an apartment,"" she later explained. ""Because I didn't have to pay for a phone."" Determined to continue her education, Jacklyn enrolled in night school. She chose her classes based on which professors would let her bring her infant son to class. She would show up with two duffel bags — one filled with textbooks, the other with cloth diapers, bottles, and toys to keep baby Jeff occupied. It was in one of those night classes that she met a young Cuban refugee named Miguel Bezos. He had arrived in the United States at age 15, fleeing Castro's regime with almost nothing. They fell in love. Mike, as everyone called him, adopted Jeff and gave him his name. Together, Jacklyn and Mike built a home where hard work, education, and big dreams were the foundation of everything. Jacklyn never stopped learning. Even after putting her college dreams on hold to raise her family and support Mike's career, she went back. In her late thirties, she enrolled again. She was relentless. At age 40, Jacklyn Bezos finally earned her college degree. ""When I graduated from the College of Saint Elizabeth at the age of 40,"" she said, ""I had never been more proud of myself."" Then, in 1995, her oldest son came to her and Mike with a proposal that sounded risky. Jeff wanted to quit his stable Wall Street job to start a company selling books on the internet. Most people had barely heard of the internet. Almost no one was shopping on it. He told his parents there was a 70% chance the company would fail. They invested anyway. Jacklyn and Mike put approximately $245,000 into their son's startup. It was an enormous leap of faith. If Jeff was right about the odds, they would lose everything. The company was called Amazon. By 2018, that investment had grown to approximately $30 billion. But the money was never the point for Jacklyn. Jeff Bezos has spoken publicly about his mother countless times. He called her story ""incredible."" He credits her not just for the financial investment, but for the foundation she built — the values she instilled, the example she set, the sacrifices she made when he was too young to understand them. Jacklyn Bezos never sought the spotlight. While her son became one of the most recognizable people on the planet, she worked quietly behind the scenes. She co-founded the Bezos Family Foundation, donating hundreds of millions to education and health causes. She championed opportunities for young people, especially those who faced obstacles like she once did. She passed away in August 2025 at the age of 78, after battling Lewy body dementia. Her son announced her death with a simple tribute: ""She pounced on the job of loving me with ferocity."" Jacklyn Bezos's life proves something important about parenting. The most valuable gift you can give your children isn't money. It's showing them what's possible by refusing to accept what others say is impossible. She was a teenage mother who society might have written off. Instead, she raised a son who changed the world — and she did it by changing hers first."

Thoughts on the GTA VI Netflix Gameplay footage: The game definitely looks technically excellent. Beautiful graphically, detailed, everything. The problem is the locations themselves are just...ugly. Everything is kind of grey and boggy. We get it's Miami, but it's not really pleasant to look at. It looks like they built a whole Forza game into GTA which is super interesting, they're clearly positioning GTA as a sandbox game for people to make their own games within. It felt like all the characters looked ugly? Did anyone else feel this? Both the male and female characters, even the ones that were suppose to specifically be "hot", still looked ugly. Is this a Sweet Baby Inc game? Also everyone seemed chubby. If you watch the trailer again you'll notice it, all the body proportions are sort of flabby and unflattering. Not sure why they did this. Probably for "realism" but...sometimes realism isn't fun. The biggest problem though was that the game felt like it was a "JOURNALISM MODE" game. It semed like it was all scripted cinematic events. If you notice even when it's the *actual* gameplay, the shooting reciptical auto-locks on to the enemies and guides you to a headshot every single time. It snaps to the right place. That compeltely defeats the purpose of the game. The game feels like it's being played on rails. Not like an actual game. Like a long interactive movie with a "Press R2 to smoke" or "press O to lift" type mechanic. Journalism mode. It looks like THANK GOD there may still be some good humor. The guy in the window humping the air with the VR headset was hilarious, and the influencer doing the "trunk challenge" was also hilarious, so glad some of the humor could still be in the game. It also seems like they took a monster effort to try to make dialogue seem as realistic as possible, the voice acting and dialogue seemed real and natural, especially with that celebrity drug guy in the car with Lucia and Jason. Overall impressions will be that the game is sort of a "Sony" style game, meaning it's going to be a journalism mode easy game, super cinematic, and less of a "gamer game" and more of a "fast and furious" family is everything themed game, with an obvious inevitable betrayal portion (speculating but come on) between Jason and Lucia, etc., until they end up working together again or some sort of classic hollywood slop. TLDR: It's visually incredible, dialogue super realistic, locations spot on, all of the TECHNICAL stuff great...but it is sort of intentionally aesthetically ugly, and seems like it will probably be a 8/10 game, not a 10/10 game, but will definitely be the best selling game of all time undoubtedly. What are your impressions? This is hot off the watch.

I'm a cardiologist. Every day I tell patients some version of the same hard truth: the heart muscle you lost in your heart attack is gone. It won't grow back. We can open the artery, but the dead zone becomes scar — and scar doesn't beat. A 25-year-old scientist in Argentina is trying to prove me wrong. And her approach is clever enough that I'm rooting for her. Here's the problem she's attacking. When an artery blocks, heart muscle in that zone starts dying within hours. Unlike your skin or your liver, the adult human heart barely regenerates. So your body does the only thing it can — it patches the hole with fibrous scar. That scar doesn't contract. The heart pumps weaker, stretches, thins, and marches toward heart failure. This is why roughly half of heart failure patients die within five years. We manage the decline. We don't reverse it. Pilar Ferrer and her team at Amnova Biotech are going after the thing we've never solved: rebuilding the muscle itself. Their tool is inspired by one of the most quietly remarkable tissues in biology — the amniotic membrane. The sac that surrounds a baby in the womb. It's rich in regenerative and anti-inflammatory factors, and doctors already use it to heal stubborn wounds and repair the cornea. They've turned that biology into an injectable hydrogel. Cell-free — no stem cells, no animal components. It ships as a room-temperature powder, gets reconstituted, and is injected directly into the damaged heart zone, ideally during bypass surgery — the operation another Argentine, René Favaloro, gave the world. Once inside, it acts as a temporary scaffold that reengineers the healing environment: it calms the destructive inflammation, grows new blood vessels, and signals the heart's own cells to proliferate and repopulate the dead zone. Instead of surrendering to scar, the tissue gets a second chance to rebuild. The early data, in sheep — chosen because their hearts are close to ours in size and physiology — showed at 28 days: smaller infarcts, improved heart function, more new blood vessels, more dividing cardiac cells. Now the honest part, because I owe you both halves. This is early. It's preclinical. And the history of cardiology is a graveyard of therapies that looked beautiful in sheep and pigs and then failed in humans — different immune responses, different healing, different scale. Human trials aren't expected until around 2028. There is no peer-reviewed efficacy publication yet. This is a candidate to watch, not a treatment to expect. But I want to tell you why it still moves me. The whole strategy is elegant. It doesn't fight the body — it borrows the body's own oldest regenerative wisdom, the biology that builds an entire human being from scratch, and points it at a broken heart. It's cell-free, so it sidesteps the rejection and manufacturing nightmares that have stalled stem-cell approaches. It's stable at room temperature and delivered during an operation we already perform. Practical, not sci-fi. And it's the frontier I've been writing about for months, arriving from an unexpected place: the shift from managing damage to reversing it. Gene editing for cholesterol. Cell therapy for diabetes. Enzymes that erase arterial aging. And now, maybe, a gel that teaches the heart to remember how to heal. For my entire career, "the muscle is gone" has been a sentence with no appeal. A 25-year-old may be writing the appeal. Science with an Argentine accent — born in the same country that gave the world the bypass. Worth watching closely.