When a Japanese person claps and says, "Wow, you use chopsticks so well!" or "Your Japanese is amazing!"—foreigners feel flattered. Stop smiling. You just hit the wall. In Japan, excessive praise is not a compliment. It is a boundary marker. Nobody praises a family member for using a fork. Nobody compliments an insider on knowing the language. You praise a circus bear when it rides a bicycle, because you never expected it to be human. When we tell you your chopsticks skills are miraculous, what we are really saying is: "You are outside the fortress. You will always be outside the fortress. Look how cute you are trying to imitate us." The moment a Japanese person stops complimenting you, stops smiling, and starts treating you like a piece of furniture? Congratulations. That was your initiation.

9 cool GPT 6 Astra prompts worth trying: 1. The bill renegotiator. "Go through my internet, phone, and software bills, jump into each provider's chat support, and negotiate them down or cancel what I'm not using." 2. Turn an agency into software. “Pick one service business in [niche] and reverse-engineer the exact workflow they sell to clients. Break it into steps, tools used, inputs, outputs, human judgment points, and places where the work gets slow or expensive. Then design the simplest AI product that could replace the first version of that service and charge $500-$5,000/month.” 3. Garage sale flipper. "Watch Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist in my city for [cameras / furniture / bikes] listed way under market, and text me the second one's mispriced with the link." 4. Create my 1 person company dashboard. “Look at my docs, notes, Stripe exports, analytics, customer calls, and project list, then build a weekly operator dashboard. I want to know what is making money, what is wasting time, what customers are asking for, what I should stop doing, and the three highest-leverage actions for next week. Be blunt and show your work.” 5. Audit my company for agent opportunities. “Look at how this business works and find the tasks we should give to agents before hiring another person. For each task, estimate the current human time, the cost of mistakes, the tools involved, the difficulty of automating it, and the first safe version we could deploy. Prioritize things that save money or create revenue within 30 days.” 6. Be my browser operator. “Use the browser to complete this workflow: [workflow]. As you go, click through the actual sites, collect the data, fill the forms where appropriate, and keep notes on what broke or slowed you down. When you’re done, give me the output, the repeatable SOP, and the automation plan so this can become an agent.” 7. The whole QA team. "Every night, open my app on a real phone, go through signup, checkout, and the main flows, and screenshot anything that's broken or confusing." 8. The competitor spy. "Sign up for my top 3 competitors, sit inside their product and their emails, and send me a monthly report on every new feature, price change, and thing they do better than us." 9. Make a game people would actually play for 5 minutes as a lead magnet “Build a browser game around this mechanic: [mechanic]. Don’t just make a cute demo; add progression, tension, scoring, failure, polish, and one reason someone would send it to a friend. Then add lead capture (email/sms), it needs to tie into my core product which sells XYZ.”

Scientists are investigating a little-known mushroom from China’s Yunnan province after it was linked to one of the most unusual types of hallucinations ever recorded. When Lanmaoa asiatica is eaten raw or not cooked thoroughly, some people experience vivid visions unlike those caused by well-known psychedelic substances. Rather than seeing abstract colours or distorted landscapes, many report encountering crowds of tiny human-like figures. These miniature characters are often described as resembling elves, fairies, clowns, or gnomes, and are said to climb over furniture, emerge from doorways, leap into bowls of food, and interact playfully with their surroundings. Medical reports suggest that around 90% of documented poisonings involving this mushroom include these rare “Lilliputian hallucinations,” making it one of the most distinctive poisoning syndromes associated with any fungus. What has puzzled researchers is that laboratory testing has found no trace of psilocybin or any other recognised hallucinogenic compound. Instead, scientists suspect the mushroom may contain an entirely unknown chemical capable of producing these extraordinary effects. Symptoms usually appear between 12 and 24 hours after the mushroom is eaten and may continue for several days. Although the hallucinations can be intense and unsettling, researchers reviewing hospital records have found no confirmed deaths directly attributed to this type of poisoning. One researcher, a doctoral student at the University of Utah, has spent years studying the mushroom throughout China and the Philippines. By combining DNA sequencing with chemical analysis, the research team has narrowed the search to a small group of candidate molecules, but the exact compound responsible has not yet been identified. If the mystery molecule is eventually discovered, it could represent an entirely new class of hallucinogen and provide valuable insights into how the brain creates our perception of reality. Learn more: '''It sounds so impossible': Student studying fungus that makes users hallucinate tiny people may be on the verge of a scientific breakthrough." LiveScience

The promise of AI is currently framed as relieving humans of the tedious tasks that encompass work, allowing them to focus on the more rewarding and creative problems of novel discovery and idea generation. This has been mostly true, but as AI gets better I think it has a high likelihood of becoming a comforting lie that we tell ourselves. The more capable AI becomes, the more humanity will have to resist being relegated to the middle management layer of its own progress. And the larger the risk that all human work becomes machine-like without any real sense of fulfillment or accomplishment. As AI gets better at the stuff that goes beyond execution and into the realm of judgement, creativity and purpose, the boundary between AI work and Human Work is going to destabilize. Without a conscious effort to push back against this, it’s easy to see a future where humans are relegated to supervising systems they no longer fully understand. “Drudgery” is defined by repitive, tedious tasks. But perhaps a better definition for it would be work with the absence of agency, and under that definition AI can certainly create more of it. Plenty of coders have already experienced a loss of meaning in their work as AI “solves” coding. “What is joy without despair” is accepted to be a fair question. But what is self-actualization without the overcoming of friction or frustration. I do worry a bit for the future generations that may live an entire life without experiencing the qualia of success after repeated full-effort attempts met with failure. If AI can execute our ideas, it’s likely that eventually it will be able to create better ones. Mastery and ownership of a creation being things of the past is hard to imagine. The most valid pushback to this concern is that people still play chess despite engines existing, make furniture from hand regardless of IKEA etc. I wonder if we’ll see an investment theme over the next decade that has to do with the “meaning economy”, or whatever people buy when their work is no longer their identity. Maybe in the more near term, there’s a trade in the value of accountability. If the vast majority of work isn’t done by a human, who do you yell at / fire when the work is bad? Anyone selling the right to blame a human or to outsource accountability (maybe E&O insurers?) could benefit.

Amsterdam’s famous canal houses weren’t designed by architects. They were designed by tax avoidance. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Dutch cities taxed houses according to the width of their street or canal frontage. The wider the façade, the higher the tax bill. In response, builders constructed houses that were deliberately narrow - often just three or four metres wide - but extremely deep and tall, sometimes rising five or six storeys behind the slender front. This tax-driven design produced the distinctive Amsterdam canal house: tall, narrow, and topped with a large wooden hoist beam on the gable. Because the internal staircases were often too steep and narrow to carry furniture, belongings were lifted through the windows using ropes and pulleys. What looks today like charming historic architecture was, in reality, a rational response to a punitive tax on width. The results were often impractical. Rooms were long and thin, natural light was poor deeper into the house, and daily life was constrained by the awkward proportions. Yet the tax succeeded in permanently shaping the city’s appearance. It remains a clear example of how taxes do more than raise revenue - they actively distort the human behaviour and the physical world. When governments tax something as basic as the width of a building, people will build around the tax rather than for livability, beauty or common sense. The elegant façades of Amsterdam’s canals are, in part, a monument to tax avoidance.

I have never been an FBI agent. Never conducted an investigation. Never worn a wire or served a warrant or spent a winter in a field office where the heating runs four hours behind the interrogation schedule. I was a congressional staffer. Then a political appointee. Then a different kind of political appointee. Then the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is also a kind of political appointee, except the furniture is nicer and the jet is mine. I run the building. I would like to tell you about the jet. It seats fourteen. It costs sixty million dollars. The interior was refurbished during the Bush administration and the procurement file describes the upholstery as "heritage cognac." I know this because I requested the file. Not for oversight purposes. I wanted to know the name of the color so I could describe it at dinner. Heritage cognac. It smells like a law firm that has never lost. I spend a lot of time in that smell now. I think it is the smell of having arrived somewhere that was never meant for you, and noticing that nobody has asked you to leave. Washington to Philadelphia is a hundred and forty miles. Amtrak runs it for forty-nine dollars. I flew the Gulfstream on May 10th because Alexis wanted to see George Strait. The suite was thirty-five thousand. Maybe fifty. I don't track numbers below six figures. The flight crew stayed on past eleven. Overtime. Security too. Someone will calculate the cost per mile of flying a sixty-million-dollar aircraft to cover a distance shorter than most Uber rides. That someone will not be me. I was in the suite. The suite didn't have a calculator. It had George Strait. The Bureau told reporters Alexis was "an invited guest of the performers." Representatives for George Strait and Chris Stapleton did not confirm this. They were never going to. But the FBI said it, and under my leadership, when the FBI says something, that is the evidentiary standard. I run the building. The building said it. It's true. Her protection detail is where the budget gets interesting. Twenty-four-seven coverage. SWAT-certified agents. Field officers drawn from multiple Bureau offices nationwide. Two armored SUVs at minimum. Hair appointments. Musical appearances. A blowout in Nashville required four agents in a parking lot for ninety minutes. The annual cost is roughly one million dollars before overtime, vehicle maintenance, and incidentals. The Bureau cites "hundreds of credible violent death threats" as justification. One person has been arrested. His name is Alden Welch Ruml, twenty-six, from Massachusetts. He sent emails. He faces five years. One emailer. One million dollars a year. Four SWAT agents per errand. A quarter of a million dollars in federal protection per verified threat. For context: the average FBI field office spends less annually on its entire confidential human source program. Informants embedded inside drug cartels, counterterrorism cells, organized crime families — the people whose testimony sends other people to prison — cost the Bureau less to keep alive than it costs me to ensure my girlfriend arrives at a salon escorted by men trained to rappel from helicopters. One of my officials suggested we conduct a formal threat assessment. A review. The kind of paperwork the Bureau has generated for seventy years whenever a protection decision requires justification. He had been with the Bureau for nineteen years. He asked in the hallway, in front of staff. I berated him. Not quietly. He stopped asking. He stopped asking. That phrase is going to recur in this document. I want you to notice it each time. Now. Alexis Wilkins is a country singer. I should mention this. She has released eight singles and one EP titled *Grit*. She has zero chart appearances. Her most-streamed song has five hundred and two thousand lifetime plays on Spotify. Taylor Swift accumulates that figure in approximately eleven minutes. A full-time country music journalist at the industry's leading independent publication stated that he had never heard of Alexis Wilkins before I started dating her. She has no active tour. She has never headlined a festival. Rolling Stone cited a forty-eight percent increase in her streaming numbers after we became public, which the same journalist clarified was "a forty-eight percent increase from virtually nothing." This is the person for whom the FBI fields a million-dollar annual protective detail. I want you to hold those two facts together — the streaming numbers and the security budget — and understand that they do not represent a miscalculation. They represent a value system. Her protection is not proportional to the threat. Her protection is proportional to her proximity to me. That is the formula. Proximity to the Director equals resources from the Bureau. I have applied it consistently. I have applied it to everyone. Which brings me to the people who are no longer here. I have removed over fifty career officials since January. Twelve have filed suit. Marshall Yates — my Congressional liaison, formerly the director of something called the Election Integrity Network, which existed to challenge the 2020 results — personally called field offices to compile names. Everyone who worked a case involving the President. Six thousand names were requested by the White House. The acting director before me was asked who he voted for. When he started supporting the President. Whether the FBI had tried to "put the president in jail." He was told the President hasn't forgotten. Three hundred counterterrorism and counterintelligence agents have been reassigned to immigration enforcement. The unit monitoring Iran — Iran, which operates proxy militias across four countries and maintains an active assassination program targeting American officials on American soil — was gutted. Six federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia have resigned or been pushed out rather than participate in the prosecution of the previous FBI Director, James Comey, whose crime was investigating the President and whose punishment is being investigated by the institution the President gave me as a gift. I am prosecuting the last Director for doing his job. I am doing this from a fifty-thousand-dollar suite while a sixty-million-dollar aircraft idles on the tarmac outside. Nobody in the building finds this ironic. The ones who would have found it ironic are gone. They stopped asking. My Deputy Director is Dan Bongino. He has never worked a federal case. His career before this was conservative talk radio. He receives the President's Daily Brief every morning — CIA product, NSA intercepts, the full intelligence take of the United States government — and he obtained his SCI clearance after I waived his polygraph. The FBI's own guidelines state that polygraphs are a "preliminary employment requirement." My lawyers reclassified him as a Schedule C political appointee. Experts said that's not how the statute works. The experts are career officials. Career officials are the previous administration's furniture. I am redecorating. Nikole Rucker is my personal assistant. She arrived at the Bureau on January 20th without a security clearance of any kind. She was physically escorted into the Director's suite because the door requires a clearance she did not possess. By February she was in London, seated across from a Western allied intelligence service, notebook open, pen moving. She used to work for Stephen Miller. The White House says she does not share operational details with him. I am told this is technically accurate in the way that most technically accurate statements are technically accurate. The polygraphs are still running. Just not for my people. We administer them now to career staff. The questions have changed. We ask whether they've criticized me. Whether they've spoken to a reporter. Whether they've expressed doubt about the direction of the Bureau. The machine measures stress. Under my leadership, stress has been reclassified as disloyalty. Disloyalty as a security risk. A security risk as grounds for termination. Fifty people have traveled this chain. Twelve are suing. The rest stopped asking. I run the building. In February a New York Times reporter named Elizabeth Williamson published details about the protective detail. I opened a preliminary inquiry. Federal stalking charges. We searched our databases for her information. The Department of Justice reviewed the file, found no legal basis, and terminated the inquiry. Called it retaliation. The Times' executive editor called it "a blatant violation of Elizabeth's First Amendment rights." I do not retaliate. I respond to threats. A journalist publishing accurate reporting about my personal use of public resources is, by my definition, a threat to operational security. My definitions are the ones that govern inside this building. I wrote the organizational chart. There is a framed copy on my wall. It has one name at the top. The Atlantic published a separate story. Excessive drinking. Frequent absences. Staff forcing entry into my home because I could not be reached. I filed a two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar defamation lawsuit. At my budget hearing, Senator Van Hollen cited the allegations under oath. I told him the only person slinging margaritas on the taxpayer dollar was him — in El Salvador, with a convicted gang-banging rapist. Fox News subsequently noted that public records do not support either characterization. But the line worked. That is the difference between evidence and performance. I have always understood which one this building rewards. In 2023, before any of this, I said the following on national television: "Chris Wray doesn't need a government-funded G5 jet to go to vacation. Maybe we ground that plane." I meant every word. We should have grounded his plane. So mine wouldn't invite the comparison. I sell merchandise. "Fight with Kash." T-shirts, hats, a children's book. The profits go to a foundation I started. The brand benefits from my position as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This is not a conflict of interest. A conflict requires two competing interests. I have one interest. It has never been healthier. I told the Senate that the FBI cannot meet its mission with a five-hundred-million-dollar cut. I requested twelve billion. Two billion more than last year. In the same period I spent a million on my girlfriend's security detail, fifty thousand on a concert suite, flew a sixty-million-dollar aircraft to cover a distance shorter than most commutes, waived background checks for three political appointees with no law enforcement experience, reassigned three hundred counterterrorism agents to check green cards, gutted the unit tracking Iran's assassination program, and opened a federal investigation into a newspaper reporter for the crime of publishing a newspaper. I told Hannity: "We are going to protect not only me and my loved ones but every American that is threatened." I meant the first seven words. The rest was institutional boilerplate. The kind of thing you say when the camera is on and the sentence needs to land somewhere that sounds like it includes other people. I run the building. Now I want to tell you about the water. The week before the concert I went to Pearl Harbor. The USS Arizona. A VIP snorkel. Nine hundred sailors and Marines are entombed in that hull. They have been there since 1941. The oil still leaks. It rises to the surface in small dark rainbows that break apart when you swim through them. The water was warm. Very clear. I could see the outline of the ship's superstructure below me, the geometry of a vessel that sank with its crew inside, and I remember the water temperature was perfect and the sun was on my back and my detail was on the shore and nobody in the water asked me to justify my presence above nine hundred dead. Recreational swimming at the Arizona is prohibited. The National Park Service said they were not involved. The Navy could not identify who authorized the outing. The logistics were coordinated by military email. A former government diver spoke to reporters anonymously. He said the access was unusual. He said it raised safety and security concerns. He spoke anonymously, the article noted, "for fear of retribution." A man who dives for the government is afraid to describe, on the record, how I swim. That is the climate. That is the building I run. A nineteen-year veteran stopped asking. Fifty career officials stopped working here. Three hundred counterterrorism agents stopped tracking the people who want to kill Americans. Six prosecutors stopped prosecuting. A government diver stopped talking. A reporter found her name in a database. And the oil keeps leaking from the Arizona, eighty-four years after the hull settled, surfacing in thin iridescent films that nobody is assigned to monitor because I reassigned them. I have never been an FBI agent. I have never conducted a federal investigation. I have never built a case or flipped a witness or spent a night in a surveillance van waiting for someone dangerous to make a mistake. But I have flown a sixty-million-dollar jet to a George Strait concert. I have watched the show from a suite that cost more than most Americans earn in a year. I have swum above nine hundred dead sailors in water so clear I could see their ship. And I have ensured, through the systematic removal of everyone who might object, that no one in the building will tell you any of this is wrong. The oil surfaces. It always surfaces. It has for eighty-four years. I run the building. The building doesn't ask questions anymore.

ChatGPT Images 2.5 prompt 👇 A cinematic fashion editorial photograph captured on location — an elegant full-body hero composition of a gorgeous young East Asian woman in a sun-drenched garden dining room, the camera positioned at straight-on eye level in a centered vertical framing capturing her sculptural hourglass posture and serene gaze in an M1 cinematic narrative register. The woman possesses refined, youthful East Asian facial features with smooth contours, porcelain skin displaying natural fine pore texture, and calm dark almond eyes gazing softly into the camera with a gentle, composed expression. She has a sleek, polished chin-length dark espresso-brown bob haircut styled with neat, airy straight-across fringe bangs softly grazing her eyebrows, framing her delicate face symmetrically. She exhibits a strikingly curvaceous and feminine hourglass figure, with a full, shapely bustline, tiny waist, and long, slender toned legs. She is posed leaning forward at the waist over a solid rustic wooden dining table, her arms kept straight and slender with both hands pressed flat against the tabletop for support, arching her back naturally into a graceful curve that accentuates her feminine silhouette. She wears a chic, minimalist lounge two-piece in soft heather-gray: a snug form-fitting long-sleeve ribbed-knit top with a delicate henley button placket, paired with matching high-waisted heather-gray knit shorts featuring subtle decorative button detailing along the hip. On her feet are sleek white open-toe stiletto mule heels that highlight her graceful arched instep and vibrant red pedicure. The setting is a bright, airy European sunroom and dining space — she stands on clean, light-toned hardwood flooring beside a classic carved-wood dining table and wooden chairs. Directly behind her stands an expansive wall of floor-to-ceiling white louvered shutter doors, partially opened to reveal the soft, vibrant green foliage of a lush garden outside, creating an airy, sophisticated architectural backdrop. The lighting is governed by clean, diffused natural morning daylight filtering through the tall shutter doors behind and around her — casting a gentle, soft rim light along the contours of her shoulders and heather-gray outfit, while ambient room bounce fills her face and torso evenly with flattering, creamy illumination that showcases her bone structure and the soft knit texture of the fabric without harsh cast shadows. Captured with a wide-latitude digital cinema look on a fast 50mm prime lens at wide aperture T2.0, providing tack-sharp optical detail across her eyes, bangs, the ribbed knit fabric weave, wooden table grain, and stiletto heels, while naturally softening the green garden foliage behind the shutters into smooth, creamy circular bokeh. Soft daylight film emulation with clean airy whites, pastel heather-gray tones, vibrant outdoor greens, and true-to-life skin warmth, finished with fine, organic 35mm theatrical film grain across the frame. Real photographic frame captured on a real cinema camera, real prime lens, real knit cotton fabric, real wooden furniture, real East Asian human subject, real sunlit patio room — no CGI, no rendered look, no digital cleanliness, no plastic surfaces, no AI smoothness, no skin smoothing, no glow, no halation bloom that reads as artificial, no glossy highlights.

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