Going shot for shot with the Miami Heat in a frenzied atmosphere on Friday night at Spectrum Center, the Hornets were stricken by a bundle of fourth-quarter turnovers, which ended up being the difference in a 128-120 home loss. 📝: | @LunazulTequila

Superstar AI researchers are paid >10× more than their frontier lab colleagues, and >100× more than most postdocs. Why? The naive explanation is that this is just due to differences in researcher quality. But in a new essay, @ansonwhho argues that this is very incomplete.

The Crucifixion by @texyouthsummit chaplain @chetcollins7 Matthew 27: 22-66 Friday morning around 9 AM, while thousands filled Jerusalem preparing for the Sabbath and festivities, the lamb of God was being crucified for the sins of the world on the outside of the city, on a lonely hill called Golgotha. Some of his disciples were hiding for fear, women that had followed Jesus stood afar off, and Roman soldiers mocked him and gambled for his robe at his feet. For the next several hours, Jesus endured the agonizing suffering of the cross, a death that ultimately leads to asphyxiation. Prior to the crucifixion, He had already been brutally beaten—receiving the lashes of a scourging whip that tore His flesh open. His beard had been plucked, and a crown of thorns had been pressed into His head. As He was mocked and humiliated, Isaiah had prophesied that His appearance would be so marred that He would be unrecognizable ( Isa 52:14). For many hours Jesus suffered; Suddenly an eerie darkness covered all the the land for three hours. An earthquake shook the ground and split rocks in two. In the midst of that darkness and suffering, Jesus cried out in Aramaic, words recorded in Matthew: “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?”—which means, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”  In that moment, He bore not only physical agony, but also the weight of humanity’s sin. As the sinless Son of God, He experienced the depth of human suffering and the separation that sin brings. Then, after declaring, “It is finished,” Jesus cried out again and gave up his spirit and died. At that very moment, the veil in the temple—the thick curtain separating the Holy of Holies from the rest of the temple—was torn from top to bottom. This signified that through His death, Jesus became the once-for-all sacrifice, opening the way for all people to have access to God through Him (Heb. 10:19, 20). Those who witnessed these events were deeply shaken. The Roman centurion, who was overseeing the crucifixion along with the soldiers under his command, observed  the darkness, the earthquake, and all that had taken place. In response, they feared greatly and said, “Truly this was the Son of God” (Matthew 27:54). And then, in a remarkable and often overlooked detail, Matthew records that after Jesus’ resurrection, the tombs were opened and many bodies of the saints—likely Old Testament believers—arose and went into the holy city of Jerusalem appearing to many (Matt 27:52, 53). All of these events surrounding the crucifixion and resurrection point to the central truth: the resurrection confirms the validity of everything Jesus accomplished on the cross. His death was not the end, but the fulfillment of His mission—to bear our sins, to provide righteousness, and to open the way for eternal life with God.

In 2022, OpenAI researchers found something that broke every rule of machine learning. Their tiny model trained for 10,000 epochs. It learned absolutely nothing. Validation accuracy was dead stuck at 50%. Then at epoch 12,000, without warning, it jumped to 99%. This phenomenon is called "Grokking". And in 2026, it might be the most important discovery in AI nobody talks about. Neural networks can train for thousands of cycles without seeming to learn anything useful. Then, in a single epoch, they suddenly achieve near-perfect generalization. What started as a weird training glitch has become a foundational insight into how models truly learn. We’ve always been told: “If validation loss stops improving for a few hundred epochs, stop training.” Early stopping was the golden rule. Grokking says the exact opposite: Keep going. The model might look completely stuck, but real understanding is quietly forming under the hood. During that long, dead plateau, the machine isn't idle. It's doing deep internal work: - Circuits form, dissolve, and reform. - Spurious correlations get pruned away. - Weight patterns crystallize around true underlying rules. - The model shifts from brute-force memorization to genuine comprehension. It’s the machine version of a human “aha!” moment—a long, agonizing buildup followed by sudden clarity. Take modular addition as a real-world example. Researchers fed a small model just 30% of all possible examples. At epoch 500, it hit 100% training accuracy but stayed at 50% validation. It had memorized the test answers, but couldn't solve a new problem. At epoch 10,000, it still sat at 50% validation. It looked utterly hopeless. Then at epoch 12,000, it instantly shot to 99%. It didn't just guess right; it had grokked the actual mathematical rule. This explains the hidden mechanics behind the massive reasoning models we use today. When you see modern reinforcement learning or long-context reasoning models suddenly "click" after looking stuck, you are witnessing grokking at scale. Massive training runs aren’t wasteful, they are deliberately forcing the AI to stop memorizing and start thinking. And we are learning to induce this at inference time. Extended Chain-of-Thought prompts that force a model to think for thousands of tokens, self-consistency loops, and verification passes are all designed to do one thing: teach the model to grok your problem on the fly. The big philosophical takeaway is brutal for our short attention spans. Learning isn’t smooth. It isn’t gradual. It is discontinuous. Models, and humans, can stay “dumb” for ages, right up until they suddenly understand everything.

Brazil Sugarcane’s Embarrassing Turn: Loud Critics Now Hoping for Worldwide Misery For years, Brazil’s sugarcane mills loudly denounced corn-based ethanol producers as inferior, unsustainable, or somehow unworthy. How times have changed. Today, one barely needs to search to find just two major corn ethanol players generating more profit than the entire Brazilian sugarcane sector combined. Yet here we are: while a few forward-thinking mills have quietly adapted, the great majority remain trapped in a pathetic cycle of wishful thinking. They pin their hopes on global chaos - skyrocketing crude prices, fertilizer shortages, or convenient geopolitical wars - to magically restore their lost edge. This is not strategy. It is strategic surrender dressed up as optimism. Hoping the rest of the world suffers so you can survive is not merely fragile; it is embarrassingly low-level behavior for an industry that once prided itself on superiority. The Delicious Irony of Praying for Higher Oil Prices The contradiction reaches peak absurdity with crude oil. Higher prices do not kindly anoint sugarcane ethanol (or sugar, for that matter) while punishing everyone else. They slam diesel costs through the roof—precisely the fuel that powers harvesting, trucking, and distribution for sugarcane mills. Meanwhile, those same high diesel prices make it far more attractive for farmers to sell corn locally rather than export it, handing corn ethanol plants a stronger domestic position right in Brazil’s own backyard. On a wider scale, prolonged high energy prices simply crush demand. Struggling consuming countries cut back further, and governments—ever eager for votes—shower even more subsidies on local producers, be they sugarcane or beet. The mills cheer for turbulence abroad, only to watch it boomerang straight into their own costs and shrinking markets. And it gets even better. The very spike in crude, fuel, and fertilizer prices these mills are desperately wishing for would fuel broader inflation, prompting banks to aggressively increase lending costs and widen credit spreads. With the largest sugarcane producer already flirting with bankruptcy, risk-averse banks will be even less forgiving. If there is one thing Brazilian sugarcane mills possess more than anyone else, it is massive debt. The resulting surge in financing costs would brutally squeeze margins and threaten the survival of many over-leveraged operations. Cheering for the conditions that could sink you is a special kind of financial masochism. The Real Fight: Costs, Innovation, and Brutal Market Reality Instead of burning money on yet another trip to New York, these executives would do far better to stay home and fix what actually matters: slashing production costs, lifting yields, squeezing more revenue from every ton, and fiercely protecting their domestic turf. The electric vehicle wave is no longer coming — it has arrived. In the first quarter of 2026, EVs already represented over 66% of imports. The future of liquid fuels is shrinking faster than many care to admit, and denial will not slow it down. And while everyone obsesses over oil prices and EVs, an even quieter tsunami is building: GLP-1 receptor agonists — the Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro class of drugs. Almost no one in the Brazilian sugarcane industry wants to talk about them, but they are exploding in adoption. These appetite-suppressing wonders are slashing cravings for sugar, sweets, and sugary drinks (with users cutting sugary beverage intake by up to 65%), driving down overall calorie consumption, and reshaping food demand worldwide. In a world with high obesity and diabetes rates, wider access and falling prices will deliver a direct slap to sugar demand. While mills dream of higher crude prices saving them, GLP-1s are silently eating their lunch — one suppressed sweet tooth at a time. Cheering for a selective El Niño is equally delusional. Reality check: El Niño years like 2015 and 2023 produced some of the largest sugarcane crops on record, flooding the market with volume and hammering prices. Hoping for convenient climate chaos is not a strategy — it’s Russian roulette with your own balance sheet. Discipline Beats Distraction Every Time Of course, there is undeniable charm in flying to New York, sipping overpriced wine with fancy labels in elegant restaurants, and pretending the world still revolves around your spreadsheets/costs. For a fleeting moment, one can feel like a prince. The market, however, could not care less about your feelings or your frequent-flyer status. It rewards cold efficiency, superior performance, and relentless innovation — the very things the corn ethanol industry has delivered while others complained. The path forward is brutally simple: stop cheering for global misfortune and start building a genuinely competitive, adaptable business. Resilience is not found in desperate prayers for higher oil or foreign crises. It is created through discipline, focus, and the courage to face reality head-on. Those who grasp this will shape whatever future the industry still has. The rest will simply watch from the sidelines, wondering why the world refused to cooperate with their fantasies.