Wednesday, September 2, 2026 · No. 19
20 articles · ~4h 36m read · 7 sections
A personal morning paper, assembled daily; the selection is the reader's, the words are the authors'.
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Top Stories
Absurd Adventure And Amygdalectomy Advocacy
Scott Alexander · Astral Codex Ten · astralcodexten.com · 21 min
Daniel Böttger recounts his brain cancer treatment, which removed his right amygdala and part of his temporal cortex. He describes the resulting loss of visceral fear and suffering, a cured depression, and a 7-point IQ gain, and argues amygdalectomy deserves reconsideration for mental health.
FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses
John Gruber · daringfireball.net · krebsonsecurity.com · 9 min
On the dark web, a service called Nexus is offering more than 153 million scanned identity documents from U.S. and Canadian residents, and the FBI's New Orleans field office has opened an inquiry into the apparent source: Louisiana verification company idscan.net. Timestamps on the stolen images align with Hertz rental-car check-ins, including two family members whose IDs were captured seconds apart.
He died in a sweltering house. Why doesn't his death record show it?
Alejandra Borunda · News : NPR · npr.org · 8 min
An NPR and Boston University investigation shows heat kills roughly 9,000 Americans annually — about five times the official count — because its role often goes unrecorded. The report traces Adam Willson's death in a sweltering Tucson house, where his genetic disorder made him heat-sensitive; his death certificate lists only "unknown natural causes."
Tech & Engineering
Maki Majima: Migration files and Git do not mix
Planet PostgreSQL · postgr.es · 7 min
Migration directories are a second, append-only version-control system inside the repository, and because they are event logs rather than mutable state files, Git's review, conflict, revert, and checkout protections silently fail for them. Declarative snapshots like schema.rb or Prisma's definitions only patch the mismatch; the real safeguard must come from drift checks against live databases, since the repo states only intended schema, never actual state.
Gülçin Yıldırım Jelínek: New system views in PostgreSQL 19
Planet PostgreSQL · postgr.es · 12 min
PostgreSQL 19 brings four new system views, and Gülçin Yıldırım Jelínek tours each with live SQL examples. pg_stat_lock tracks lock waits and fast-path overflows (with a demo using 140 partitions), pg_stat_recovery offers a consistent snapshot of standby replay state, pg_stat_autovacuum_scores exposes the new autovacuum priority scores, and pg_dsm_registry_allocations lists dynamic shared-memory allocations. She also notes the default max_locks_per_transaction rise to 128.
How we could save petabytes of cache storage with Zstandard and Pingora
Aashi Patel · CloudFlare · blog.cloudflare.com · 7 min
Cloudflare's Cache Transcoding prototype encodes eligible compressible text with Zstandard before disk, keeping bytes compressed across Tiered Cache and decoding only on the client-facing hop. Initial testing shrinks eligible assets to about a third of their original on-disk size at a CPU cost of a few percent; media and precompressed content are skipped.
Nvidia snuck me into a room to show off DLSS 5 in person, and it's somehow beautiful, ugly, impressive, and troubling all at the same time
PC Gamer · pcgamer.com · 9 min
In a private Gamescom demo, Nvidia shows DLSS 5 is about developer control: two intensity sliders, per-object masking, and switchable AI models. NBA 2K27 at low settings looks impressively realistic with no ghosting, but maxed-out model B turns characters into AI-beauty-filter versions. Nvidia estimates a 50-60% performance hit, and the reporter leaves conflicted about AI-enhanced gaming.
Science & Space
Schizophrenia’s Cruel Roulette Wheel
Kristen French · Nautilus · nautil.us · 14 min
Consuelo Walss-Bass, a psychiatric geneticist, lost her sister Paty to schizophrenia while four other siblings escaped it. In a conversation about her book Why My Sister, she explores the 287 genomic loci tied to the illness, the absence of a biological test, and her hope that brain organoids will finally explain why some are struck and others spared.
AI & Machine Learning
I trained a small transformer in 1.5hrs and it beats many LLMs
porridgeraisin · Hacker News: Best · mvakde.github.io · 16 min
Training a transformer from scratch in 1.5 hours on a single RTX 5090, a solo researcher reaches 44% on ARC-1 and 7% on ARC-2 — matching TRM/HRM with $0.67 lifetime compute. The write-up credits modern architecture choices (SwiGLU, RMSNorm, 3D RoPE, NorMuon) and argues training on eval inputs is legitimate transduction rather than leakage, citing ablations and rebutting critics.
Ed Zitron’s AI Prediction Track Record
John Gruber · daringfireball.net · danluu.com · 59 min
A data-driven scorecard of Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions finds them consistently wrong in both outcome and reasoning. Meta, Google, and Microsoft all grew revenue and profit, contradicting Zitron's 'dying company' claims; a spreadsheet error double-counts Anthropic months. Failed calls from 2024–2025 include Cursor's $60B exit.
LLMs and self-referentiality
Scott · Shtetl-Optimized · scottaaronson.blog · 4 min
Against the Hofstadter–Penrose idea that intelligence requires self-reference, the essay argues LLMs reached conversational mastery without any strange loops in the stack. Their talk about themselves emerged as a free byproduct of pretraining and universality. The author sees prediction and compression as the vindicated route and buries explicit self-referentiality among history’s classic wrong ideas.
Culture & Essays
Going Up and Going In
Brian Laidlaw · Longreads · longreads.com · 30 min
Brian Laidlaw's memoir excerpt traces his shift from a careful child to a climber soloing the Second and Third Flatirons, guided by Anne Dufourmantelle's philosophy that risk is about life, not death. Conversations with extreme athletes who lost friends to 'going in' frame the stakes, and his new ambition targets the First.
For Marlon James, Being Incurious Is a Writer’s Biggest Sin
Electric Literature · electricliterature.com · 11 min
Marlon James discusses his new novel 'The Disappearers,' set in Jamaica after a brutal homophobic attack, and calls curiosity the one quality a writer cannot lack. He describes his process: reading through writer's block, sitting down to write daily without inspiration, and never quite knowing when a book has ended. He also notes his 20-year-old bell-bottoms finally came back in style.
Running 1,200 Miles Across Great Britain
Guest Writer · iRunFar.com · 11 min
From Land's End to John o' Groats, a mental performance coach and former pro baseball player covers 1,200 miles on trails in 35 days, self-supported, burning 8,000 calories a day. He describes injuries, night sweats, and the mindset—raising money for the Homeless World Cup, treating each day as 'just a jog,' staying present—that made the journey possible.
‘I feel like I’m grieving’: staff on the devastating fallout of widespread layoffs at Xbox
Keith Stuart · Technology | The Guardian · theguardian.com · 8 min
Microsoft's Xbox reset eliminates 1,600 jobs immediately; laid-off staff recall two-minute Teams calls, muted cameras, and instant Slack farewells. Unionized Bethesda and ZeniMax studios continue bargaining, while Id Software loses 136 employees—a majority—reportedly becoming a 'support studio.' Workers describe grief, depression, and the price of losing decades of institutional knowledge.
More nothing now
Justin Neuman · Aeon · aeon.co · 13 min
After his children turn Catan into an invented world of islands and bridges, a professor contrasts competitive agôn with free paidia. Drawing on Huizinga, Winnicott and Nguyen's 'value capture', he argues that metrics now colonise leisure, and that unstructured play — walking, crafting, improvising — boosts divergent thinking by 60 percent and deserves cultivation as the ancient virtue eutrapelia.
Niche Corner
AnkiDroid: Google Play no longer allowing Open Collective donation link
hexa555 · Hacker News: Best · github.com · 20 min
Google Play is rejecting AnkiDroid updates because the app’s donation link leads to Open Source Collective, a 501(c)(6) non-profit that Google does not accept as equivalent to a 501(c)(3) charity. The volunteer-run flashcard app, with over 10 million installs, will be removed from the store on September 11 except in India and Russia unless it removes the link.
Fujifilm users can now send film simulations to their camera from their iPhone
Mitchell Clark · Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com) · dpreview.com · 7 min
Two new iOS apps promise to end the tedious manual entry of Fujifilm film-simulation recipes: Fuji X Weekly and beta app FujiShare both sync recipes from an iPhone to recent cameras over USB using PTP. Fuji X Weekly’s paid tier pushes entire recipe sets; FujiShare offers free multi-recipe packs. Caveats: unsupported transfers risk voiding the warranty and compatibility starts with the X-T3/X-T30.
From the Blogroll
Russ Allbery: Review: Too Like the Lightning
Planet Debian · eyrie.org · 10 min
Russ Allbery gives Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota opener a 7/10, praising its social world-building and cognitive estrangement but balking at a global politics that keeps shrinking to a handful of characters and at Mycroft's obsequious narration. He also finds the gender-pronoun mischief pointed but exhausting, and warns the book ends abruptly mid-journey.
Git Submodules as a Package Manager
Andrew Nesbitt · nesbitt.io · 8 min
Git submodules carry the package-manager pieces—gitlink as lockfile, .gitmodules as manifest—but their pins break when a URL changes, worktrees require --force when submodules are present, and recursive clones have enabled remote code execution through CVEs like 2022-39253 and 2024-32002. The comparison with cargo and pnpm highlights what's missing: a shared object cache, branch recursion defaults, and version-range syntax.