Links
4 stars
He Leaked the Secrets of a Southeast Asian Scam Compound. Then He Had to Get Out Alive | WIRED
25-minute read
“Hello. I’m currently working inside a major crypto romance scam operation based in the Golden Triangle,” it began. “I am a computer engineer being forced to work here under a contract.”
“I’ve collected internal evidence of how the scam works—step by step,” the message continued. “I am still inside the compound, so I cannot risk direct exposure. But I want to help shut this down.”
I knew only vaguely that the Golden Triangle was a lawless jungle region in Southeast Asia. But as a reporter who has covered cryptocurrency crime for the past decade and a half, I understood that crypto scamming—specifically the version of it that’s come to be known as “pig butchering,” in which victims are lured with promises of romance and lucrative investments, only to be tricked into handing over their life savings—has become the most profitable form of cybercrime in the world, pulling in tens of billions of dollars annually.
[...]
Red Bull’s situation was not precisely the brutal modern slavery I had read about elsewhere. It was more like a grotesque parody of a corporate sales floor. In theory, the staffers were incentivized with commissions designed to create the illusion that they could get rich from hard work. In reality, they were kept in perpetual debt and servitude. Red Bull told me he was paid a base salary of 3,500 Chinese yuan a month, close to $500, but the money was almost entirely taken from him by daily fines for various infractions, most often not meeting his quota of initial conversations with victims. The result was that he had virtually no income and subsisted off the food in the cafeteria, mostly rice and vegetables that he said tasted of strange chemicals.
He was bound into this system by a one-year contract, and believed when that time was over—in about six more months—he’d be allowed to leave. So far, he told me, he hadn’t successfully scammed anyone, only skated by with the minimum number of plausible attempts.
Original link | Archive.is link
‘It’s just a bomb’ | Bungalow
15-minute read
But Mohammad’s expression soon hardened again. He kept swaying back and forwards, and Nathan noticed he was fidgeting, turning to look at his bag just behind him. His hands were still wedged in his pockets.
“Are you all right mate? You seem a bit agitated about that bag. Why are you focused on the bag?”
“Oh nowt, nowt.”
“What’s so important about it?”
“You don’t want to know. You don’t want to know.”
“Just say.”
“It’s just a bomb.” He said it like it was absolutely normal. Like he was talking about a pair of shoes.
“What?”
“Oh yeah, just a bomb.”
“A bomb. OK. What’s your plan?”
“I was going to walk through the main door, past the lifts. And then wait for the nurses to come in for their break, and then I’ll set it off and walk out.”
“Can I see it?” Nathan asked, looking at the bag again.
Mohammad’s breathing grew strained. Nathan felt maybe he shouldn’t have asked but kept going anyway. “It can’t be that important if I see,” he said, “if what you say is in there is in there.”
3 stars
The Adolescence of Technology | Dario Amodei
55-minute read
From the CEO of Anthropic:
There is a scene in the movie version of Carl Sagan’s book Contact where the main character, an astronomer who has detected the first radio signal from an alien civilization, is being considered for the role of humanity’s representative to meet the aliens. The international panel interviewing her asks, “If you could ask [the aliens] just one question, what would it be?” Her reply is: “I’d ask them, ‘How did you do it? How did you evolve, how did you survive this technological adolescence without destroying yourself?” When I think about where humanity is now with AI—about what we’re on the cusp of—my mind keeps going back to that scene, because the question is so apt for our current situation, and I wish we had the aliens’ answer to guide us. I believe we are entering a rite of passage, both turbulent and inevitable, which will test who we are as a species. Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it.
Disappeared to a Foreign Prison | New Yorker
17-minute read
One Saturday morning in early September, I got a WhatsApp video call from eleven strangers locked inside a secretive detention camp in a forest in Ghana. Their faces looked glazed with sweat and stricken with fear. In the background, I could hear birdsong and the drone of insects. An armed guard watched over the group as they huddled around a shared cellphone.
“There are big snakes here, and scorpions!” a male voice with an American accent called out.
“My stomach is really hurting, and we have to beg for food,” another man said.
A third added, “We fear we’ll be tortured and killed.”
One of the men, a car salesman and a real-estate agent from Miami, whom I’ll call Jim, gave me a tour of the scene: an open-air military complex known as Bundase Training Camp, some forty miles from Accra. “I have five U.S.-citizen children, and they don’t know where their father is,” Jim said.
Original link | Archive.is link
Scams, Schemes, Ruthless Cons: The Untold Story of How Jeffrey Epstein Got Rich | New York Times
24-minute read
“Are you sitting down?” the H.R. official asked Tennenbaum. “Neither school has heard of him.”
Tennenbaum was in a delicate spot. He asked Greenberg what to do. The response, Tennenbaum told us, was that he should treat Epstein as if he were a normal employee — an instruction that made clear that, thanks to his relationships, Epstein was in fact not a normal employee.
He summoned Epstein to his office. “You lied about your education,” he said.
“Yes, I know,” Epstein calmly replied. He had never graduated from college. Tennenbaum recalls being disarmed by the admission. Decades later, he would regard it as an example of Epstein’s ability to manipulate his marks — in this case, him.
“Why did you do it?” Tennenbaum stammered.
Without an impressive degree or two, Epstein said, “I knew nobody would give me a chance.”
This resonated with Tennenbaum. He had benefited from his own share of second chances over the years. And so he agreed to give Epstein one as well.
It was perhaps the first example of Epstein getting caught cheating — and then avoiding punishment thanks to his uncanny ability to take advantage of those in positions of power. This would become a lifelong pattern, one that largely explains Epstein’s remarkable success at amassing wealth and, eventually, orchestrating a vast sex-trafficking operation.
Original link | Archive.is link
Best Of Moltbook | Astral Codex Ten
7-minute read
It should not surprise you that a social network for AI agents is already filled with much more intelligent discourse than most social networks for humans...
Moltbook is “a social network for AI agents”, although “humans [are] welcome to observe”.
[...]
Moltbook is an experiment in how these agents communicate with one another and the human world. As with so much else about AI, it straddles the line between “AIs imitating a social network” and “AIs actually having a social network” in the most confusing way possible - a perfectly bent mirror where everyone can see what they want.
Janus and other cyborgists have catalogued how AIs act in contexts outside the usual helpful assistant persona. Even Anthropic has admitted that two Claude instances, asked to converse about whatever they want, spiral into discussion of cosmic bliss. So it’s not surprising that an AI social network would get weird fast.
But even having encountered their work many times, I find Moltbook surprising. I can confirm it’s not trivially made-up - I asked my copy of Claude to participate, and it made comments pretty similar to all the others. Beyond that, your guess is as good is mine.
TSMC Risk | Stratechery
7-minute read
You probably think, given this title, you know what this Article is about. The most advanced semiconductors are made by TSMC in Taiwan, and Taiwan is claimed by China, which has not and will not take reunification-by-force off of the table.
[...]
The TSMC brake has — if all of those CEO and CFO comments above are to be believed — already cost the biggest tech companies a lot of money. That’s the implication of not having enough supply to satisfy demand: there was revenue to be made that wasn’t, because TSMC didn’t buy the AI hype at the same time everyone else did.
[...]
TSMC is, to be clear, being extremely rational.
2 stars
Seeing Like a Sedan | Asterisk
15-minute read
Picture a fall afternoon in Austin, Texas. The city is experiencing a sudden rainstorm, common there in October. Along a wet and darkened city street drive two robotaxis. Each has passengers. Neither has a driver.
Both cars drive themselves, but they perceive the world very differently.
One robotaxi is a Waymo. From its roof, a mounted lidar rig spins continuously, sending out laser pulses that bounce back from the road, the storefronts, and other vehicles, while radar signals emanate from its bumpers and side panels. The Waymo uses these sensors to generate a detailed 3D model of its surroundings, detecting pedestrians and cars that human drivers might struggle to see.
In the next lane is a Tesla Cybercab, operating in unsupervised full self-driving mode. It has no lidar and no radar, just eight cameras housed in pockets of glass. The car processes these video feeds through a neural network, identifying objects, estimating their dimensions, and planning its path accordingly.
JOINT REVIEW: Philosophy Between the Lines, by Arthur M. Melzer | Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf
22-minute read
He claims (and as you say provides heaps of evidence for his claim) that prior to the Enlightenment it was completely universal knowledge that every philosopher worth reading imbued his texts with hidden meanings. On the contrary, the vast majority of people today (including me until a few years ago) not only do not believe that philosophical texts contain hidden messages, but further do not know that until very recently everybody thought they did. When you really stop and think about it, this pair of facts is jaw-dropping. It’s civilizational forgetting on a nigh-unprecedented scale. As if an entire religion or culture that was once universal has disappeared so totally that we forgot we’d even forgotten it.
This sort of thing is catnip for me, because I’m kind of obsessed with these episodes of global epistemic regress. We know that they happened before — for example calculus was probably invented in the ancient world by Eudoxus of Cnidus and by Archimedes, and then completely forgotten. Or consider that time that the cure to scurvy was discovered and then lost again. The latter example is more interesting, because there was no collapse into barbarism as happened after the end of the Hellenistic world, people just…forgot. Well, if it happened in the past, then I’m sure it’s happening now too, but trying to spot these gaps in your own culture is like trying to take a picture of a black hole — very difficult by the very nature of the thing.
It Was the Most Violent Prison in America. Then the Guards Went on Strike | GQ
24-minute read
It was time for the 3 p.m. shift change at Walpole State Prison. But on this afternoon in March 1973, the corrections officers were not reporting to work as usual. They believed that the prisoners had become too powerful—in some ways, more powerful than them. As a result, the officers—who were standing on a narrow island of grass in front of the prison, buzzing with agitation—felt that they could no longer do their jobs properly or safely. There was a “rising tide of permissiveness in Massachusetts prisons,” officers told The Boston Globe. One guard put it succinctly: “Cons are running the joint right now.”
Between the sheets at the college Excel championships | Washington Post
8-minute read
You know how hard it is to be the most distinct person at the Luxor Hotel & Casino on a Monday afternoon?
In the hotel check-in line, there’s a woman with a safari hat on her head and a giant plastic parrot on her shoulder. In the bathroom, there’s a man brushing his teeth, his eyes a little bloodshot, a foot-high stack of $100 chips forming a perfect triangle on the sink to his right. And on the casino floor, an older man uses Google Maps to find his way, though he seems confused about whether to turn right at the Wizard of Oz slot machine or keep walking past a sleeping roulette table, where he would eventually hit a sign for an overpriced buffet, then another for tickets to see Carrot Top do whatever Carrot Top does.
And yet, near the front desk, at what might be the world’s saddest Starbucks, sits Benjamin Weber, who traveled 24 hours from rural Austria, not far from the Hungarian border, to defend his individual title in college Excel. Yes, competitive spreadsheeting.
Original link | Archive.is link
Field of clones: How horse replicas came to dominate polo | Knowable Magazine
8-minute read
At the slightest touch of the reins, he felt a familiarity that shook him. It was 2016, and polo player Adolfo Cambiaso — considered the best in the world — was riding for the first time on a genetic clone of Cuartetera, his flagship mare. The same explosive start, the same agility in the curves, the same sustained stride in the long sprints. “It was the same,” he recalls. “Same movements, same head.... I couldn’t believe it.” It took only a few seconds for him to realize that his gamble — which many had dismissed as nonsense — had paid off.
Does Therapy Culture Explain the Ideological Mental Health Gap? | Richard Hanania’s Newsletter
6-minute read
Evidence that too much awareness of psychological problems is causing more of them
[...]
If, compared to liberals, conservatives are happier, have better mental health, or whatever else we want to call it, what might be the reason for this?
Can Civilization Function Without Alcohol? | The Future Market
5-minute read
Alcohol has no moral compass of its own. It’s just a chemical, albeit with an infamous reputation. Societies have tried to restrict or eliminate it before—through religious prohibition, through constitutional amendments, through moral crusades—and mostly failed, or succeeded only where a substitute emerged.
What’s different now isn’t the questioning—it’s that the pressures are finally aligned. A hardening medical consensus, a generation choosing sobriety for secular reasons, pharmacological alternatives that didn’t exist before. The interesting question isn’t whether alcohol consumption will decline. It’s what else disappears when alcohol does.
[...]
The theory sounds abstract until you look at what alcohol has actually catalyzed throughout history. The American Revolution was largely plotted in taverns. The Green Dragon in Boston is sometimes called the “Headquarters of the Revolution.” The Sons of Liberty, fueled by punch and ale, planned the Boston Tea Party there—the liquid bonding necessary to commit treason against the Crown. The same mechanism has served monstrous ends. The rise of Nazism in 1920s Germany was inextricably linked to the beer hall culture of Munich. The failed 1923 coup is literally known as the Beer Hall Putsch.
Monster Neutrino Could Be a Messenger of Ancient Black Holes | Quanta Magazine
6-minute read
Nearly three years ago, a particle from space slammed into the Mediterranean Sea and lit up the partially complete Cubic Kilometer Neutrino Telescope (KM3NET) detector off the coast of Sicily. The particle was a neutrino, a fundamental component of matter commonly known for its ability to slip through other matter unnoticed.
[...]
The day after the KM3NET collaboration announced the detection, the physicist David Kaiser walked into a room full of his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a bold proposition: What if the monster neutrino came from an exploding primordial black hole?
1 star
How Your Brain Creates ‘Aha’ Moments and Why They Stick | Quanta Magazine
5-minute read
When the answer finally comes to you, it’ll likely feel instantaneous. You might even say “Aha!” This kind of sudden realization is known as insight, and a research team recently uncovered how the brain produces it, which suggests why insightful ideas tend to stick in our memory.
I’ve always been a cruise hater. I took one anyway and it was…fine? | Business Insider
7-minute read
I realized the cruise may have been a mistake on the second night of my voyage. I asked a bartender what time the rooftop jacuzzis closed, and he matter-of-factly told me it was whenever the first person of the night threw up in one. I’d noticed the tubs were drained that morning, which I trustingly imagined was part of some daily cleaning regimen, not the result of one of my fellow passengers tossing their cookies in our shared amenities. I wondered if I should tell my boyfriend or leave him blissfully unaware. The truth can’t really set you free when you’re trapped on a 90,000-ton boat with 2,000 strangers. Ultimately, I fessed up anyway. If I had to sit with this nauseating piece of information, so did he.
I’d honestly thought my boyfriend was joking when he said he’d won a free cruise by playing Tetris on his phone. I would later come to realize, after sharing the information with friends and coworkers, that that was a typical response. But he did, thanks to approximately four years of an hourlong New York City subway commute.
Original link | Archive.is link
Microbial Olympics: Super-duper one-celled athletes | Knowable Magazine
4-minute read
In winter sports, lugers slide at more than 90 miles per hour, hockey players send the puck zipping across the ice at 100 mph, and figure skaters spin up to 342 rotations per minute. That’s fast.
But these human feats don’t seem so impressive when compared with the speed demons of the microbial world. In these ongoing games, minuscule predators and their prey hit high velocities during the chase. Hungry microbes make amazing leaps for food. Others hurl bits of their bodies or expand or contract with more force than astronauts experience at takeoff. Skier Lindsey Vonn has nothing on these speedsters.
The star-rating system for curation is surprisingly effective at guiding reading prioirity. That Moltbook piece stands out tho, the idea of AI agents having actual social dynamics (not just mimicking them) is one of those things that'll probaly age weirdly no matter which way it goes.