Stop eating Lady Gaga's Oreos - by Adam Mastroianni

I think this is why we now tolerate such blatant greed among famous people: we think we have a chance of becoming one of them. We once saw ourselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires; now we see ourselves as temporarily unknown celebrities.

Max Martin - Wikipedia

Since 1998, Martin has written or co-written 30 Billboard Hot 100 number-one hit songs (most of which he has also produced or co-produced). Eight of these songs debuted at number one on the chart.

1. 1998 – "…Baby One More Time" by Britney Spears
2. 2000 – "It's Gonna Be Me" by NSYNC
3. 2008 – "I Kissed a Girl" by Katy Perry
4. 2008 – "So What" by Pink
5. 2009 – "My Life Would Suck Without You" by Kelly Clarkson
6. 2009 – "3" by Britney Spears
7. 2010 – "California Gurls" by Katy Perry featuring Snoop Dogg
8. 2010 – "Teenage Dream" by Katy Perry
9. 2010 – "Raise Your Glass" by Pink
10. 2011 – "Hold It Against Me" by Britney Spears
11. 2011 – "E.T." by Katy Perry featuring Kanye West
12. 2011 – "Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)" by Katy Perry
13. 2012 – "Part of Me" by Katy Perry
14. 2012 – "One More Night" by Maroon 5
15. 2012 – "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" by Taylor Swift
16. 2013 – "Roar" by Katy Perry
17. 2013 – "Dark Horse" by Katy Perry featuring Juicy J
18. 2014 – "Shake It Off" by Taylor Swift
19. 2014 – "Blank Space" by Taylor Swift
20. 2015 – "Bad Blood" by Taylor Swift featuring Kendrick Lamar
21. 2015 – "Can't Feel My Face" by The Weeknd
22. 2016 – "Can't Stop the Feeling!" by Justin Timberlake
23. 2019 – "Blinding Lights" by The Weeknd
24. 2021 – "Save Your Tears" by The Weeknd and Ariana Grande
25. 2021 – "My Universe" by Coldplay and BTS
26. 2024 – "Yes, And?" by Ariana Grande
27. 2024 – "We Can't Be Friends (Wait for Your Love)" by Ariana Grande
28. 2025 – "The Fate of Ophelia" by Taylor Swift
29. 2026 – "Opalite" by Taylor Swift
30. 2026 - "Hate That I Made You Love Me" by Ariana Grande

Nobody understands the point of hybrid cars - YouTube

That is why the car doesn't charge the battery with its engine unless the battery is too low. When the car is parked as it was in the car wash, it does use the battery pack like a buffer to power its accessories, and will run the engine for a few minutes at a time to charge it back up when it gets low. In fact, here's exactly what that looks like: with the vehicle stationary, once the battery pack dips below 40%, the engine switches on and charges the battery up to about 48%, a process which takes three minutes. And then it will shut the engine back off and use the energy it just stored until it's too low again. But that's just a fancy kind of idling this drivetrain can do thanks to its fully electric suite of accessories. Otherwise, when the vehicle is being driven, the battery pack is charged almost exclusively with regenerative braking.

Collections: Warfare in Dune, Part II: The Fremen Jihad – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry

That position – that the destruction of the Fremen Jihad is not merely possible but inevitable to the point that Paul cannot stop it – puts a very, very high bar on its military plausibility. In particular it rules out any defense that Fremen victory is simply because Paul, as a prescient military leader, can simply pull an endless series of ‘inside straights.’ Remember: the Fremen explicitly still win even in Paul Muad’Dib Atredies [sic] is dead at the hands of Feyd Rautha Harkonnen. It is not enough for it to be possible for the Fremen to win, it must be impossible for them to lose.

Now in the thematic world of Dune, that is because military victory is fundamentally a product of the Fremen Mirage: societies have an inherent vitality to them and the Fremen are vital, hardened by the harshness of Arrakis, in a way that the Great Houses are not. In Herbert’s mind, that is enough: the ‘hard men’ created by the ‘hard times’ of Arrakis will inevitably triumph once an event – the emergence of Paul as a heroic figure – spurs them into action. Paul is thus die Weltseele zu Pferde, “the world-spirit on horseback,” the archetypal ‘great man of history’ who embodies supposed historical forces which are larger than him, which act through him and which would act without him.

Mineral Commodity Summaries | U.S. Geological Survey

Published on an annual basis, this report is the earliest Government publication to furnish estimates covering nonfuel mineral industry data. Data sheets contain information on the domestic industry structure, Government programs, tariffs, and 5-year salient statistics for over 90 individual minerals and materials.

It's insane, in a good way, that something like this is publicly available for free. A breakdown of US and global mineral production stats. They give both a general overview and then a breakdown for each of the 94 tracked minerals. Wow.

Mining For Beginners - How Does a Metals and Mineral Mine Work? - Energy and Mining Innovation

So fucking Factorio.

Saw | ContraPoints - YouTube

This is why she's still the fucking goat. I tend to prefer her more abstract pieces, like Twilight and (especially) Envy so I had a great time.

SymbolicsGenera (Official Symbolics Ivory Emulator) · GitHub

For a few days in March, the official Symbolics Genera organisation contained a repository named Licensing which had a (draconian) "friends of lisp" contract one could sign to get access to the Genera source. It seems to be gone now. Sadly I failed to archive the PDF. It was quite funny with, for instance, a clause noting the necessity of deletion of all Genera software from your computers upon death. I ended up not applying, mainly because the process involved typing one's full address into the Github issues tracker. We'll see if they put together anything less restrictive.

GitHub - hanshuebner/lisp-mcp · GitHub

Seems to have been renamed from genera-mcp. Maybe the restrictive license? This guy was the first to get in to the aforementioned program. Happy hacking brother.

Britain Still Has Conversion Therapists. Here’s Why - Philosophy Tube

A superb look into the history and (tragically) the present of conversion practices. Definitely worth a watch.

The interested watcher can find an even deeper dive in Debunking Transphobia of JasperDasper. It's been a while since I saw it so I do not recall the overlap.

"It was never about helping people. It was always about authority." [~31:00]

"The state of mind has been replaced by the Cass Review. A nice clean document that produces that moment of disconnect between what folks working in the NHS believe they are doing and what they are really doing." [~1:59:00]

(re: Hilary Cass's BBC interview, Feb 2026): "This is the same false theory that justified abuse and conversion practices on queer kids in the 1950s. It is very worrying that a woman presented by British media and politics as an expert on our healthcare was allowed on the BBC to rehash unchallenged the 75-year-old nonsense of a dead pedophile." [~1:44:00]

Apple Vision Pro’s Optics Blurrier & Lower Contrast than Meta Quest 3 – KGOnTech

This is quite a niche post, balanced out by the interesting and quite unexpected fact it talks about. As said in Vision Pro is an over-engineered “devkit” (emphasis mine):

With this design decision, Apple is no doubt giving up a bit of the Vision Pro display’s high pixel resolution in order to achieve overall smoother graphics. You are definitely losing some text crispness in order to gain a higher perception of quality for images, video and 3D animations. This is a big benefit of starting with an ultra high-resolution micro-OLED display — Apple had enough pixels to work with that they could afford to make this trade-off. This is the kind of thing that our hardcore VR engineers at Oculus would have fought against to the end of the world, and I doubt we could have ever shipped a “blurred headset”, LOL!

The easiest way to make the world smarter - Rabbit hole

A history of iodine deficiency and supplementation. A somber reminder that the world we know is not an immovable thing but a process that must be kept in motion continuously by many sober hands. See also The World Keeps Getting Saved and You Don’t Notice (TW: LessWrong). Our safety makes us forget. A similar trend in the eradication of diseases like polio is a big component of modern vaccine skepticism. Just Like one can assume there's no need for iodine in salt because nobody has goiters, one has the privilege of assuming that vaccines either don't work or are simply a tool of the deep state or whatnot. These sorts of things feel like the closest thing there is to a genuine luxury belief.

Destroying A World That Doesn't Exist - Wifies

The sequel to one of the candidates for the best Minecraft video of 2025, Searching For A World That Doesn’t Exist, a cross between the genres of an ARG analysis video, an ARG in itself and a creepypasta. The sequel is bombastic, a perfect continuation with, most notably, completely breathtaking set design, i.e. builds. Back in the day, even a small part of one of these would have been a jaw-dropping video to be shared for months. The level that we got to is incredible.