Why Is Martha’s Vineyard Going Vegan? It’s All About Tick Bites. (NYT):

On the porch of the Chilmark General Store and at sunset-watching parties on Menemsha Beach, conversations circle ineluctably to the lone star tick, which after a single bite can leave people with a life-threatening allergy to most meat and dairy.

Known as alpha-gal syndrome, the condition is changing the way many people shop, cook and eat in a place long known as a food-lover’s retreat for its thriving independent farms and restaurants. These new habits may prove to be lasting, as some islanders who initially avoided beef and cheese temporarily, out of necessity, later give them up for good out of preference.

“It’s sort of supersized vegetarianism,” said Rebecca Miller, a farm owner who has the syndrome herself.

Are Samosas Unhealthy? Some Indians Find Official Advice Hard to Swallow.:

So, when a recent government advisory put samosas — along with other deep-fried Indian snacks and Western foods such as burgers and French fries — on a list of things that should be eaten in moderation because of their high oil and sugar content, there was an unsurprising outcry. Social media erupted with memes, and Indian media chimed in to say the country’s most iconic bites were under attack.

@rivatez:

That animals seemingly anticipate events should humble us more. Changes in groundwater chemistry, electromagnetic fields and sound waves make animals restless, distressed and even relocate

In the West it is seen as ‘woo’ to contemplate that energy/weather humans don’t consciously experience can affect our psychology, and yet we forget that we are animals too.

Even outside extreme weather events, the lunar cycle moves oceans, huge bodies of water. We are, like all animals, primarily made of water. The word ‘lunacy’ comes from the ancient understanding that our minds can be affected by it

An interesting experiment is to log your daily mood for a few months- ups and downs, anxiety / joy levels, big arguments with loved ones etc. Then afterwards, retroactively chart it against lunar cycles and NASA space weather data that tracks geomagnetic storms, solar flares etc.

Be open- minded and try it. I, too, used to think this stuff was BS

Now I think much of modern psychiatry is giving people drugs to tune down people’s individual responses to these external inputs, eg ‘bipolar’ might just indicate high sensitivity

How many important scientific breakthroughs lie on the other side of our collective dismissal of ‘woo’?

Why I believe in AGI (again):

First, I’m now convinced that ChatGPT understands what it reads. Second, reasoning models persuade me that ChatGPT is creative. Third, ChatGPT summarizes texts extremely well, which I believe to be a robust measure of intelligence.

Derek Thompson:

"The better news is that this is happening at a time when exercise seems to be increasing for many groups, especially the young and old. The bad news is ... deep Medicaid cuts and declines in childhood vaccine uptake are not exactly optimistic predictors of American health."

Your Review: Dating Men In The Bay Area: Not what it says on the label at all! Recommended.

Adults Are Going to Sleep-away Camp to Make Friends. It Seems to Actually Work.:

“Anyone that has worked at camp or grown up in the camp world understands there is a powerful people connection that forms at camp,” said Liam Macleod, a longtime camp professional and marketing director at Camp No Counselors. “It’s camp magic and it’s hard to replicate in the regular world.”

What is the most profitable thing you have done with ChatGPT? on Reddit via Simon Willison: In dollar terms, probably crafting fundraising messages for charity event organized by my Alumni Association. In real terms, physiotherapy for my back and legs. So far. Some great examples at the link. Failure of imagination remains the biggest hurdle in getting value from LLMs.

AI Is Designing Bizarre New Physics Experiments That Actually Work:

It took months of effort to understand what the AI was doing. It turned out that the machine had used a counterintuitive trick to achieve its goals. It added an additional three-kilometer-long ring between the main interferometer and the detector to circulate the light before it exited the interferometer’s arms. Adhikari’s team realized that the AI was probably using some esoteric theoretical principles that Russian physicists had identified decades ago to reduce quantum mechanical noise. No one had ever pursued those ideas experimentally. “It takes a lot to think this far outside of the accepted solution,” Adhikari said. “We really needed the AI.”

GPT-5 prompting guide:

GPT-5, our newest flagship model, represents a substantial leap forward in agentic task performance, coding, raw intelligence, and steerability.

While we trust it will perform excellently “out of the box” across a wide range of domains, in this guide we’ll cover prompting tips to maximize the quality of model outputs, derived from our experience training and applying the model to real-world tasks. We discuss concepts like improving agentic task performance, ensuring instruction adherence, making use of newly API features, and optimizing coding for frontend and software engineering tasks - with key insights into AI code editor Cursor’s prompt tuning work with GPT-5.

We’ve seen significant gains from applying these best practices and adopting our canonical tools whenever possible, and we hope that this guide, along with the prompt optimizer tool we’ve built, will serve as a launchpad for your use of GPT-5. But, as always, remember that prompting is not a one-size-fits-all exercise - we encourage you to run experiments and iterate on the foundation offered here to find the best solution for your problem.

And a tutorial by Anthropic.

Class Dismissed: Alpha School is getting a lot of coverage all of a sudden. Long piece about the people and the tech behind it.