Month: June 2026

In a series of experiments published in 2011, they found that having an uncompleted goal generated intrusive thoughts during completely different tasks and impaired performance on problem-solving exercises. The simple fact of having something pending (unresolved, undecided, or not written down anywhere reliable) consumed mental resources that should have been available for something else.

Here is, perhaps, the most useful finding in this entire area of research: in those same experiments, all the participants had to do was formulate a concrete, specific plan for tackling the pending task (not to complete it, but simply to decide when and how they would do it) for the intrusive thoughts to disappear and their performance to return to normal. The mind did not need the task to be completed. It needed it to be decided.
— Read on facilethings.com/blog/en/decision-fatigue

Even when a joke doesn’t elicit a guffaw, people may still experience the benefit by feeling uplifted by it, he said. And some research shows that emotions are tied to health and well-being.There’s also a cognitive response, known as wit, that can occur with humor. To understand a joke, people often need to shift their perspective, and studies suggest that this cognitive reframing can help regulate emotions and cope with stress, Sultanoff said.Dad jokes tap into not only wit but also the social dimension of humor — what Sultanoff calls relational fusion.

Science suggests cringe-worthy dad jokes may serve an actual purpose – The Washington Post

The police in Boston are searching for two boys who they said flashed a handgun at a pair of children running a lemonade stand on Wednesday and stole an undisclosed amount of cash from a bright pink lockbox.

The robbery, which occurred around 4:45 p.m., rattled South Boston, where it is common for children to set up lemonade stands in the summer for their first taste of the American dream. Many in the neighborhood couldn’t wrap their heads around why someone would target a pair of young entrepreneurs engaged in a time-honored childhood hustle.

Tiffany Byrne, the aunt of the two children working the lemonade stand, said that about $80 was taken.

“The fact that anyone could do this to children is horrible,” she said.

Children’s Lemonade Stand Is Robbed in Broad Daylight in Boston – The New York Times

Two hundred and fifty years ago, fifty-six men signed their names to a document that pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to forge this nation. Some went bankrupt. Some watched their property seized and their children buried. They staked everything so that we could inherit a country so abundant, so free, and so safe that we now have the luxury of despising one another over politics from the comfort of our phones.

Maybe the foreigners have it right. Maybe the eagle and the flyover and the canyon and the kindness of a stranger with car keys really are worth crossing an ocean to see. Maybe, watching them fall in love with the place we take for granted, we could fall in love with it again ourselves and decide to be a little more charitable to the neighbor God told us to love, even when we cannot stand how he votes.

Through Strangers’ Eyes May We See Ourselves Again As Great

Last month, Google announced what it billed as the biggest change to search in 25 years: The search box now automatically expands as you type, and sometimes morphs into a chatbot. As a result, the SEO industry is scurrying to figure out how to get search bots to recommend a given product—a practice sometimes called “GEO,” for generative-engine optimization. To put it more bluntly, your search results are getting sloptimized.
— Read on www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/06/google-search-ai-optimization/687495/

One thing that a lot of my AI and tech friends don’t really understand is that trust is not about information and its quality alone. It’s about the messenger. And so when they talk about having AGIs that do super-persuasion by writing the most persuasive sentence in the world, I think: I don’t think you understand trust, because it’s not about the sentence. It’s about who says it and their track record and what they’ve told me before. And the stronger your individual brand, the trust you build, the voice you have, the track record that is just yours, the better off you’ll be
— Read on on.substack.com/p/the-independent-writers-advantage

We propose an output-based approach to measure the missing value of data. We treat data as an asset, measure its volume based on the quality of firms’ revenue forecasts, and endogenously determine its depreciation. We then capitalize the data value and explore what the measured GDP would be if the data were treated and transacted similarly to a physical asset. Our findings suggest that the aggregate value of data is about 1.5% of GDP.
— Read on www.nber.org/papers/w35266

Hackers say that they used Meta’s AI support chatbot to break into a host of high-profile Instagram profiles by asking the support bot to change the email address associated with the target account. The claims coincide with a series of high-profile Instagram account takeovers, including the Barack Obama White House account, the Chief Master Sergeant of Space Force’s account, and Sephora’s account.
— Read on www.404media.co/hackers-simply-asked-meta-ai-to-give-them-access-to-high-profile-instagram-accounts-it-worked/