The classic features of A.D.H.D. include things like not staying on task, losing the thread of a conversation and forgetting instructions. They are failures of “sustained engagement.” If attention is about the mind homing in on what’s relevant in a given moment, engagement is about keeping that spotlight pointed at the same target over time. Doing so may be less a matter of filtering out distractions and more a matter of whether the task registers in the brain as worth doing in the first place.
Once this distinction is appreciated, the results of the Cell study stop being contradictory. Stimulants create what looks like improved attention and focus, but they really do so by enhancing the salience of mundane activities — tricking the brain into assigning greater worth and significance to things like math homework and laundry.
This also helps explain why stimulants like amphetamines calm down hyperactive children. People without A.D.H.D. who use amphetamines often find themselves jittery and revved up, so the calming effect may seem counterintuitive. However, if a child is restless and fidgeting because the task at hand isn’t rewarding enough, then it makes sense that stimulants would help that child sit still and stay engaged rather than seek stimulation elsewhere.
— Read on www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/science/adhd-attention-motivation.html
Author: Jason
When did Google get so f-ing weird? – Sancho Panza’s Thoughts
Google, a search engine which does not have human emotions, assumed that I had been spurned by a man in my life named Dario and decided what I wanted was an empathetic digital friend. What I wanted was some links, but that’s not what Google does in 2026.
— Read on sancho.bearblog.dev/google-weird/
History is All Around Us
Posting is Embarrassing | The Spite Stack on Patreon
I don’t think posting always felt so damn corny and useless. There was a time online when posting could lead to stuff: people looking at your work, opportunities, real conversations in the comments. But now that the dead internet and ai bots have basically ruined what was a pretty sick hang out spot, I don’t even know how much longer it feels worthwhile. This is, notably, in contrast to posting on Patreon. The people who want to see it see it, and the people who don’t, don’t. And I feel zero pressure to post about only one topic for my “niche” or “brand” or whatever. In effect, I get all of the jollies of 2010s blogging and none of the embarrassment of “not having gone viral.”
— Read on www.patreon.com/thespitestack/posts/posting-is-168529790
What If We Just Stopped? | dansinker.com
Dan Sinker asks a good question about today’s social media: What if we just stopped?
And it makes me wonder, what kind of internet would we have if social media went away? Especially since so many ways of staying connected from before (AIM, forums, etc) are gone?
I used to tell myself that I had to stay engaged because social was where news broke, but I’m not sure what news I’ve seen break on social in ages. It’s all just people reacting to news that’s already broken. Or, worse, making shit up in the hopes of getting likes.
Mostly, it seems, we yell. We yell about the world, we yell about the other social sites, we yell about news stories we didn’t read, we yell about whatever sucker was unlucky enough to be that day’s main character, and we yell, mostly, at each other. We yell because we are mad at all of this. And we yell because we’re all trapped in a machine that was built, in part, to keep us yelling.
I’m not sure what keeps me there, what keeps any of us there, beyond inertia. We’re in the Looney Tunes stage of the end of social, where we’ve glided well past the edge of the cliff and it’s slowing dawning on us that the only way left is down. Fast.
What if we just stopped?
— Read on dansinker.com/posts/2026-09-23-stopped/
An Army of Paid Creators Is Carpeting the Web With Political Content – The New York Times
The accounts posting these messages aren’t run by celebrity influencers with massive engagement, legions of fans and lucrative product endorsement deals. Most have only a smattering of followers and, often, the people behind them aren’t even based in the United States.
Functioning more like birdshot than a single bullet, these high-volume social media campaigns represent the new vanguard of modern political influence, saturating the internet with a topic until it is all but unavoidable. That can help game social media network algorithms so that they treat coordinated content as organic, spreading the message even wider. Built from dozens or hundreds of posts from accounts you’ve never heard of, they amount to an echo chamber on a budget.
“This is digital astroturfing, plain and simple,” said Samuel Woolley, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh who studies how new technologies can be used to manipulate public opinion on the web. “The more people see an idea online, the more inured to it they become and the more commonplace and acceptable it becomes.”
— Read on www.nytimes.com/2026/09/22/us/politics/influencers-midterms-echo-chamber.html
The Miracle Survivors (from 2003)
To an extent, we are all survivors. One study asserted that 17 percent of the entire United States population outside New York reported symptoms like nightmares, sleeplessness, and anxiety in the days after September 11. Still, the more intense the exposure, the greater its effect. So for every non–New Yorker who suffered, almost three New Yorkers reported symptoms. And the closer that New Yorker was to the Trade Center, the more he felt it. You could measure the difference in blocks. People below Canal Street reported symptoms at almost three times the rate of those below 110th Street. If this is true, then the most intense experience of survival was had by sixteen who experienced almost incomprehensible luck that day. These people—a bookkeeper, an office temp, an engineer, a Port Authority cop, and twelve firemen—survived despite having the World Trade Center collapse on top of them.
For them, surviving has proved to be a complicated task. As one survivor’s wife explains, “Everyone else feels like 9/11 was a long time ago. I still feel like we are stuck on September 12, not really able to move beyond it.” And, as she inevitably reminds herself, they are the lucky ones.
The Season
Kid, the thing that none of the documentaries will show you was how that morning, after the first reports, nobody knew anything.
CNN had reported about a fire on the National Mall, which turned out to be people seeing smoke from the Pentagon and not understanding what they were seeing. There were rumors of a car bomb at the State Department building, a bomb at the U.S. Capitol building, and one at the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House. “The USA Today building in Rosslyn was supposedly enveloped in smoke,” per one report. You name the Washington landmark, chances were somebody had heard it had been hit.
It felt like the whole world had spun off its axis.
LLMs processing Cow Pucks
Harry Frankfurt wrote a wonderful essay called On Bullshit. His central move is a distinction most people miss: the difference between a liar and a bullshitter.
The liar cares about the truth. He has to. Truth is what a liar wants to conceal, and you cannot conceal what you have not first located. Lying is a truth-tracking activity performed in reverse.
The bullshitter doesn’t care about the truth at all. Not for it, not against it. Truth is simply not a variable in his function. His goal is to persuade, to impress, to manage how he is perceived. Whether the words happen to be true is incidental.
That’s an LLM model.
View from the inside
Mr. Walczak is quick to clarify something at this point in conversations about the missing film. He does not believe the pictures will reveal some hidden explanation for the events of that day. He is not a conspiracy theorist.
He is something different — a Sept. 11 completist. The two can look very similar from a distance, people foraging for things that will supposedly show what really happened on that day. But Mr. Walczak has a track record of actually finding them.
On an episode of a 2021 podcast he created, “Missing on 9/11,” he rattled off a list of photos that he has verified were taken on various floors of the towers: “One picture from the 48th, three from the 35th, one from the 51st, five from the 74th, two from the 61st.”
And in his sprawling, labyrinthine quest for those photographs, he would come to know a community of sleuths intent on finding and preserving unseen footage from that singular day. They huddle in Reddit threads, inspecting images and triangulating the exact positions of the photographers.
“People just assume everything’s been published,” Mr. Walczak said. “Not only is that not true, there’s a lot of fascinating footage that hasn’t been published.”
It is like they are working together on a puzzle that, 25 years later, still seems not quite complete. And new pieces keep emerging.
He’s Seen Images of 9/11 From Just About Every Angle. Except This One. – The New York Times