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
Author: Jason
Through Strangers’ Eyes May We See Ourselves Again As Great – Erick Erickson
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
Your Search Results Are Getting Sloptimized – The Atlantic
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/
The independent writer’s advantage in the age of AI
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
The Missing Value of Data | NBER
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 Simply Asked Meta AI to Give Them Access to High-Profile Instagram Accounts. It Worked
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/
The Pope Is Now the World’s Most Famous Humanist – DNYUNZ
This is an element of Leo’s argument, of course—he is, after all, head of the Catholic Church—but he also makes clear that humanity, as he describes it, should be exalted because of its “woundedness” just as much as its “grandeur.” Our limitations are the key to understanding what makes humans special. “We must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them,” he writes. You don’t even need to believe in God to appreciate that our uniqueness derives from the friction produced by our “vulnerability, suffering and failure.” To smooth out this roughness would be to get rid of what is most essential about us. Along those lines, this is maybe my favorite passage from the encyclical:
The Pope Is Now the World’s Most Famous Humanist – DNYUZTo eliminate suffering entirely would mean, in the end, extinguishing love and desire as well. Those who love and desire cannot avoid passing through trial and suffering; and over the years, we carry within us lessons that leave their mark like scars, the memories of a journey shaped by freedom and failure, dreams and disappointments. It is only thanks to the interplay of these elements that the wonders of the soul occur within us, allowing us to sense the richness of our humanity. To renounce this adventure, both tragic and splendid, in the name of a presumed transcendence of all limits, could mean many things, but it would no longer be human.
Pope Leo XIV – Man of the People
“When efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value, human beings are tempted to see themselves as a project to be optimized rather than as persons called to relationship and communion.”
“It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. – J.R.R. Tolkien”
– Pope Leo XIV
Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Leo XIV Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026)
Pope Leo XIV invoked Gandalf when addressing artificial intelligence in his first encyclical.
Pope Leo XIV published his landmark encyclical on artificial intelligence “Magnifica Humanitas” May 25, comparing the attempt to build an AI future that excludes God to the “Tower of Babel” and underlining the need to safeguard human dignity as it is “threatened by new forms of dehumanization.”
“The risk of dehumanization — of building a future that excludes God and reduces the other to a means — is an ancient and ever-new temptation that today takes on a technical guise,” Pope Leo wrote in his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.”
“In the era of artificial intelligence, when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human. We must lovingly safeguard the grandeur of humanity bestowed upon us and revealed in its fullness in Christ, the splendor of which no machine can ever replace,” he said.
There is a LOT of great stuff in here. Worth a nice long read.
We must, then, avoid the “Babel syndrome,” namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance. The risk of dehumanization — of building a future that excludes God and reduces the other to a means — is an ancient and ever-new temptation that today takes on a technical guise.
…
More gravely, the pervasive technocratic paradigm in which we are immersed, and that is amplified by the digital revolution and AI, threatens to normalize an anti-human vision. In that vision, the fullness of life is equated with having more, reducing weakness, eliminating uncertainty and exerting total control. When efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value, human beings are tempted to see themselves as a project to be optimized rather than as persons called to relationship and communion.
AI’s Token Bang for Big Bucks
Many companies have embraced AI and have pushed staff to use it just because it’s there.
He said that, based on talks with Uber’s senior engineering leaders, he realized higher token usage did not translate into a proportional increase in useful consumer features.
“That link is not there yet, right?” he said. “I think maybe implicitly there is more that is getting shipped, but it’s very hard to draw a line between one of those stats and, ‘Okay, now we’re actually producing 25% more useful consumer features.'”
Uber’s COO Says It’s Getting Harder to Justify the Money Spent on AI – Business Insider
On one hand, I kinda smirk at the idea of Uber getting caught up in the SAAS “sell it for super cheap and at a loss to destroy the competition and hook the buyer and then kick up those prices” business model that, well, made Uber.
On the other, this makes total sense when you consider the costs of AI at scale for companies like Uber, Duolingo, Microsoft, etc. Many companies have embraced AI and have pushed staff to use it just because it’s there.
Duolingo, for instance, walked back its decision to include AI usage in performance reviews after employees asked whether they had to use AI for the sake of using it.
“It felt like, rather than being held accountable for the actual outcome, we were trying to just push something that in some cases did not fit,” Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn said in a podcast interview in April.
For a person using it at home on the free level generating funny lyrics or images, AI is a neat little toy. For companies looking to use it across the company for coding or as AI assistants, every little ask adds up in ways we’re not trained to look for. I mean, how much does it cost to Google something?
Add on the seemingly random token consumption* newer models of Claude or ChatGPT require to do even rudimentary tasks and it gets real tough to see the bang for buck.
* I say “seemingly random” because the use makes sense. In some ways the new models are pulling back the curtain on how they’re thinking behind the scenes, in others it’s tweaks that make them work better. But there’s no real method of measuring exactly what a query is going to cost until you commit, and when you’re paying by the token for hundreds or thousands of employees, that can run away from you real fast.
I’m curious if we have any real examples yet of AI usage seeing a net positive ROI across all players – company using AI sees profits from its use, AI provider is making enough money to more than cover its costs, etc.
Counting is hard.
Starbucks is sunsetting its AI inventory program after it reportedly miscounted and mislabeled store items.
Another common mistake the AI program made was mixing up different types of milk or skipping them altogether. The program was only active for nine months, according to Reuters.
“With a quick scan using a handheld tablet, partners can instantly see what’s in stock — ensuring cold foam, oat milk, or caramel drizzle are always available,” a now-deleted blog post explaining the AI program read. “Customers can enjoy beverages their way, every time — and partners [Starbucks’ term for its employees] spend less time in the backroom and more time crafting and connecting.”
Starbucks retires AI inventory program after just nine months