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Olympic ice-skating, the Minions soundtrack, and copyright clearance
A Spanish figure skater, wanted to use songs from the Minions soundtrack for his Olympic routine, but that was put into jeopardy due to copyright clearance. What makes clearance especially difficult for the Olympics is you have to get the song cleared for the entire world.
In his post earlier this week where he lamented not being able to use the music, Guarino said, “I followed all required procedures and submitted my music through the ISU ClicknClear system back in August, and I competed with this program throughout the entire season.”
The sport’s governing body, the International Skating Union, said in a statement to Front Office Sports, “Copyright clearances can represent a challenge for all artistic sports. While the ISU does not have a contractual relationship with ClicknClear, we continue to work collaboratively with rights clearance stakeholders to ensure that thrilling performances can be accompanied by stirring music.”
Ultimately, he was able to get clearance.
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Two cities under siege
I’ve thought about this often lately, how much does today compare to the years running up to the American Revolution, where British troops attempted to force compliance in its populace? Boston 1770 and Minneapolis 2026 share similarities.
The rage from those pre-revolution clashes in Boston continued to linger for years into the Constitutional Convention, and then the debate over the Bill of Rights. The Founders were also students of history, and saw how the domestic use of the military led to the fall of the Roman Republic. This, in large part, is why we have the Second, Third, and Fourth Amendments, and why the Constitution splits control of the military between the president and Congress. You really can’t overstate how much the Founders worried about . . . exactly what we’re seeing in Minneapolis.
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People who can see collapse before it happens
I found myself nodding along to nearly everything in this article about why certain people can foresee collapse before others. Basically, it comes down to be able to see patterns.
Baron-Cohen’s work on hyper-systemising (2006) describes how autistic people naturally gravitate toward understanding structures, mechanisms, and causal patterns rather than social signalling. They notice inconsistencies, detect contradictions, and see what does not add up.¹
Collapse awareness begins here; with the realisation that the cultural story of infinite growth in a finite system fails even the most basic coherence test.
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10 things learned from AI code assistants
Benj Edwards tried numerous AI code assistants and came away with 10 lessons learned.
Claude Code, Codex, and Google’s Gemini CLI, can seemingly perform software miracles on a small scale. They can spit out flashy prototypes of simple applications, user interfaces, and even games, but only as long as they borrow patterns from their training data. Much like a 3D printer, doing production-level work takes far more effort. Creating durable production code, managing a complex project, or crafting something truly novel still requires experience, patience, and skill beyond what today’s AI agents can provide on their own.
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The guilt of the inbox
The original inbox was a wooden tray on a real desk.
Papers arrived there because a person walked them over. The obligation was physics: it took up space, it had mass, someone had expended effort. You could see when it was empty.
The telephone demanded presence but not memory. It rang, you answered or you didn’t. No accumulation. No count. When it stopped ringing, the obligation evaporated. The phone never remembered what you missed.
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Cows using tools
A cow using a stick to scratch an itch.
For a cow, Veronika has had what might be considered an idyllic life. She lives in a picturesque town in Austria, surrounded by snow-capped mountains and glacial lakes. She is a beloved family pet, rather than a production animal, and spends her days ambling through tree-lined pastures. And when she has an itch, she scratches it — by expertly wielding a stick.
Now, in a new study, Veronika has demonstrated even more advanced scratching skills, deploying different ends of a wooden broom to target different parts of her body. It is, scientists say, an example of flexible tool use, a behavior that is relatively rare in the animal kingdom. The paper, which was published in Current Biology on Monday, is the first scientific paper to describe tool use in cattle, which have not traditionally been celebrated for their smarts.
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Jewish seniors are offering to hide their Haitian caregivers
The saying goes, “history doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes.” In Florida, Jewish seniors are offering to hide their Haitian caregivers.
About 500 seniors live at Sinai Residences in Boca Raton, Florida, including many Holocaust survivors. Recently, some of them asked if they could hide the building’s Haitian staff in their apartments.
“That reminds me of Anne Frank,” Rachel Blumberg, president and CEO of the center, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “There’s a kindred bond between our residents being Jewish and seeing the place that the Haitians have gone through.”
The seniors were aware of something that is only beginning to dawn on the rest of the country: that in addition to the aggressive immigration enforcement operations underway in Minnesota and elsewhere, the Trump administration has moved to cancel Temporary Protected Status for immigrants from a handful of countries once deemed too unsafe to return to.
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Cryptocurrencies are dying
Cryptocurrencies are dying as joke coins and pump and dump schemes burn out.
With that in mind, a recent report from CoinGecko (via CoinDesk) says the crypto reaper has been unusually busy lately. Looking at its own records from as far back as 2021, CoinGecko found that 20.2 million tokens had been placed on the market, and that the majority—53.2%—have ceased active trading. They’re dead.
What’s more, 11.6 million of the token failures recorded by CoinGecko—86.3%—happened last year. In other words, 2025 was a mass die-off.
