Ben Pitcher ⚓️ @BenPitcher

Ted Dyer (British, born 1940)

[ I keep reviewing the research behind this article with interest] medium.com/write-a-cataly…

Something has broken in people since the start of the pandemic... Chart: WSJ

Claude found an infinite money printing glitch that has sent the crypto market tumbling. The whole crypto market is tanking today because a security researcher, using Claude Opus 4.8, detected a security vulnerability in ZCash that went undetected for four years that would’ve allowed anyone to print infinite amounts of money. In a situation like this, anyone who did so would’ve been able to transfer out the glitched tokens for a stablecoin or even BTC using a bridging service. Real money. It’s unknown if anyone, aside from Claude, knew of this vulnerability or exploited it in the four years that it has existed.

Back to books - Sweden's schools give up digital learning bbc.in/41CvrFS

my column: Louis Theroux’s manosphere documentary exposes the fact that the manosphere is a downstream effect of fatherlessness. Misogyny, violence and antisocial behaviour are sold as masculinity by men – who’ve never experienced the real deal – to boys looking for role models they don’t have in their own families. Link in the first comment.

Your brain peaked musically somewhere around age 16. Everything since then has been a dopamine echo. Between the ages of 12 and 22, the mesolimbic dopamine pathway, the same circuit that processes cocaine and sex, fires at levels in response to sound that it will never reach again for the rest of your life. A 2011 McGill study used PET scans and fMRI simultaneously and found that music triggers dopamine release in the striatum at peak emotional arousal. The caudate nucleus lights up during anticipation of the good part. The nucleus accumbens lights up when it hits. Your brain is treating a guitar riff with the same reward architecture it uses for food-seeking and pair bonding. During adolescence, that response is dramatically amplified. Pubertal hormones are flooding the system. The prefrontal cortex is still wiring itself. Memories formed during this window get encoded with a density of emotional tagging that nothing in your 30s or 40s can replicate. Researchers at the University of Leeds identified this as the “reminiscence bump”: the period when your sense of self is forming, and the music playing during that formation becomes structurally integrated into your identity. A 2025 longitudinal study from the University of Gothenburg analyzed 40,000 users’ streaming data across 15 years. Younger listeners explored broadly across genres. Older listeners collapsed into increasingly narrow loops, almost entirely anchored to music from their teens and early twenties. Your brain stopped losing interest in new music years ago. It’s running a cost-benefit analysis. Familiar songs deliver guaranteed dopamine with zero processing cost. New songs require pattern recognition, expectation-building, and repeated exposure before the reward circuit kicks in. Past 25, most people stop paying that tax. The one variable that predicts whether someone keeps exploring: the personality trait “openness to experience.” Score high, you keep seeking. Score average, you default to the familiar forever. The fix, if you want one: deliberate exposure. Three listens minimum before your auditory cortex builds enough predictive models to generate a reward response. One passive listen on a playlist will never get there. Your brain needs repetition to find the pattern, and it needs the pattern to release dopamine.

𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN

4 months ago

Unfortunately, as you get older, you gradually become less interested in new music and keep going back to the old favorite songs you once loved.

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We now have evidence that gentle parenting doesn’t work. Here’s an uncomfortable truth about parenting no one wants to say out loud: The data is not kind to gentle parenting. According to teenagers, strict curfews. strict bedtimes, screen limits, device drop off times, dedicated homework blocks, and sleepover restrictions IMPROVE higher relationship quality. And yes, parenting difficulty goes up. Of course it does. Leadership is harder than appeasement. For the past decade we have been sold a watered down, Instagram friendly version of “gentle parenting” that often collapses into boundary avoidance, endless negotiation and emotional processing without enforcement. Parents terrified of saying no because they do not want to rupture connection. But connection without authority is not connection. It is dependency. When parents impose structure, the relationship improves. Teenagers report better parent child relationship quality in homes with curfews and rules. Younger kids report better relationships in homes with screen limits and bedtimes. Even device drop off times correlate positively. Why? Because structure is not cruelty. Structure is love made visible. A bedtime says: your brain matters more than your entertainment. A screen limit says: your dopamine system is not fully developed and I will guard it until it is. A curfew says: your safety matters more than your social standing. That is not authoritarianism. That is caring. Boundaries create friction. Friction creates growth. The parent absorbs the short term discomfort so the child does not pay the long term cost. Children do not experience well calibrated limits as rejection. They experience them as stability. The human brain craves predictability. Predictability reduces anxiety. Reduced anxiety strengthens attachment. That is why relationship quality goes up. Notice something else in the data. The strongest effects are around time structure. Bedtime. Homework. Devices. Outside play. These are environmental constraints. They scaffold executive function. The winning formula is not tyranny. It is high warmth plus high structure. The modern failure mode is high warmth plus low structure. That is just abdication of responsibility wrapped in empathy. Children need leadership, not negotiation. They need adults who can tolerate their anger. They need boundaries that do not move every time emotions spike. They need someone whose prefrontal cortex is fully myelinated. The harder path produces the stronger bond. Because when a child feels that someone is strong enough to hold the line, they relax. And relaxed nervous systems build durable relationships.

More waves shaking the powers that be. Is this the return of Sheba and the sabeans?

Visegrád 24 @visegrad24

5 months ago

People protested in Aden today to demand a free and independent South Arabia

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When they say 'peace and safety'

Visegrád 24 @visegrad24

5 months ago

People protested in Aden today to demand a free and independent South Arabia

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Sea and waves roaring x.com/ksadjadpour/st…

Karim Sadjadpour @ksadjadpour

6 months ago

The size and intensity of the protests tonight in Tehran are all the more remarkable when you consider each person knew they were risking their life.

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[Is it an AI bubble? - well it seems to walk like a duck, swim like a duck and talk like a duck etc... ] oaktreecapital.com/insights/memo/…

[barrier to achieving AGI - linear progress needs exponential resources ] timdettmers.com/2025/12/10/why…

Graphical visualization of the unit circle, the functions sine and cosine and why cos²(x) + sin²(x) = 1

casually mentioned to someone under 25 that it used to be legal to smoke in restaurants and I think someday people are going to have that same look of horror and disbelief on their faces when we tell them we used to hand iPads to babies

happy lehman brothers bankruptcy day to all who observe

During the spring of 1888, Van Gogh wrote that he was in a "fury of work" depicting the “tremendous gaiety” of the blossoming trees ~ here’s his ‘Flowering Orchard’

@boswelltoday Errr - Noah built an ark for over 100 years according to the bible, not 7 days!! ( Gen 5v32 cp to Gen 7v6 & Gen 6v3) - so even her biblical analogy is completely wrong!!

@autocorrect2_0 The man who is more concerned with his submission to his Head, Christ, than he is with his wife's to him will be blessed.

If you’re slightly bewildered by the world out there, take a quiet walk with me on a narrow lane. There’s grass growing in the middle, gold blowing above and copper at my feet, and the morning mist over the rooftops will soon thin and clear and let the light in. #peakdistrict