How Are Memories Stored Inside Your Brain?
This video from Kurzgesagt is a great little primer on how the human brain stores memories.
Memory is one of the strangest abilities you possess. Your brain uses an incredibly complex biological system to preserve moments from your past that no longer exist, allowing you to revisit experiences from years ago. But memories are not always recordings of reality. In fact, every time a memory comes under the spotlight of your attention, it can melt and change a tiny bit.
What exactly is a memory, how is a moment in time stored inside your brain, and why does remembering something slowly rewrite the story of your life
LinkedIn and X Are Flooded With AI Spam, Browsing Data Suggests
404 Media: “A shocking amount of the content that users encounter on popular social media websites is likely AI generated, according to data from a company that detects AI writing. As much as 41 percent of longform written content seen by users on LinkedIn is likely to be fully AI-generated and roughly a third of longer posts on X are AI-generated; roughly one-in-ten longer Reddit and Substack posts are AI, according to the data.
The data was collected using a Chrome extension from Pangram, a company that detects AI-generated writing. Pangram’s Chrome extension scans writing that users encounter while browsing and determines if any given post is likely AI-generated or likely human written. Because Pangram works passively in the background while a user is browsing the internet, it only scans posts that its users actually see.
This helps answer the question of whether AI slop is actually poisoning the internet that humans actually use, versus polluting the internet more broadly. The answer is unequivocal: AI slop writing is not just sequestered off on unpopular automated SEO farms or spam sites that no one reads; humans are regularly wading through AI dreck on hugely popular sites….”
The Great Blogging Collapse: What Happened to 100 Successful Blogs?
Daniel Stanica: “I tracked 100 once-successful blogs over four years to understand what happened after Google’s Helpful Content Updates and the rise of AI Overviews. The results were striking: the median blog lost 85% of its organic traffic, while only 21 continued to grow. This study reveals the patterns behind the winners, the losers, and what it takes to build a blog that can survive in 2026.”
Mastodon, The Only Good Choice, but Bluesky is even better
Dear World: Now is a good time to get off social media that’s going downhill. Where by “downhill” I mean any combination of less useful, less safe, or less fun. It’s time for something better, and by “something better” I mean Mastodon. Which, I’m here to say, offers a better social-media experience than the alternatives. Furthermore, the alternatives are fatally flawed.
By “Mastodon” I mean the many servers, mostly (but not all) running the Mastodon software, that communicate using the ActivityPub protocol. Now I’ll try to convince you to start using one of them. The simplest argument · Have you noticed that social-media products, in the long term, seem inevitably to enshittify? I have. But there’s a major exception, a tool that’s been serving billions of us for decades, and works about as well as it ever did. I’m talking about email. ¶Why does email stay reasonably healthy? Because nobody owns it. Anyone on any server can communicate with anyone else on any other.
Nobody can buy it and make it a vehicle for their politics. Nobody can crank up the ads or make things worse to improve their profit margin. Mastodon’s like email that way. Plus it does all the Post and Repost and Quote and Follow and Reply and Like and Block stuff that you’re used to, and there are thousands of servers. Anyone can run one and nobody can own the whole thing. It doesn’t have ads and it won’t. It’s dead easy to use and it’s fun and you should give it a try.
The rest of this essay goes into detail about why Mastodon is generally great and why the alternatives have little future. But if the pitch sounds good so far, stop reading, go get an account, and climb on board. Why now? · Along with that “can’t be owned” and “no ads” stuff, the software is getting really good, particularly in the last couple of releases. It’s got cool features you won’t find elsewhere, and there’s very little cool stuff from elsewhere that’s not here. ¶ There was a time when newly-arrived people had confusing or unfriendly experiences, or missed features that were important to them. It looks to me like those days are over…”
