Ctrl freak

A summary of where things stand after three weeks of war in Iran. / Wake Up to Politics

Europe rejects Donald Trump’s pleas for help in securing the Strait of Hormuz. / Politico

In the United States, the White House quietly encourages farmers to hire immigrants to fill staffing shortages. / The New York Times [$]

In 2024, cigarette smoking among US adults fell below 10% for the first time in recorded history. / STAT

A journalist receives death threats from Polymarket gamblers attempting to persuade him to change a story. / The Times of Israel

Max Read: “We’re not training LLMs when we take quizzes on the Times website. But I suspect we’re training ourselves.” / Read Max

A 20-year-old student in Iraq is believed to be the first civilian killed by the United States in an AI-assisted strike. / Airwars

Video footage of humanoid robots working in a South Carolina auto-parts factory. / The Wall Street Journal [$]

Related: Expect videos of robots doing backflips to be replaced by videos showing “humanoids working fluidly in unfamiliar environments.” / Intelligence Age

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The historical beauty of Turkish coffee is thought to be a matter of water quality. / Sprudge Special Projects Desk

“Perhaps the greatest repository of moral beauty in English literature” might be Dorothea in Middlemarch. / Plough

A video supercut of the entire Beatles discography, but only the parts that mention numbers. / YouTube

Gary Shteyngart flies to South Africa to praise JM Coetzee. “Nobody could make you feel as cultured and literary in the space of some 200-odd pages as the stoic and writerly looking man from Cape Town.” / The Atlantic [$]

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