Brūce Hïggïns @LBruceHiggins

10 GITHUB REPOS THAT UNLOCK THE INTERNET THAT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE FREE Bookmark every single one. The web got buried under popups, blur walls, and tollbooths on knowledge that was never meant to be sold. These dig it back out. 1. github.com/ourresearch/un… The single best one. It scans 20 million research papers and finds the free, legal, author-posted version of almost any locked study. A nonprofit built it, thousands of universities run on it, and the authors put these copies online on purpose. Science you were quietly priced out of, opened back up. 2. openalex.org OpenAlex is a free, open index of 400 million scholarly works, the open replacement for the databases universities pay millions to license. Search the entire map of human research without an institutional login. The card catalog of all science, finally public. 3. github.com/csns1/bypass-p… A community extension that restores reader access to sites that show the full article to Google but hide it from you, by loading the version search engines already see. The "this page exists, why can't I read it" problem, solved on the sites that opted into that game. 4. github.com/gorhill/ublock The best content blocker ever made. It strips the ads, popups, autoplay videos, and tracking junk that turned reading anything into a fight. Google crippled it inside Chrome, so it runs at full power on Firefox and Brave. The clean web you forgot existed. 5. github.com/FreedomOfPress… From the Freedom of the Press Foundation. It takes any sketchy or locked-down document and rebuilds it into a safe, readable PDF. Built for journalists, free for everyone. Information that was wrapped in friction, handed back clean. 6. github.com/wallabag/walla… A self-hosted read-later app that saves the full clean text of any article to your own server, stripped of clutter, readable forever even if the original page dies. Pocket got gutted. This is the version nobody can shut down or paywall. 10K+ stars. 7. github.com/gildas-lormeau… Save any web page as one complete, self-contained file, exactly as it looked, that you own forever. When useful pages vanish or get locked later, your copy still opens. The internet is temporary. This makes the parts you care about permanent. 8. github.com/sunzhenyu/Clea… and readability tools Mozilla's open Readability engine is the code behind every "reader mode" button, and the open tools built on it rip a page down to just the words. No sidebars, no newsletter nag, no cookie wall. Pure text, the way reading online was supposed to feel. 9. github.com/gildas-lormeau… A heavier-duty page archiver that compresses an entire site into one file you can reopen offline anytime. Researchers and writers use it to keep a permanent, readable record of sources before they move behind a wall or disappear. 10. github.com/internetarchiv… The Internet Archive's Open Library, a free, open catalog of millions of books, many of them readable in full right now. A civilization's library, run by a nonprofit, open to anyone with a connection. The oldest paywall of all, the one around books, pried open for good. The internet was supposed to be free. These quietly made it free again.

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@AJamesMcCarthy Really untidy out there - somebody really should straighten it up. Grab a broom already.

In June 2000, Robin Williams sat down for a conversation with George Lucas for Robin's brief weekly interview show on audible. The episode was originally thirty minutes but below you'll find the entire raw recording from two different sessions, with discussions ranging from Marlon Brando as Jabba the Hutt, to Lucas asking if Robin would voice a CG Howard the Duck for a special edition of the '86 movie 👏 Really cool

New Blog Post: A REAL Way to Replicate Measure Names & Values in Calculations. In this guest blog post, we learn how to essentially utilize Measure Names and Values in calculations. And this is no April Fool's joke this time around. Check it out: flerlagetwins.com/2026/06/a-real…

@paulapoundstone FYI I follow you and Twitter isn’t showing me your posts. I was like ‘whatever happened to Paula’ and you’ve been here all along.

@60s_Batman She was also on a game show (or Gong Show?). I was quite in love with her

@keisatsukan663 @RyanWeather I do remember shovelling that one in Scituate.

Brian Eno Answers Deep Questions from Journalist Dick Flash: Best Eno Interview You’ll See goo.gl/xl0JDD

A Soviet psychologist walked into a café in 1927 and watched a waiter do something impossible. He remembered every open order at every table. Perfectly. Without notes. Without effort. Then a table paid their bill. She asked him to repeat the order. He couldn't remember a single item. She spent the next two years figuring out why. What she found is now the operating system underneath every platform fighting for your attention. Her name was Bluma Zeigarnik, and she was a graduate student at the time, sitting with her professor Kurt Lewin, watching the waiters work the room. What caught her attention was something so ordinary that it had been happening in restaurants for centuries without anyone asking why. The waiters could remember every open order with perfect accuracy. Table four wanted the schnitzel with no sauce. Table seven had changed their wine twice. Table twelve owed for three coffees and a dessert. Every detail, held without effort, without notes, without any visible system at all. But the moment a table paid their bill, the information vanished. Completely. Lewin tested it on the spot. He called a waiter back minutes after a table had settled up and asked him to recite the order. The waiter could not do it. Not partially. Not approximately. The information was simply gone. Zeigarnik went back to her lab and spent the next two years turning that observation into one of the most replicated findings in the history of psychology. Here is what she proved, and why it changes how you think about attention, memory, and almost every piece of media you have ever consumed. She gave participants a series of tasks. Some tasks they were allowed to finish. Others were interrupted before completion. Then she tested recall across both groups. The unfinished tasks were remembered at nearly twice the rate of the completed ones. Not slightly better. Nearly twice. The brain was holding the incomplete work in a state of active tension, returning to it, keeping it warm, refusing to file it away. The finished tasks were closed, archived, released. The unfinished ones were still running. She called it the resumption goal. When the brain commits to a task and cannot complete it, it opens a file that stays open until resolution arrives. That open file consumes a portion of your cognitive bandwidth whether you are thinking about it consciously or not. It surfaces in idle moments. It pulls at the edge of your attention during other work. It is the thing you find yourself thinking about in the shower when you were not trying to think about anything at all. This is not a flaw in human cognition. It is a feature. The brain evolved to finish things. An open loop is a signal that something important is unresolved. Keeping that signal active increases the probability that you will return to it and complete it. In an environment where most tasks had real survival stakes, this was an extraordinarily useful mechanism. In the modern world, it is the most exploited vulnerability in human attention. Netflix did not invent the cliffhanger. But it industrialized it in a way no medium before it ever had. When a show ends on an unresolved question, it does not just create curiosity. It opens a file in your brain that stays active until the next episode closes it. The autoplay countdown that begins at 15 seconds is not a convenience feature. It is a precise calculation about how long the average person can tolerate an open loop before the discomfort of not knowing overrides every other intention they had for the evening. One more episode is not a choice. It is your brain doing exactly what it was designed to do: return to what is unfinished. The writers who built Lost, Breaking Bad, and Succession understood this intuitively without ever reading a psychology paper. Every episode ended on an open question. Every season finale answered three things and opened five more. The entire architecture of prestige television is a Zeigarnik machine running at industrial scale. But television is not where this gets dangerous. Every notification on your phone is an open loop. Every unread email is an open loop. Every task you wrote on a list and have not yet crossed off is an open loop. Each one is consuming a small but real portion of your available attention, pulling fractionally at your focus, degrading your capacity to be fully present in whatever you are actually doing right now. TikTok's algorithm does not just serve you content you like. It serves you content that ends one loop and immediately opens another, keeping the resumption system permanently activated so the cost of stopping always feels higher than the cost of continuing. The research on this accumulation effect is striking. Psychologists studying cognitive load have found that unfinished tasks do not sit passively in memory. They actively interrupt. They surface at the wrong moments. They are the reason you are reading something and suddenly remember an email you forgot to send. The brain is not malfunctioning. It is running its resumption system exactly as designed. It is just running it across forty open loops simultaneously, in an environment that generates new ones faster than any human nervous system was built to process. The most important practical implication Zeigarnik's research produced is one that most people use backwards. David Allen built his entire Getting Things Done system on the insight that the only way to close a cognitive open loop is to either complete the task or make a trusted commitment to complete it later. Writing something down in a system you actually trust has the same effect on the brain as finishing it. The file closes. The bandwidth is released. This is why writing a task down feels like relief even before you have done anything about it. You have not solved the problem. You have simply told your brain that the loop is registered and will be returned to, which is enough for the resumption system to stand down. The inverse is equally true and far more destructive. Every task that lives only in your head, unwritten and unscheduled, is an open loop burning cognitive resources around the clock. The mental cost is not proportional to the size of the task. A tiny nagging obligation consumes the same active tension as a major project. Your brain does not discriminate by importance. It discriminates by completion. Zeigarnik published her findings in 1927. The paper sat in academic literature for decades before anyone outside psychology paid attention to it. Then television got good. Then the smartphone arrived. Then the entire attention economy was engineered, largely by people who understood intuitively what she had proven scientifically: an open loop is the most powerful hook available to anyone who wants to hold human attention. Netflix knew it. Instagram knew it. Every designer who ever made a notification badge red instead of grey knew it. The café in Vienna is long gone. The mechanism she discovered there is now the operating system underneath every platform fighting for your time. Every "to be continued." Every unread notification. Every thread that ends with "part 2 tomorrow." All of it is the same waiter, the same unpaid bill, the same brain refusing to let go of what it has not yet finished. Zeigarnik noticed it over coffee in 1927. A century later, it is the most valuable insight in the history of media. And nobody taught it to you in school.

@DanLamothe Shocked m, SHOCKED he would lie about such a thing

@JSamwise Storytelling disaster. Writers needed an excuse to get the dragon over the wall and this was the best they could do.

@ClueHeywood *Exactly* wrong.

@TimInHonolulu Design by Albert Speer and Associates

Here’s a short video I made that shows off the equipment, raw shots, and final product of my latest sun/rocket photo. Shots like these are a lot of work to chase down, but so worth it!

@paulapoundstone The ladies next door are married and it’s awful. They keep inviting me over for Thai food and they let me play with their Newfie.

This summer, staff writer Charlie Wood (@walkingthedot) joined hundreds of physicists on a journey to Helgoland, the birthplace of quantum mechanics. The conversation was light, centering around questions like, where does our reality come from? quantamagazine.org/its-a-mess-a-b…

@Macbaconai

@lippyent AI BS

@1qt_exe Ione