BatesLine linkblog

Gen Z is engineering an analog future -- and it's at least a $5 billion opportunity | Fortune

"My conversations with 13- to 25-year-olds revealed the core tension: a longing for a past when they were tech-free and owned their own attention.

"'I am nostalgic for a time when I was present, when my generation was between 5 and 10, when we were still doing things in the real world,' shared 19-year-old Nancy, a university student in London, 'I don't remember what I watched yesterday on TikTok, but I remember what I did years ago when I didn't have a phone.'...

"That pushback against the perceived digital prison is now a market. Analog and 'pre-smartphone' experiences -- digital detox cabins, phone-free clubs, dumb phones -- are scaling fast. Unplugged, the UK's first digital-detox cabin company, has expanded from a handful of locations in 2020 to over 50 in 2026."

Repost: Susan Got What Was Coming To Her

"The evil attempting to ensorcel Susan is not dramatic. She doesn't murder babies (not even in the womb). She doesn't starve or whip innocent children. She's just an ordinary young woman, interested in ordinary things, like lipstick and nylons. So, obviously, missing out on Narnia? Maybe going to Hell? This is totally unfair, right?

"But what if it is not?

"St. John Bosco, a Catholic saint, once had a vision of Hell. To his horror, he saw young men he had taught burning there, boys whom he thought of as good and hard-working. One of the causes for this suffering, he was told, was idleness...they had drifted gently away from God, stopped praying, and fallen into gossip and laziness, and this spiritual laziness slowly wafted them away from Heaven.

"He found that being polite, respectful, and avoiding big sins was not enough...if they rejected grace, hid sin, or did not give their heart entirely to God....

"If you had gone to Narnia and you had been granted a gift that billions of people would have given their lives for--to walk with Aslan and see him in the flesh--and you let yourself be seduced by worldly things and forgot Aslan...

"If you turned away from good, in its papable leonine form, to scramble after evil, in its mundane, boring, just drifting away from good form...

...wouldn't you deserve what's coming to you?"

NEET: Not in Education, Employment or Training. It's too late to fix this, but...

The lament of a Christian young man between a Millennial and a GenZ:

"I can't use my degree in a helping profession, which supposedly needed more men, because it went woke. Now, I'm on my fourth career. I have been passed over for multiple positions because I was a man instead of a woman. The people who passed me over admitted to it. I finally gave up and started a business, but artificial intelligence and inflation undercut me. Some of those who helped me to establish my business even told me they were hoping to mentor a woman instead. In addition, even some of my customers wanted to work with a female-owned business....

"I'm now a skilled tradesman. I live on my own, with no debt and money in the bank... but I have a non-zero chance of dying at work, and overwhelming overtime, which I can't get out of. For the privilege, I had to be turned away at the door by multiple other trades, because they refused to work with some college boy."

Why Is Pete Hegseth Purging Women From Command? Doug Wilson Is Why. - Mother Jones

This article is by a biased left-wing writer in a left-wing magazine, but nevertheless Doug Wilson, the founder of the modern classical education movement, and the community he has gathered in Moscow, Idaho, come across in a positive light.

Microsoft warns hotel/airport Wi-Fi is being hijacked to steal your login | PCWorld

"In a recent Microsoft Security Blog post, the company has raised awareness of a widespread attack campaign called CaptiveCrunch. In short, Russian hackers are using manipulated DNS queries to redirect users to phishing sites that mimic Microsoft's official online services. As a result, Microsoft is warning against the use of public Wi-Fi networks.

"With these fake phishing sites, the attackers are attempting to intercept and steal login credentials for Microsoft accounts. Some security researchers previously published a warning to this effect back in July, and now Microsoft is supplementing that report with its own new information based on what it has been monitoring since May 2026.

"According to the report, the attackers redirect users--for example, those who are logging into their Microsoft accounts via a hotel Wi-Fi network--to imitation phishing sites. There, the attackers capture device and OAuth codes, which they can use to take over said Microsoft accounts."

RELATED: I use public Wi-Fi despite the risks. Here's how I keep safe

Chesterton's Fence: A Lesson in Thinking

"Chesterton's Fence is a principle that reminds us to look before we leap. To understand before we act. It's a cautionary reminder to understand why something is the way it is before meddling in change.

"The principle comes from a parable by G.K. Chesterton.

"'There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."'"

10 Things From the 2000s That Are Now Collectible--and Valuable - Mental Floss

iPods, Pokemon Cards, Tamagotchi, old game consoles, DVDs, and VCR tapes are on the list. See also 6 Rare Disney VHS Tapes That Are Worth a Lot of Money Today.

On Violations of LLM Review Policies - ICML Blog

The International Conference of Machine Learning identified 497 papers because 398 reciprocal reviewers used an LLM to write the review when they had promised not to use AI. "At a high level, the LLM detection involved watermarking submission PDFs with hidden LLM instructions, which would subtly influence any review produced via an LLM.... First, we created a dictionary of 170,000 phrases. For each paper, we sampled two phrases randomly from this dictionary. The probability with which a given pair of phrases is picked is thus smaller than one in ten billion. We watermarked the PDF of each paper submitted with instructions, visible only to an LLM, instructing it to include the two selected phrases in the review. (A human reading the PDF would not directly see this watermark.)"

John O'Sullivan on O'Sullivan's First Law on National Review Online

Often miscredited to Robert Conquest, O'Sullivan's First Law says, "All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing." His reasoning: "I cite as supporting evidence the ACLU, the Ford Foundation, and the Episcopal Church. The reason is, of course, that people who staff such bodies tend to be the sort who don't like private profit, business, making money, the current organization of society, and, by extension, the Western world. At which point Michels's Iron Law of Oligarchy takes over -- and the rest follows."

Students Say Holberton School Bootcamp Is Like 'Lord of the Flies' - Business Insider

I'm not shocked by this. Friends tell me that the Holberton grads they've dealt with have generally been eager but ill-prepared. Learning to code -- learning how the syntax of a computer language works, how to use the development tools, how to build a running program -- is important, but it's not the same as learning how to solve problems or how to design and integrate large software systems involving multiple engineers.