Apple has set a new dead­line of November 1, 2026 for all Patreon cre­ators to switch from Patreon’s legacy billing sys­tem to the App Store’s in-app pur­chase sys­tem in the Patreon app on the iPhone and iPad, as re­ported by TechCrunch.

Note: This im­age has been edited to in­clude a pile of cash.

Patreon is a plat­form where cre­ators such as YouTubers can re­ceive pay­ments from fans, which can be a valu­able rev­enue stream along­side ads and spon­sor­ships.

Apple ini­tially told Patreon that its cre­ators must move to the App Store’s in-app pur­chase sys­tem by November 2025, or else Patreon would risk re­moval from the App Store, but the dead­line was pushed back. Apple con­sid­ers pay­ments from sup­port­ers to cre­ators on Patreon to be dig­i­tal goods that it is en­ti­tled to re­ceive a com­mis­sion on.

Apple re­ceives a 30% com­mis­sion on in-app pur­chases and sub­scrip­tions, but this drops to 15% for a sub­scrip­tion that has been on­go­ing for more than a year.

Patreon gives cre­ators the op­tion to ei­ther in­crease their prices in the iOS app only, or ab­sorb the fee them­selves, keep­ing prices the same across plat­forms.

On the iPhone and iPad, Patreon users who wish to sup­port a cre­ator can side­step the App Store’s com­mis­sion by com­plet­ing their pay­ment via Patreon’s web­site.

Patreon said it is dis­ap­pointed with how Apple has nav­i­gated this pol­icy.

According to TechCrunch, only 4% of Patreon cre­ators are still us­ing the plat­for­m’s legacy billing sys­tem, with the rest hav­ing al­ready switched over.

Patreon has shared a FAQ with more de­tails for cre­ators.

“[Nvidia CEO] Jensen Huang Is Begging You to Stop Being So Negative About AI” — Headline from Gizmodo

Guys, enough is enough. Bullying is a se­ri­ous is­sue, and it’s time for me to speak out. There’s an ex­tremely hurt­ful nar­ra­tive go­ing around that my prod­uct, a rev­o­lu­tion­ary new tech­nol­ogy that ex­ists to scam the el­derly and make you dis­trust any­thing you see on­line, is harm­ful to so­ci­ety. This slan­der is to­tally un­war­ranted, and I would re­ally ap­pre­ci­ate it if every­one would stop be­ing so mean about this thing I just in­vested a bil­lion dol­lars in.

As some­one who des­per­ately needs this tech­nol­ogy to work out, I can hon­estly say it is the most es­sen­tial tool ever cre­ated in all of hu­man his­tory. Don’t mer­ci­lessly ridicule it just be­cause it steals the joy out of your hob­bies and cre­ates sex­u­ally ex­plicit im­ages of women with­out their con­sent. Seriously, please stop! It re­ally hurts my feel­ings.

It’s easy to throw stones if you think about the job dis­place­ment and eco­log­i­cal de­struc­tion caused by this point­less tech­nol­ogy. But such black-and-white, not-want­ing-bil­lion­aires-to-get-richer think­ing is, quite frankly, cruel. You can’t just mea­sure the value of some­thing in terms of “whether or not it makes every­thing worse for every­one.” The world is much more com­pli­cated than that.

This tech­nol­ogy is go­ing to fuel in­no­va­tion across in­dus­tries and solve all prob­lems of fem­i­nism and equal rights. Yes, it’s ex­pand­ing the sur­veil­lance state, and yes, it’s de­stroy­ing the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem, and yes, it’s be­ing trained on copy­righted work with­out per­mis­sion, and yes, it’s be­ing used to cre­ate lethal au­tonomous weapons sys­tems that can iden­tify, tar­get, and kill with­out hu­man in­put, but… I for­get my point, but ul­ti­mately, I think you should em­brace it.

Lately, I feel like I just can’t win with you guys. Please, just use my evil tech­nol­ogy. What’s so wrong with that? Just use it. I’m beg­ging you. I want to con­tinue liv­ing my im­moral tech­no­fas­cist life with­out any crit­i­cism.

If you’d like to make a trans­la­tion of this post, check out the in­struc­tions of how to do that here. Thank you so much for mak­ing this thing ac­ces­si­ble to more folks!

Wanna be the first(ish) to see my new stuff when it comes out? Sign up for my very low-vol­ume, max­i­mum once-a-month

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Vitamin D & Omega-3 have a larger ef­fect on de­pres­sion than an­ti­de­pres­sants

⏱ This post is over years old.

Proceed at own risk.

The “standardized ef­fect size” of an­ti­de­pres­sants on de­pres­sion, vs placebo, is around 0.4. (On av­er­age; some peo­ple re­spond much bet­ter or much worse.) This is like go­ing from a C to a C+.

In con­trast: the ef­fect size of 1500 mg/​day of “≥60% EPA” Omega-3 sup­ple­ments — which are cheaper & have fewer side ef­fects than an­ti­de­pres­sants — is a bit higher, around 0.6. This is like go­ing from a C to a B–.

But, much bet­ter: the ef­fect size of 5000 IU/day of Vitamin D is around 1.8. This is like go­ing from a C to an A–! It works even for peo­ple who don’t have a Vitamin D in­suf­fi­ciency, which al­most half of American adults do.

Even if you’re al­ready tak­ing Vitamin D & Omega-3, you may still not be tak­ing enough. The “official” rec­om­men­da­tions are all sev­eral times too low, and newer re­search shows that the of­fi­cial “max safe dose” for Vitamin D is 2 times too low. Both these sup­ple­ments are safe, cheap, and over-the-counter, with pos­i­tive side-ef­fects (on Covid & cog­ni­tion).

So, un­less you have spe­cific rea­sons to not take Vitamin D & Omega-3 — (kidney stones, blood thin­ners, etc) — please try them, for at least a month! They could save your men­tal health. Maybe even your life.

In Alicetown, the av­er­age per­son has 4 younger cousins.

In Bobtown, the av­er­age per­son has 3 younger cousins.

Alright, not so sur­pris­ing. You may not even no­tice a dif­fer­ence.

In Alicetown, the av­er­age per­son has 4 limbs.

In Bobtown, the av­er­age per­son has 3 limbs.

It’s the same ab­solute dif­fer­ence (4 vs 3) and rel­a­tive dif­fer­ence (3/4). So what makes limbs more sur­pris­ing than cousins? Well, partly it’s more dra­matic & vis­i­ble, but also be­cause: we ex­pect high vari­a­tion in the num­ber of some­one’s younger cousins, but not their num­ber of limbs.

This is why sci­en­tists cal­cu­late an “effect size” or “standardized mean dif­fer­ence” (“mean” = av­er­age). We take the dif­fer­ence be­tween two groups, then di­vide by the to­tal amount of vari­a­tion, to ac­count for how sur­pris­ing a dif­fer­ence is.

Unfortunately for laypeo­ple, the ef­fect size is usu­ally just re­ported as a num­ber, like “+0.74” for spac­ing out your study­ing vs cram­ming, or “–0.776″ for sleep de­pri­va­tion on at­ten­tion.

But what’s that mean? How can we make these num­bers in­tu­itive?

Well, a com­mon way for data to be is a bell-shaped curve (also called a “normal dis­tri­b­u­tion”). And most of us are, alas, well-ac­quainted with the bell curve in school grades. (“grading on a curve”)

So: school grades give us a use­ful way to think about stan­dard­ized ef­fect sizes! We can now con­vert that num­ber into an ac­tual let­ter grade:

For ex­am­ple: spac­ing out your study­ing, rel­a­tive to cram­ming, will on av­er­age lift your test scores from a C to a B–. (effect size = +0.74) And short-term sleep de­pri­va­tion, rel­a­tive to healthy sleep, will on av­er­age tank your abil­ity to pay at­ten­tion from a C to a D+. (effect size: –0.776)

But it’s not lim­ited to just grades & aca­d­e­mic per­for­mance. Effect sizes can also help us un­der­stand any kind of dif­fer­ence be­tween groups, in ob­ser­va­tion or in ex­per­i­ments!

Let’s use our school grade anal­ogy, to in­ter­pret ef­fect sizes on men­tal health:

What’s an “F in men­tal health”? By de­f­i­n­i­tion of a bell curve, ~2.3% of peo­ple are be­low –2 sigma (an “F”). (See: this bell curve cal­cu­la­tor.) In Canada, ~2.6% of peo­ple had sui­ci­dal ideation in 2022, while in the US, it was ~4.9% in 2019. So, it’s not too far off to say: “F in men­tal health = lit­er­ally sui­ci­dal”. (Also, re­minder that ~4% is 1-in-25 peo­ple. You likely know some­one, or are some­one, who will feel sui­ci­dal this year. Please reach out to your friends & loved ones!)

What’s a “D in men­tal health”? ~16% of peo­ple are be­low –1 sigma (a “D”) on a bell curve. The Keyes 2002 study es­ti­mated that ~14.1% of adults meet the DSM-III cri­te­ria for a ma­jor de­pres­sive episode. So, D = Depressed.

What’s an av­er­age “C in men­tal health”? ~68% of peo­ple are within a sigma of av­er­age (a “C”) on a bell curve. Same above study found that 56.6 per­cent had mod­er­ate men­tal health. They were nei­ther “languishing” nor “flourishing”. I guess C = Could Be Worse.

What’s a “B in men­tal health”? ~16% of peo­ple are above +1 sigma (a “B”) on a bell curve. Same above study found that 17.2% of adults are “flourishing”. Good for them! B = Flourishing, life is good.

What’s an “A in men­tal health”? I don’t know who these freaks are. I ac­tu­ally could not find any sci­en­tific stud­ies on “the +2 sigma in well-be­ing”. In con­trast, there’s lots of re­search on sui­ci­dal ideation, the –2 sigma in well-be­ing. In the ab­sence of any ac­tual data, I’ll just say: A = AWESOME

So, if an in­ter­ven­tion is found to have an ef­fect size of +1.0, that’s like go­ing up a let­ter grade. If some­thing’s found to have an ef­fect size of -2.0, that’s like go­ing down two let­ter grades. And so on.

Okay, so how do we get peo­ples’ “mental health grades” up?

Let’s look at an­ti­de­pres­sants, Omega-3, and Vitamin D, in turn:

The good news is they work. The bad news is they don’t work as well as you’d think they may work.

Cipriani et al 2018 is a re­cent meta-analy­sis (a study col­lect­ing lots of pre­vi­ous stud­ies) that in­ves­ti­gated 21 dif­fer­ent an­ti­de­pres­sants. The most ef­fec­tive an­ti­de­pres­sant, Amitriptyline, rel­a­tive to placebo, had an Odds Ratio of 2.13 — which con­verts to a Cohen’s d ef­fect size of 0.417 — which is “small-medium” ac­cord­ing to Cohen’s rec­om­men­da­tions. Or, by our school-let­ter-grade com­par­i­son: the best an­ti­de­pres­sant would take your men­tal health grade from an F to F+, or C to C+.

From Figure 3 of that pa­per, you can see that Amitriptyline has the high­est es­ti­mated ef­fect size, while the side ef­fects are no worse than placebo:

Sure, “F to F+” can be life­sav­ing, but… y’­know… that’s not a lot. And again, this is the ef­fect on av­er­age. Some peo­ple re­spond much bet­ter to an­ti­de­pres­sants… while some re­spond much worse.

Keep get­ting con­fused on which fat is what? Me too. So, here’s a crash course on var­i­ous fats:

Fatty acids are chains of car­bons & hy­dro­gens + two oxy­gens. They say “OOH” at one end, and “HHH” at the other end:

A sat­u­rated fatty acid is one where all the car­bons’ free spots are filled up with hy­dro­gens. (Hence, “saturated”) This makes the mol­e­cule stick straight out. This is why long sat­u­rated fatty acids — like those found in but­ter — tend to be solid at room tem­per­a­ture.

In con­trast, un­sat­u­rated fatty acids have at least one hy­dro­gen miss­ing. This causes them to have a dou­ble-bond “kink” in the mol­e­cule. This makes them not stick out, which is why un­sat­u­rated fats tend to be liq­uid at room tem­per­a­ture. Mono-unsaturated fatty acids (MUFAs) — like in olive oil — only have one kink. Poly-unsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) — like in fatty fish — have two or more kinks. Let’s be ma­ture adults about this, please.

For com­plete­ness: trans fats are un­sat­u­rated fats whose “kink” is twisted around, caus­ing them to go straight. That is the worst sen­tence I’ve writ­ten all month. The twisted kink is caused by the hy­dro­gens be­ing on op­po­site sides, hence “trans”. (And yes, if they’re on the same side it’s “cis”. Latin was a mis­take.) The mol­e­cule be­ing straight is why trans fats — which mar­garine used to be full of — are solid at room tem­per­a­ture, de­spite be­ing an un­sat­u­rated fat.

It’s neat when­ever you can trace the his­tory of some­thing right down to its atoms! Margarine was first in­vented be­cause it’s cheaper, and is spread­able straight from the fridge, un­like but­ter. Margarine (used to be) made by tak­ing un­sat­u­rated veg­etable oils, which were cheaper than an­i­mal fats, then pump­ing a bunch of hy­dro­gens into it (hence, “hydrogenated oils”). If you com­pletely hy­dro­genate an oil, it be­comes a sat­u­rated fat. But they only par­tially hy­dro­genated those oils, lead­ing to trans fats, which were cheaper & a spread­able semi-solid at fridge tem­per­a­ture.

In the 1970s & 80s, the US Food & Drug Administration con­cluded that trans fats were not harm­ful to hu­mans, and nu­tri­tion­ists pro­moted mar­garine over but­ter, be­cause but­ter had “unhealthy” sat­u­rated fats. But in the early 1990s, sci­en­tists re­al­ized that trans fats were even worse for you than sat­u­rated fats. Only in the 2010′s, did most Western coun­tries start of­fi­cially ban­ning trans fats. Reminder: pol­icy is of­ten decades be­hind sci­ence.

I need to stop go­ing on in­fo­dump tan­gents. Anyway, Omega-3 is any fatty acid with its first kink at the 3rd car­bon from the Omega end (“HHH”), though it can have more kinks later down the chain. (And yes, Omega-6 has its first kink at the 6th car­bon, and Omega-9 has its first kink at the 9th car­bon. There’s noth­ing phys­i­cally pre­vent­ing Omega-4 or Omega-5′s from ex­ist­ing, but due to some quirk of evo­lu­tion, Omega-3, -6, and -9 are the ones bi­o­log­i­cal life uses most. As far as I can tell, there’s no spe­cific rea­son they’re all mul­ti­ples of 3. Probably just a co­in­ci­dence. There is a less com­mon Omega-7.)

Finally, there’s three main types of Omega-3: EPA (Eicosapentaenoic Acid), DHA (Docosahexaenoic Acid), and ALA (Alpha-Linolenic Acid). ALA is mostly found in plants like chia seeds & wal­nuts, while EPA & DHA mostly come from seafood, though there are al­gae-based ve­gan sources.

EPA & DHA are the fo­cus of this sec­tion. For bio-me­chan­i­cal rea­sons I don’t un­der­stand but I as­sume some­one else does: EPA is the one as­so­ci­ated with anti-in­flam­ma­tion, bet­ter brain health, and less de­pres­sion… while DHA is­n’t. (But DHA is still needed for other stuff, like your neu­rons’ cell walls, so don’t cut them out com­pletely!)

All the above info in a Venn (technically Euler) di­a­gram:

Okay, enough yap. Time for the ac­tual data:

Sublette et al 2011 is an older meta-analy­sis, but it’s the only one I could find that tries to es­ti­mate the ac­tual “dose-response” curve, which shows: how much ef­fect, for how much treat­ment. Why is that im­por­tant? Because one prob­lem with many meta-analy­ses is they’ll do some­thing like: “Study 1 gave pa­tients 1 gram of med­i­cine and saw a +1 im­prove­ment in dis­ease, Study 2 gave 10 grams and saw +4 im­prove­ment, Study 3 gave 100 grams and saw neg­a­tive –5 im­prove­ment… the av­er­age of +1, +4, and –5 is zero… there­fore the med­i­cine’s ef­fect is zero.” …As men­tioned briefly ear­lier, this is a mean­ing­less mean. That’s why we want to know the re­sponse at each dose.

So, the Sublette meta-analy­sis gath­ered ran­dom­ized tri­als study­ing Omega-3 on de­pres­sion (vs placebo, of course) and got the fol­low­ing dose-re­sponse curve.⤵ Note that the hor­i­zon­tal axis is not just amount of to­tal Omega-3, but specif­i­cally the ex­tra amount of “unopposed” EPA, above the amount of DHA. Or in other words, “EPA mi­nus DHA”:

The top ef­fect size is around +0.558, which is like go­ing from an F to D–, or C to B–. You get this max­i­mum ef­fect around 1 to 2 grams of ex­tra EPA, and too much EPA gets worse re­sults. The meta-analy­sis finds that Omega-3 sup­ple­ments that are ~60% EPA (and the rest DHA) are op­ti­mal.

This find­ing is roughly in line with later meta-analy­ses. Liao et al 2019 also finds that ~1 gram of ≥60% EPA is best, but ac­tu­ally found a much higher ef­fect size: +1.03. Kelaiditis et al 2023 also finds 1 to 2g of ≥60% EPA is best, but found a lower ef­fect size of +0.43… which is still as good as the best an­ti­de­pres­sant!

Either way, let’s boil this down to a rec­om­men­da­tion. You want around 1 gram of EPA a day. So if your sup­ple­ments are 60% EPA, you need 1 gram ÷ 0.6 ~= 1.667 grams = 1667 mil­ligrams. Let’s round this down for con­ve­nience: get 1500 mg/​day of 60%-EPA Omega-3 sup­ple­ments.

In com­par­i­son, most of­fi­cial health or­ga­ni­za­tions rec­om­mend “250–500 mg com­bined EPA and DHA each day for healthy adults.” That is over three times too low, at least for op­ti­mal ef­fects on de­pres­sion. Which, as we cal­cu­lated above, is prob­a­bly around 1500 mg/​day. (The of­fi­cial safe dose is 5000 mg/​day)

Finally, a (small) study di­rectly in­ves­ti­gat­ing the link be­tween sui­cide & Omega-3. Sublette et al 2006: “Low [DHA] and low Omega-3 pro­por­tions […] pre­dicted risk of sui­ci­dal be­hav­ior among de­pressed pa­tients over the 2-year pe­riod.” Though keep in mind this is a small study, and it’s ob­ser­va­tional not ex­per­i­men­tal. Also, weird that con­trary to the above stud­ies on de­pres­sion, DHA pre­dicted sui­cide but not EPA. Not sure what to make of that.

Bonus: Omega-3 may also boost cog­ni­tion? Shahinfar et al 2025: “Enhancement of global cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties was ob­served with in­creas­ing omega-3 dosage up to 1500 mg/​day. [effect size = 1.00, like go­ing from a grade of C to B!], fol­lowed by down­ward trend at higher doses.”

Ghaemi et al 2024 is a meta-analy­sis on Vitamin D on de­pres­sion. Again, it ac­tu­ally es­ti­mates a dose-re­sponse curve! Below is Figure 1 + Table 2, show­ing the ef­fect of Vitamin D dosage on de­pres­sion vs placebo. The solid line is the av­er­age es­ti­mated ef­fect, dashed lines are 95% con­fi­dence in­ter­val. Note the ef­fect size is neg­a­tive in this fig­ure, be­cause they’re mea­sur­ing re­duc­tion in de­pres­sive symp­toms:

The up­per range of un­cer­tainty is low­est at 5000 IU (International Units) of Vitamin D a day, with an es­ti­mated ef­fect size of 1.82, with a 95% un­cer­tainty range, from 0.98 to 2.66. An ef­fect size of 1.82 is like tak­ing your men­tal health from an F to a C–, or a C to an A–! And even in the most pes­simistic case, 0.98, that’s still over twice as ef­fec­tive as the top an­ti­de­pres­sant!

This meta-analy­sis in­cludes tri­als with par­tic­i­pants who don’t have Vitamin D de­fi­ciency. There’s still a good ef­fect of Vitamin D on de­pres­sion for them, even if smaller! Though, you prob­a­bly are lack­ing Vitamin D: Liu et al 2018 finds that a bit un­der half of all adults (41.4%) have Vitamin D Insufficiency.

And that’s ac­cord­ing to the of­fi­cial rec­om­men­da­tion, of 400-800 IU a day… which is is too damn low. Even the of­fi­cial max­i­mum safe dose of Vitamin D, of 4000 IU/day, is too low. McCullough et al 2019 gave over thou­sands of pa­tients 5,000 to 10,000 IU/day, for seven years, and there were zero cases of se­ri­ous side ef­fects. This is in line with Billington et al 2020, a 3-year-long dou­ble-blinded ran­dom­ized con­trolled trial, where they found “the safety pro­file of vi­t­a­min D sup­ple­men­ta­tion is sim­i­lar for doses of 400, 4000, and 10,000 IU/day.” (though “mild hy­per­cal­cemia” in­creased from 3% to 9%. IMHO, that’s a small cost for re­duc­ing the risk of ma­jor de­pres­sion & sui­cide.)

And it makes sense that 10,000 IU a day should be safe. Your skin, ex­posed to the Sun’s ul­tra­vi­o­let rays, can syn­the­size up to (the equiv­a­lent of) 10,000 IU a day, be­fore plateau­ing out. Source is Vieth 1999: “Because vi­t­a­min D is po­ten­tially toxic, in­take of [1000 IU/day] has been avoided even though the weight of ev­i­dence shows that the cur­rently ac­cepted [limit] of [2000 IU/day] is too low by at least 5-fold.” (So why are all the of­fi­cial sources still so para­noid about Vitamin D? Well, un­for­tu­nately, of­fi­cial/​gov­ern­men­tal pol­icy is al­ways a few decades be­hind the sci­ence in any field. See Also: the trans fat de­bate, every­thing about ed­u­ca­tional pol­icy.)

Speaking of the Sun, why take sup­ple­ments in­stead of just get­ting Vitamin D from Sun ex­po­sure? Well, skin can­cer. But also: be­cause Sun-Skin D varies greatly de­pend­ing on the sea­son, your lat­i­tude, and your skin type. There’s less ul­tra­vi­o­let rays from the Sun in win­ter/​fall, and at lat­i­tudes fur­ther from the equa­tor. And the darker your skin is, the less Vitamin D your skin makes for the same amount of Sun ex­po­sure. As ex­pected from the bio-physics of skin, Black adults have the high­est preva­lence of Vitamin D de­fi­ciency (82.1%!!), fol­lowed by Hispanic adults (62.9%). (But hey, at least Black adults have the low­est in­ci­dence of skin can­cer. You win some you lose some.) The point is: speak­ing as some­one with Southeast Asian skin, who’s cur­rently in Canada dur­ing win­ter… even if I stood out­side naked for hours, I’d get ap­prox­i­mately zero IU/day of Vitamin D from the Sun. Thus: sup­ple­ments.

Finally, a meta-analy­sis di­rectly mea­sur­ing the ef­fect of Vitamin D on sui­cide rates. Yu et al 2025: “Vitamin D in pa­tients with [suicidal be­hav­iours] were sig­nif­i­cantly lower than in con­trols (standardized mean dif­fer­ence: –0.69, or a ‘medium’ dif­fer­ence)”. Reminder that this pa­per by it­self only mea­sures cor­re­la­tion, not cau­sa­tion — but com­bined with the above ex­per­i­ments of Vitamin D on de­pres­sion, I think it’s rea­son­able to guess it’s partly causal.

* Almost half of you have a Vitamin D de­fi­ciency ac­cord­ing to the of­fi­cial rec­om­men­da­tion (800 IU/day).

* And the of­fi­cial rec­om­men­da­tion is way too low. Even the of­fi­cial max­i­mum safe dose (4000 IU/day) is be­low the op­ti­mal Vitamin D for de­pres­sion (5000 IU/day) or what your body can pro­duce from the Sun in op­ti­mal con­di­tions (10,000 IU/day). Recent ran­dom­ized con­trolled tri­als con­firm that 10,000 IU/day is, in­deed, mostly safe.

* Your daily re­minder than of­fi­cial pol­icy is of­ten decades be­hind the sci­ence.

Bonus: Vitamin D sup­ple­men­ta­tion was found in sev­eral ran­dom­ized con­trolled tri­als to re­duce mor­tal­ity from Covid-19! It prob­a­bly helps guard against in­fluenza too, though the ev­i­dence is small & early.

Scurvy is caused by a lack of Vitamin C. It’s a con­di­tion that causes your wounds to re-open up & teeth to fall out. Scurvy used to kill al­most half(!) of all sailors on ma­jor ex­pe­di­tions; it’s es­ti­mated mil­lions died. It can be cured by eat­ing lemons.

Rickets is mostly caused by a lack of Vitamin D. It’s a con­di­tion where kids’ bones go all soft and de­formed. During the Industrial Revolution, up to 80% of kids suf­fered from it. It can be pre­vented with cod liver oil.

Goiters is mostly caused by a lack of Iodine. It’s a con­di­tion where the thy­roid gland in your neck swells up painfully, to the size of an ap­ple. During WWI, a third of adult men had goi­ters. It can be pre­vented with iodized salt.

About 1 in 4 peo­ple are ex­pected to have clin­i­cal de­pres­sion some­time in their life. Depression is the #1 source of the global “burden from dis­ease” in the men­tal health cat­e­gory, and that cat­e­gory is the #6 bur­den of dis­ease in the world, above Alzheimer’s, malaria, and sex­u­ally trans­mit­ted in­fec­tions.

The ef­fec­tive al­tru­ists are all, “woah for just $3000 you can pre­vent a child’s death from malaria” — and that’s great! save them kids! — but where’s the fan­fare for the ac­cu­mu­lat­ing ev­i­dence that, “woah with cheap daily sup­ple­ments we can save mil­lions from sui­cide & de­pressed lives”?

Over and over again through­out his­tory, some hor­rific thing that caused mil­lions to suf­fer, turned out to be “yeah you were miss­ing this one mol­e­cule lol”. To be clear: not every­thing is gonna be that sim­ple, and men­tal health is not “just” chem­istry. Also, all the num­bers on this page have with large er­ror bars & un­cer­tainty, more re­search is needed.

But, as of right now, I feel I can at least con­fi­dently claim the fol­low­ing:

* Vitamin D and Omega-3 are both at least on par with an­ti­de­pres­sants.

* The ev­i­dence is much stronger for Vitamin D; it’s very plau­si­bly at least twice as good as an­ti­de­pres­sants.

* Both sup­ple­ments are cheap and safe, so what’s the harm of try­ing? (positive “expected value” for this bet)

MY SPECIFIC RECOMMENDATIONS FOR YOU TO DO A. S.A.P:

* Go to a phar­macy, buy the fol­low­ing sup­ple­ments over-the-counter, in what­ever form you like: (I like the easy-to-swal­low gel cap­sules)

* Vitamin D

🌱 By de­fault, Vitamin D sup­ple­ments are de­rived from… (quick web search)… the grease in sheep’s wool? Huh. Also fish liver oil. Anyway, if you’re ve­gan, make sure your bot­tle specif­i­cally says “vegan” or “from lichen/​mush­rooms”. (If you’re veg­e­tar­ian, the sheep’s-wool Vitamin D is fine, they don’t kill the sheep for it.)

* 🌱 By de­fault, Vitamin D sup­ple­ments are de­rived from… (quick web search)… the grease in sheep’s wool? Huh. Also fish liver oil. Anyway, if you’re ve­gan, make sure your bot­tle specif­i­cally says “vegan” or “from lichen/​mush­rooms”. (If you’re veg­e­tar­ian, the sheep’s-wool Vitamin D is fine, they don’t kill the sheep for it.)

* Omega-3 where EPA is ~60% of the Omega-3 to­tal. For ex­am­ple, my 500mg Omega-3 cap­sules have 300mg EPA, 200mg DHA.

🌱 By de­fault, Omega-3 sup­ple­ments come from fish. If you’re veg(etari)?an, there are plant-based sources of Omega-3, but look care­fully: most ve­gan Omega-3 sup­ple­ments pro­vide more DHA than EPA, which the above stud­ies sug­gest fully can­cel out the an­ti­de­pres­sant ef­fect. Double check the nu­tri­tional la­bel to make sure it’s ≥60% EPA. For ex­am­ple, this one is 300mg EPA + 200mg DHA. (not an af­fil­i­ate link)

* 🌱 By de­fault, Omega-3 sup­ple­ments come from fish. If you’re veg(etari)?an, there are plant-based sources of Omega-3, but look care­fully: most ve­gan Omega-3 sup­ple­ments pro­vide more DHA than EPA, which the above stud­ies sug­gest fully can­cel out the an­ti­de­pres­sant ef­fect. Double check the nu­tri­tional la­bel to make sure it’s ≥60% EPA. For ex­am­ple, this one is 300mg EPA + 200mg DHA. (not an af­fil­i­ate link)

* Take ~5000 IU of Vitamin D

⚠️ be cau­tious if you have kid­ney stones, or are on med­ica­tions that could in­ter­act with Vitamin D. “ask your doc­tor”.

4,000 IU is the “official max­i­mum safe dose”, if you un­der­stand­ably don’t trust a ran­dom in­ter­net blog­ger, even though she cited peer-re­viewed sources.

10,000 IU if you’re feel­ing dar­ing / have darker skin / live in less sunny cli­mates.

* ⚠️ be cau­tious if you have kid­ney stones, or are on med­ica­tions that could in­ter­act with Vitamin D. “ask your doc­tor”.

* 4,000 IU is the “official max­i­mum safe dose”, if you un­der­stand­ably don’t trust a ran­dom in­ter­net blog­ger, even though she cited peer-re­viewed sources.

* 10,000 IU if you’re feel­ing dar­ing / have darker skin / live in less sunny cli­mates.

* Take ~1500 mg of ≥60%-EPA Omega-3

⚠️ be cau­tious if you’re on blood thin­ners, or other med­ica­tions that could in­ter­act with Omega-3. again, “ask your doc­tor”.

* ⚠️ be cau­tious if you’re on blood thin­ners, or other med­ica­tions that could in­ter­act with Omega-3. again, “ask your doc­tor”.

* (Don’t quit your ex­ist­ing an­ti­de­pres­sants if they’re net-pos­i­tive for you!)

you may also want to ask your doc­tor about Amitriptyline, or those other best-ef­fect-size an­ti­de­pres­sants.

* you may also want to ask your doc­tor about Amitriptyline, or those other best-ef­fect-size an­ti­de­pres­sants.

This, if it is still vis­i­ble:

Next up, age ver­i­fi­ca­tion for ADSB?

The first im­ages from the Meteosat Third Generation-Sounder satel­lite have been shared at the European Space Conference in Brussels, show­ing how the mis­sion will pro­vide data on tem­per­a­ture and hu­mid­ity, for more ac­cu­rate weather fore­cast­ing over Europe and north­ern Africa.

The im­ages from Meteosat Third Generation-Sounder (MTG-S) show a full-disc im­age of Earth as seen from geo­sta­tion­ary or­bit, about 36 000 km above Earth’s sur­face. These im­ages were cap­tured on 15 November 2025 by the satel­lite’s Infrared Sounder in­stru­ment. In the ‘temperature’ im­age (below), the Infrared Sounder used a long-wave in­frared chan­nel, which mea­sured Earth’s sur­face tem­per­a­ture as well as the tem­per­a­ture at the top of clouds. Dark red cor­re­sponds to high tem­per­a­tures, mainly on the warmer land sur­faces, while blue cor­re­sponds to lower tem­per­a­tures, typ­i­cally on the top of clouds.As would be ex­pected, most of the warmest (dark red) ar­eas in this im­age are on the con­ti­nents of Africa and South America. In the top-cen­tre of the im­age, the out­line of the coast of west­ern Africa is clearly vis­i­ble in dark red, with the Cape Verde penin­sula, home to Senegal’s cap­i­tal Dakar, vis­i­ble as among the warmest ar­eas in this im­age. In the bot­tom-right of the im­age, the west­ern coast of Namibia and South Africa are also vis­i­ble in red be­neath a swirl of cold cloud shown in blue, while the north­east coast of Brazil is vis­i­ble in dark red on the left of the im­age.

The ‘humidity’ im­age (below) was cap­tured us­ing the Infrared Sounder’s medium-wave in­frared chan­nel, which mea­sures hu­mid­ity in Earth’s at­mos­phere. Blue colours cor­re­spond to re­gions in the at­mos­phere with higher hu­mid­ity, while red colours cor­re­spond to lower hu­mid­ity in the at­mos­phere.The out­lines of land­masses are not vis­i­ble in this im­age. The ar­eas of least at­mos­pheric hu­mid­ity, shown in dark red, are seen ap­prox­i­mately over the Sahara Desert and the Middle East (top of im­age), while a large area of ‘dry’ at­mos­phere also cov­ers part of the South Atlantic Ocean (centre of im­age). Numerous patches of high hu­mid­ity are seen in dark blue over the east­ern part of the African con­ti­nent as well as in high and low lat­i­tudes.

Below we see a close-up from MTG-Sounder of the European con­ti­nent and part of north­ern Africa. Like the first im­age above, here we see heat from land sur­faces and tem­per­a­tures at the top of clouds. The heat from the African con­ti­nent is seen in red in the lower part of the im­age, while a dark blue weather front cov­ers Spain and Portugal. The Italian penin­sula is in the cen­tre of the im­age.

Temperatures over Europe and north­ern Africa by MTG-Sounder

And the an­i­ma­tion (below) uses data from the MTG-Sounder satel­lite to track the erup­tion of Ethiopia’s Hayli Gubbi vol­cano on 23 November 2025. The back­ground im­agery shows sur­face tem­per­a­ture changes while in­frared chan­nels high­light the de­vel­op­ing ash plume. The satel­lite’s timely ob­ser­va­tions en­able track­ing of the evolv­ing ash plume over time.

MTG is a world-class Earth ob­ser­va­tion mis­sion de­vel­oped by the European Space Agency (ESA) with European part­ners to ad­dress sci­en­tific and so­ci­etal chal­lenges. The mis­sion pro­vides game-chang­ing data for fore­cast­ing weather and air qual­ity over Europe.The satel­lite’s geo­sta­tion­ary po­si­tion above the equa­tor means it main­tains a fixed po­si­tion rel­a­tive to Earth, fol­low­ing the same area on the plan­et’s sur­face as we ro­tate. This en­ables it to pro­vide cov­er­age of Europe and part of north­ern Africa on a 15-minute re­peat cy­cle. It sup­plies new data on tem­per­a­ture and hu­mid­ity over Europe every 30 min­utes, sup­ply­ing me­te­o­rol­o­gists with a com­plete weather pic­ture of the re­gion and com­ple­ment­ing data on cloud for­ma­tion and light­ning from the MTG-Imager (MTG-I) satel­lite.

ESA’s Director of Earth Observation Programmes, Simonetta Cheli, said, “Seeing the first Infrared Sounder im­ages from the MTG-Sounder satel­lite re­ally brings this mis­sion and its po­ten­tial to life. We ex­pect data from this mis­sion to change the way we fore­cast se­vere storms over Europe — and this is very ex­cit­ing for com­mu­ni­ties and cit­i­zens, as well as for me­te­o­rol­o­gists and cli­ma­tol­o­gists. As ever, the out­stand­ing work done by our teams in col­lab­o­ra­tion with long-stand­ing part­ners, in­clud­ing Eumetsat, the European Commission and dozens of European in­dus­try teams, means we now have the abil­ity to pre­dict ex­treme weather events in more ac­cu­rate and timely ways than ever be­fore.”The Infrared Sounder in­stru­ment on board MTG-S is the first European hy­per­spec­tral sound­ing in­stru­ment in geo­sta­tion­ary or­bit. It is de­signed to gen­er­ate a com­pletely new type of data prod­uct. It uses in­ter­fer­o­met­ric tech­niques, which analyse minis­cule pat­terns in light waves, to cap­ture data on tem­per­a­ture and hu­mid­ity, as well as be­ing able to mea­sure wind and trace gases in the at­mos­phere. The data will even­tu­ally be used to gen­er­ate three-di­men­sional maps of the at­mos­phere, help­ing to im­prove the ac­cu­racy of weather fore­cast­ing, es­pe­cially for now­cast­ing rapidly evolv­ing storms.“It’s fan­tas­tic to see the first im­ages from this ground­break­ing mis­sion,” said James Champion, ESA’s MTG Project Manager. “This satel­lite has been 15 years in de­vel­op­ment and will rev­o­lu­tionise weather fore­cast­ing and es­pe­cially now­cast­ing. The abil­ity to ver­ti­cally pro­file the full Earth’s disk with a re­peat cy­cle of only 30 min­utes for Europe is an in­cred­i­ble ac­com­plish­ment!”

“I’m ex­cited that we can share these first im­ages from the Infrared Sounder, which show­case just a small se­lec­tion of the 1700 in­frared chan­nels con­tin­u­ously ac­quired by the in­stru­ment as it ob­serves Earth,” said Pieter Van den Braembussche, MTG System and Payload Manager at ESA. “By com­bin­ing all 1700 chan­nels, we will soon be able to gen­er­ate three di­men­sional maps of tem­per­a­ture, hu­mid­ity and even trace gases in the at­mos­phere. This ca­pa­bil­ity will of­fer a com­pletely new per­spec­tive on Earth’s at­mos­phere, not pre­vi­ously avail­able in Europe, and is ex­pected to help fore­cast­ers pre­dict se­vere storms ear­lier than is pos­si­ble to­day.”

The MTG mis­sion cur­rently has two satel­lites in or­bit: MTG-I and MTG-S. The sec­ond Imager will be launched later in 2026.MTG-S was launched on 1 July 2025. Thales Alenia Space is the prime con­trac­tor for the over­all MTG mis­sion, with OHB Systems re­spon­si­ble for the MTG-Sounder satel­lite. Mission con­trol and data dis­tri­b­u­tion are man­aged by Eumetsat.The MTG-S satel­lite also hosts the Copernicus Sentinel-4 mis­sion, which con­sists of an ul­tra­vi­o­let, vis­i­ble and near-in­frared (UVN) imag­ing spec­trom­e­ter. Sentinel-4 de­liv­ered its first im­ages last year.

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on Wednesday that the au­tomaker is end­ing pro­duc­tion of its Model S and X ve­hi­cles, and will use the fac­tory in Fremont, California, to build Optimus hu­manoid ro­bots.

“It’s time to ba­si­cally bring the Model S and X pro­grams to an end with an hon­or­able dis­charge,” Musk said on the com­pa­ny’s fourth-quar­ter earn­ings call. “If you’re in­ter­ested in buy­ing a Model S and X, now would be the time to or­der it.”

After the orig­i­nal Roadster, the two mod­els are Tesla’s old­est ve­hi­cles, and in re­cent years the com­pany has slashed prices as global com­pe­ti­tion for elec­tric ve­hi­cles has soared. Tesla started sell­ing the Model S sedan in 2012, and the Model X SUV three years later.

On Tesla’s web­site, the Model S cur­rently starts at about $95,000, while the Model X starts at around $100,000

Tesla’s far more pop­u­lar mod­els are the 3 and Y, which ac­counted for 97% of the com­pa­ny’s 1.59 mil­lion de­liv­er­ies last year. The Model 3 now starts at about $37,000, and the Model Y is around $40,000. Tesla de­buted more af­ford­able ver­sions of the ve­hi­cles late last year.

In its earn­ings an­nounce­ment on Wednesday, Tesla re­ported its first an­nual rev­enue de­cline on record, with sales falling in three of the past four quar­ters. Musk has been try­ing to turn at­ten­tion away from tra­di­tional EVs and to­ward a fu­ture of dri­ver­less cars and hu­manoid ro­bots, ar­eas where the com­pany cur­rently has vir­tu­ally no busi­ness.

The UK Government re­cently un­veiled its ‘AI Skills Hub’, which wants to pro­vide 10 mil­lion work­ers with AI skills by 2030. The main site was de­liv­ered by PwC for the low, low price of.. £4.1 mil­lion (~$5,657,000).

It is not good. Like, at all - the UI is in­sanely bad and it’s clear that this was just a vibecoded site (to be fair, this is the AI Skills Hub, but c’­mon, where is the pride in your work? I would be ashamed to even re­lease this as a pro­to­type!)

PwC did­n’t even write any of the course con­tent! The only thing the Skills Hub does is link out to ex­ter­nal pages, like Salesforce’s free Trailhead learn­ing plat­form:

Note that I’m fairly cer­tain this course al­ready ex­isted be­fore the con­tract was even awarded, so all the site does is.. link out to other sites?

PwC it­self also ad­mits that the site does not prop­erly meet ac­ces­si­bil­ity stan­dards:

Even for those with­out a dis­abil­ity, the lack of here in this re­gard means that the site can be very con­fus­ing and buggy as a re­sult.

The site has a course on “AI and in­tel­lec­tual prop­erty”. One thing it men­tions is fair use:

Except that fair use is not a thing in the UK - that’s a US con­cept! The UK uses what’s known as “fair deal­ing”, which is more re­stric­tive than fair use, so the de­tails here are plain wrong.

The in­ter­face for this web­site has also not been clearly thought out - one glar­ing ex­am­ple is the process of ac­tu­ally en­rolling in a course.

On the course page, the “Enroll Now” but­ton is tiny, and if you don’t see it and try scrolling down to the bot­tom, you will find your­self noth­ing but a com­ment sec­tion!

Then you have other bugs too, like the “Skills & Training Gap Analysis” - which is linked at the top of the site! - ap­par­ently be­ing closed off to the pub­lic for no rea­son:

To be hon­est, see­ing this made me an­gry.

I’m an­gry at the sheer waste­ful­ness of the UK Government here. Our pub­lic ser­vices are col­laps­ing - while £4 mil­lion is ad­mit­tedly chump change for the UK gov­ern­ment, there are real peo­ple be­hind these num­bers - fam­i­lies wait­ing months for NHS ap­point­ments, chil­dren in crum­bling schools, vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple not get­ting the care they need. The waste feels par­tic­u­larly galling when you re­alise that al­most no one will ac­tu­ally use this site!

I’m also an­gry that the small web­dev busi­nesses we have here in the UK were left out of this - for less than 5% of the cost, we’d have a bet­ter web­site and help out small busi­nesses who ac­tu­ally care about their work, in­stead of hand­ing the pro­ject to a multi­na­tional com­pany that made nearly $60 bil­lion in rev­enue in a year and has zero qualms about rip­ping off the British tax­payer.

Diagrams are es­sen­tial for AI-assisted pro­gram­ming. When you’re work­ing with an AI cod­ing as­sis­tant, be­ing able to vi­su­al­ize data flows, state ma­chines, and sys­tem ar­chi­tec­ture—di­rectly in your ter­mi­nal or chat in­ter­face—makes com­plex con­cepts in­stantly gras­pable.

Mermaid is the de facto stan­dard for text-based di­a­grams. It’s bril­liant. But the de­fault ren­derer has prob­lems:

* Aesthetics — Might be per­sonal pref­er­ence, but wished they looked more pro­fes­sional

* No ter­mi­nal out­put — Can’t ren­der to ASCII for CLI tools

* Heavy de­pen­den­cies — Pulls in a lot of code for sim­ple di­a­grams

We built beau­ti­ful-mer­maid at Craft to power di­a­grams in Craft Agents. It’s fast, beau­ti­ful, and works every­where—from rich UIs to plain ter­mi­nals.

The ASCII ren­der­ing en­gine is based on mer­maid-ascii by Alexander Grooff. We ported it from Go to TypeScript and ex­tended it Thank you Alexander for the ex­cel­lent foun­da­tion! (And in­spi­ra­tion that this was pos­si­ble.)

* 15 built-in themes — And dead sim­ple to add your own

* Full Shiki com­pat­i­bil­ity — Use any VS Code theme di­rectly

npm in­stall beau­ti­ful-mer­maid

# or

bun add beau­ti­ful-mer­maid

# or

pnpm add beau­ti­ful-mer­maid

im­port { ren­der­Mer­maid } from ‘beautiful-mermaid’

const svg = await ren­der­Mer­maid(`

graph TD

A[Start] –> B{Decision}

B –>|Yes| C[Action]

B –>|No| D[End]

im­port { ren­der­Mer­maid­Ascii } from ‘beautiful-mermaid’

const ascii = ren­der­Mer­maid­Ascii(`graph LR; A –> B –> C`)

The them­ing sys­tem is the heart of beau­ti­ful-mer­maid. It’s de­signed to be both pow­er­ful and dead sim­ple.

Every di­a­gram needs just two col­ors: back­ground (bg) and fore­ground (fg). That’s it. From these two col­ors, the en­tire di­a­gram is de­rived us­ing color-mix():

const svg = await ren­der­Mer­maid(di­a­gram, {

bg: ‘#1a1b26’, // Background

fg: ‘#a9b1d6’, // Foreground

This is Mono Mode—a co­her­ent, beau­ti­ful di­a­gram from just two col­ors. The sys­tem au­to­mat­i­cally de­rives:

For richer themes, you can pro­vide op­tional “enrichment” col­ors that over­ride spe­cific de­riva­tions:

const svg = await ren­der­Mer­maid(di­a­gram, {

bg: ‘#1a1b26’,

fg: ‘#a9b1d6’,

// Optional en­rich­ment:

line: ‘#3d59a1’, // Edge/connector color

ac­cent: ‘#7aa2f7’, // Arrow heads, high­lights

muted: ‘#565f89’, // Secondary text, la­bels

sur­face: ‘#292e42’, // Node fill tint

bor­der: ‘#3d59a1’, // Node stroke

If an en­rich­ment color is­n’t pro­vided, it falls back to the color-mix() de­riva­tion. This means you can pro­vide just the col­ors you care about.

All col­ors are CSS cus­tom prop­er­ties on the el­e­ment. This means you can switch themes in­stantly with­out re-ren­der­ing:

// Switch theme by up­dat­ing CSS vari­ables

svg.style.set­Prop­erty(‘–bg’, ‘#282a36’)

svg.style.set­Prop­erty(‘–fg’, ‘#f8f8f2’)

// The en­tire di­a­gram up­dates im­me­di­ately

15 care­fully cu­rated themes ship out of the box:

im­port { ren­der­Mer­maid, THEMES } from ‘beautiful-mermaid’

const svg = await ren­der­Mer­maid(di­a­gram, THEMES[‘tokyo-night’])

Creating a theme is triv­ial. At min­i­mum, just pro­vide bg and fg:

const myTheme = {

bg: ‘#0f0f0f’,

fg: ‘#e0e0e0’,

const svg = await ren­der­Mer­maid(di­a­gram, myTheme)

Want richer col­ors? Add any of the op­tional en­rich­ments:

const myRichTheme = {

bg: ‘#0f0f0f’,

fg: ‘#e0e0e0’,

ac­cent: ‘#ff6b6b’, // Pop of color for ar­rows

muted: ‘#666666’, // Subdued la­bels

Use any VS Code theme di­rectly via Shiki in­te­gra­tion. This gives you ac­cess to hun­dreds of com­mu­nity themes:

im­port { getS­in­gle­ton­High­lighter } from ‘shiki’

im­port { ren­der­Mer­maid, fromShikiTheme } from ‘beautiful-mermaid’

// Load any theme from Shiki’s reg­istry

const high­lighter = await getS­in­gle­ton­High­lighter({

themes: [‘vitesse-dark’, ‘rose-pine’, ‘material-theme-darker’]

// Extract di­a­gram col­ors from the theme

const col­ors = fromShikiTheme(high­lighter.get­Theme(‘vitesse-dark’))

const svg = await ren­der­Mer­maid(di­a­gram, col­ors)

The fromShikiTheme() func­tion in­tel­li­gently maps VS Code ed­i­tor col­ors to di­a­gram roles:

For ter­mi­nal en­vi­ron­ments, CLI tools, or any­where you need plain text, ren­der to ASCII or Unicode box-draw­ing char­ac­ters:

im­port { ren­der­Mer­maid­Ascii } from ‘beautiful-mermaid’

// Unicode mode (default) — pret­tier box draw­ing

const uni­code = ren­der­Mer­maid­Ascii(`graph LR; A –> B`)

// Pure ASCII mode — max­i­mum com­pat­i­bil­ity

const ascii = ren­der­Mer­maid­Ascii(`graph LR; A –> B`, { use­Ascii: true })

ren­der­Mer­maid­Ascii(di­a­gram, {

use­Ascii: false, // true = ASCII, false = Unicode (default)

paddingX: 5, // Horizontal spac­ing be­tween nodes

paddingY: 5, // Vertical spac­ing be­tween nodes

boxBor­der­Padding: 1, // Padding in­side node boxes

The ASCII ren­der­ing en­gine is based on mer­maid-ascii by Alexander Grooff. We ported it from Go to TypeScript and ex­tended it with:

Thank you Alexander for the ex­cel­lent foun­da­tion!

Projects

I have a credit card with HSBC. It does­n’t see much use, but I still get a monthly state­ment from them, and an email to say it’s avail­able.

Not long ago I re­ceived a let­ter from them telling me that emails to me were be­ing “returned un­de­liv­ered” and they needed me to up­date the email ad­dress on my ac­count.

I don’t know what emails are be­ing “returned un­de­liv­ered” to HSBC, but it is­n’t any of the ones sit­ting, read, in my email client.

I logged into my ac­count, per the in­struc­tions in the let­ter, and dis­cov­ered my cor­rect email ad­dress al­ready right there, much to my… lack of sur­prise.

So I kicked off a live chat via their app, with an agent called Ankitha. Over the course of a drawn-out hour-long con­ver­sa­tion, they re­peat­edly told to tell me how to up­date my email ad­dress (which was never my ques­tion). Eventually, when they un­der­stood that my email ad­dress was al­ready cor­rect, then they con­cluded the call, say­ing (emphasis mine):

I can un­der­stand your frus­tra­tion, but if the bank has sent the let­ter, you will have to up­date the e-mail ad­dress.

This is the point at which a nor­mal per­son would prob­a­bly just change the email ad­dress in their on­line bank­ing to a “spare” email ad­dress.

But aside from the fact that I’d rather not, by this point I’d caught the scent of a deeper un­der­ly­ing is­sue. After all, did­n’t I have a con­ver­sa­tion a lit­tle like this one but with a dif­fer­ent bank, about four years ago?

Perhaps I should be grate­ful that they did­n’t say that I have to change my name, which can some­times  be sig­nif­i­cantly more awk­ward than my email

ad­dress…

So I called Customer Services di­rectly, who told me that if my email ad­dress is al­ready cor­rect then I can ig­nore their let­ter.

I sug­gested that per­haps their let­ter tem­plate might need up­dat­ing so it does­n’t say “action re­quired” if ac­tion is not re­quired. Or that per­haps what they mean to say is “action re­quired: check your email ad­dress is cor­rect”.

Say what you mean, HSBC! I’ve sug­gested an im­prove­ment to your let­ter tem­plate.

So any­way, ap­par­ently every­thing’s fine… al­though I re­served fi­nal judge­ment un­til I’d seen that they were still send­ing me emails!

I think I can place a solid guess about what went wrong here. But it makes me feel like we’re liv­ing in the Darkest Timeline.

You know the one I mean. Somebody rolled a ‘1’, did­n’t they…

I dis­sected HSBC’s lat­est email to me: it was of the “your lat­est state­ment is avail­able” va­ri­ety. Deep within the email, down at the bot­tom, is this code:

What you’re see­ing are two track­ing pix­els: tiny 1×1 pixel im­ages, usu­ally trans­par­ent or white-on-white to make them even-more in­vis­i­ble, used to sur­rep­ti­tiously track when some­body reads an email. When you open an email from HSBC — po­ten­tially every time you open an email from them — your email client con­nects to those web ad­dresses to get the nec­es­sary im­ages. The code at the end of each iden­ti­fies the email they were con­tained within, which in turn can be linked back to the re­cip­i­ent.

You know how in­va­sive a read-re­ceipt feels? Tracking pix­els are like those… but turned up to eleven. While a read-re­ceipt only says “the re­cip­i­ent read this email” (usually only af­ter the re­cip­i­ent gives con­sent for it to do so), a track­ing pixel can of­ten track when and how of­ten you re­fer to an email.

If I re-read a year-old email from HSBC, they’re say­ing that they want to know about it.

But it gets worse. Because HSBC are us­ing http://, rather than https:// URLs for their track­ing pix­els, they’re also say­ing that every time you read an email from them, they’d like every­body on the same net­work as you to be able to know that you did so, too. If you’re at my house, on my WiFi, and you open an email from HSBC, not only might HSBC know about it, but I might know about it too.

An eas­ily-avoid­able se­cu­rity fail­ure there, HSBC… which is­n’t the kind of thing one hopes to hear about a bank!

Tracking pix­els are usu­ally in­vis­i­ble, so I turned these ones vis­i­ble so you can see where they hide.

But… track­ing pix­els don’t ac­tu­ally work. At least, they does­n’t work on me. Like many pri­vacy-con­scious in­di­vid­u­als, my de­vices are con­fig­ured to block track­ing pix­els (and a va­ri­ety of other in­stru­ments of sur­veil­lance cap­i­tal­ism) right out of the gate.

This means that even though I do read most of the non-spam email that lands in my Inbox, the sender does­n’t get to know that I did so un­less I choose to tell them. This is the way that email was de­signed to work, and is the only way that a sender can be con­fi­dent that it will work.

But we’re in the Darkest Timeline. Tracking pix­els have be­come so en­demic that HSBC have clearly come to the opin­ion

that if they can’t track when I open their emails, I must not be re­ceiv­ing their emails. So they wrote me a let­ter to tell me that my emails have been “returned un­de­liv­ered” (which seems to be an out­right lie).

Surveillance cap­i­tal­ism has be­come so ubiq­ui­tous that it’s be­come trans­par­ent. Transparent like the in­vis­i­ble spies at the bot­tom of your bank’s emails.

I’ve changed my mind. Maybe this is what HSBC’s let­ter should have said.

So in sum­mary, with only a lit­tle spec­u­la­tion:

Surveillance cap­i­tal­ism be­came wide­spread enough that HSBC came to as­sume that track­ing pix­els have bul­let­proof re­li­a­bil­ity.

HSBC started us­ing track­ing pix­els them to check whether emails are be­ing re­ceived (even though that’s not what they do when they are re­li­able, which

they’re not).

Eventually, HSBC as­sumed their track­ing was bul­let­proof. Because HSBC could­n’t track how of­ten, when, and where I was read­ing their emails… they posted me a let­ter to

tell me I needed to change my email ad­dress.

What do I think HSBC should do?

Instead of send­ing me a mis­lead­ing let­ter about un­de­liv­ered emails, per­haps a bet­ter ap­proach for HSBC could be:

At an ab­solute min­i­mum, stop us­ing un­en­crypted con­nec­tions for track­ing pix­els. I do not want to open a bank email on a cafe’s pub­lic WiFi and have

every­body in the cafe po­ten­tially know who I bank with… and that I just opened an email from them! I cer­tainly don’t want at­tack­ers in­ject­ing con­tent into the bot­tom of

le­git­i­mate emails.

Stop as­sum­ing that if some­body blocks your at­tempts to spy on them via your emails, it means they’re not get­ting your emails. It does­n’t mean that. It’s never meant

that. There are all kinds of rea­sons that your track­ing pix­els might not work, and they’re not even all pri­vacy-re­lated rea­sons!

Or, bet­ter yet: just stop try­ing to sur­veil your cus­tomers’ email habits in the first place? You al­ready sit on a wealth of per­sonal and fi­nan­cial in­for­ma­tion which

you can, and prob­a­bly do, data-mine for your own ben­e­fit. Can you at least try to pay lip ser­vice to your own pub­lished prin­ci­ples on the

eth­i­cal use of data and, if I may quote them, “use only that data which is ap­pro­pri­ate for the pur­pose” and “embed pri­vacy con­sid­er­a­tions into de­sign and ap­proval processes”.

If you need to check that an email ad­dress is valid, do that, not an un­re­li­able proxy for it. Instead of this let­ter, you could have sent an email that

said “We need to check that you’re re­ceiv­ing our emails. Please click this link to con­firm that you are.” This not only achieves in­formed con­sent for your track­ing, but it can be

more-se­cure too be­cause you can au­then­ti­cate the user dur­ing the process.

Also, to quote your own prin­ci­ples once more: when you make a mis­take like as­sum­ing your spy­ing is a flaw­less way to de­tect the va­lid­ity of email ad­dresses, per­haps you should “be trans­par­ent with our cus­tomers and other stake­hold­ers about how we use their data”.

Wouldn’t that be bet­ter than writ­ing to a cus­tomer to say that their emails are be­ing re­turned un­de­liv­ered (when they’re not)… and then hav­ing your staff tell them that hav­ing re­ceived such an email they have no choice but to change the email ad­dress they use (which is then dis­puted by your other staff)?

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A Google bug re­port on the Chromium Issue Tracker to­day has in­ad­ver­tently leaked the Android desk­top in­ter­face for the first time.

The bug re­port pub­lished to­day about Chrome Incognito tabs was ac­com­pa­nied by two screen cap­tures. From the de­scrip­tion, we learn that the de­vice be­ing recorded is the HP Elite Dragonfly 13.5 Chromebook, board/​co­de­name “Brya(Redrix).” Pictured above, it runs a 12th Gen Intel Core (AlderLake-U) proces­sor from 2021.

The build num­ber for “ALOS” — Aluminum OS is desk­top Android’s co­de­name — ZL1A.260119.001. A1. Another ref­er­ence in the video iden­ti­fies this as Android 16. It’s not sur­pris­ing that Google in­ter­nally is us­ing ex­ist­ing Chromebook hard­ware to de­velop the new ex­pe­ri­ence.

DEVICE: Brya(Redrix) CHROME BUILD: 145.0.7587.4(Dev be­fore up­grade) and 146.0.7634.0(Dev af­ter up­grade) ALOS: ZL1A.260119.001. A1

Compared to tablets and phone-pro­jected desk­top mode, the sta­tus bar is taller and more op­ti­mized for large screens. We see the time (with sec­onds) in the top row fol­lowed by the date. On the right side, we see the Android 16 M3E bat­tery icon, Wi-Fi, a no­ti­fi­ca­tion bell icon, “EN” (presumably rep­re­sent­ing the set key­board lan­guage), Gemini icon, and screen recorder pill. The record­ing in­ter­face re­sem­bles the mo­bile ver­sion

However, the Taskbar is iden­ti­cal to what we have to­day, while the mouse cur­sor has been slightly mod­i­fied to have a tail.

The Google Chrome in­ter­face mostly aligns with the cur­rent large-screen Android ver­sion ex­cept for the Extensions but­ton, which is cur­rently only avail­able on the desk­top browser. We also see an ex­am­ple of split-screen mul­ti­task­ing.

Meanwhile, desk­top win­dow­ing is mostly un­changed from what we have to­day, with the app name at the left. The min­i­mize, fullscreen, and close but­tons at the top-right are sim­i­lar to ChromeOS.