Wealth Migration
Thinking of leaving it all behind for a cheaper living? Here’s the places money is moving too…
Abstaining from meat on Friday
In summary, let it not be said that by this action, implementing the spirit of renewal coming out of the Council, we have abolished Friday, repudiated the holy traditions of our fathers, or diminished the insistence of the Church on the fact of sin and the need for penance.
In 1966, the USCCB (US Catholic Council of Bishops) published their Pastoral Statement on Penance and Abstinence. Until that point, abstaining from meat on Fridays was a hard requirement that carried the penalty of sin. What many people took away from that document was this:
Among the works of voluntary self-denial and personal penance which we especially commend to our people for the future observance of Friday, even though we hereby terminate the traditional law of abstinence binding under pain of sin, as the sole prescribed means of observing Friday, we give first place to abstinence from flesh meat.
What many people failed to read was that the call to penance on Fridays IS still in effect – in fact moreso. They observed that abstinence from meat is much less of a penance than it used to be and that the gospel might indeed be better served by other forms of self-denial and atonement. They especially mention acts that Jesus speaks of when the final judgement will be laid upon the world.
It would bring great glory to God and good to souls if Fridays found our people doing volunteer work in hospitals, visiting the sick, serving the needs of the aged and the lonely, instructing the young in the Faith, participating as Christians in community affairs, and meeting our obligations to our families, our friends,our neighbors, and our community, including our parishes, with a special zeal born of the desire to add the merit of penance to the other virtues exercised in good works born of living faith.
So, in short, while the requirement for act of abstinence from meat on Fridays was lifted, we are still asked to do acts of penance that can still include abstinence from meat or other acts of atonement and penance.
The document makes an excellent point that by our acts of penance and atonement on Friday when Jesus died, it helps us to enter into and prepare us for the celebration of mass on Sunday.
Project Sid: 1000 autonomous agents were left for days to build an entire society in Minecraft
In 2025, Fundamental Research Labs (FRL), known at the time as Altera AI, set 1,000 AI agents loose in a world to see what happened. The goal was to see if they could coordinate large groups of AIs, prevent stagnation, and encourage meaningful collaboration in a way that would make them genuinely useful if they were agents in the real world working for real humans.
What emerged was both surprising and revealing. These early AI agents were distributed across urban and rural communities, each with its own distinct culture and identity. They divided labour in farming, others in building or trading.
At times, the society faltered as groups of agents fell into endless loops of polite agreement or got stuck chasing unattainable goals (common in early AI). Users also found the agents frustratingly independent and often ran off to do their own thing. At first, they were only completing 20-25% of their tasks, which they got up to 50% – but still far short of the 60-70% rate of humans.
What they learned was fully autonomous agents were actually not very good. Instead, they started focusing agents to do more specific tasks. They then developed Shortcut, an excel agent able to take a business goal and then build complex financial models, analyze sales figures, forecast revenue, etc. It was tested and could do first-year banking tasks 9 out of 10 times – proving specialization was far better than generalization.
It’s a study of early AI worth reading.
Measles and other diseases breaking out in Oregon
There seems to be another outbreak of measles in the Portland metro area – something that seems to be becoming a weekly occurrence.
Another sad development by one of the most ‘progressive’ states in the country: outbreaks of measles. Currently, more than one in three (36%) Oregon schools report MMR vaccination rates under 93% and are therefore at high risk of a measles outbreak. A population must have 95% vaccination rate for herd immunity.
Early stage AI denial and grief
I think this is a phase most experienced developers have gone through in the last 6-8 months and I think it’s worth mentioning so that we remember it in a few years.
This article is from the end of 2025 when AI was just starting to turn the corner from toy to tool. I remember many people, including myself, that tried AI solutions out and found them to be very limited for real production purposes. They were excellent for in-house QA or automating small tasks, but writing real production code was still very rough.
Many people, even midway through 2026, are still calling it all ‘AI slop’. Those days are now largely gone. Even expert Linux package owners recognize that AI assisted bug and vulnerability searching has turned the corner from toy to tool.
A reminder that the 5 stages of grief (and realizing AI is now an essential tool in all software development) are:
- Denial: A defense mechanism that helps pace feelings of grief. It involves numbness or disbelief, protecting you from the immediate shock of reality.
- Anger: A natural response to feeling powerless or overwhelmed. This anger can be masked, directed at yourself, or aimed at others, serving as a shield against the underlying pain.
- Bargaining: An attempt to regain control of a situation. It often involves making deals or asking “what if” or “if only” questions to find a way out of the pain.
- Depression: A deep, sometimes quiet sense of sadness. It is a natural reflection of the magnitude of your loss, where the reality sets in and you may naturally withdraw to process.
- Acceptance: Coming to terms with the reality of the loss and understanding that your life will be different moving forward. It does not mean you are “okay” with what happened, but rather that you are integrating the loss into your life and learning to live with it.
401k millionaires grow to record numbers
For the first time, half of private-sector workers are saving in 401(k)s, and it appears people are taking full advantage of it – by becoming millionaires.
Fidelity reported they have 654,000 customers that have over 1 million dollars in a 401k at the end of 2025, the highest level in records going back to the early 2000s. Around 3.2% of more than three million accounts tracked by benefits provider Alight had balances above $1 million as of the third quarter, double the figure at the end of 2022. At T. Rowe Price, roughly 2.6% of participants had balances above $1 million, up from 1.3% at the end of 2022.
Coldcard Wallets Hacked – $130 million lost and counting
Keeping Bitcoin safe has been a tall order. When your crypto gets stolen, it usually ends up overseas in milliseconds – making getting it back turn into an international nightmare.
Compounding this is the ‘Your Keys, Not Your Coins‘ ethos that keeps the hard core Bitcoin users from putting their coins into exchanges (Not that those are very safe either). Worse, there’s no FDIC to protect your losses either. Of course, that also doesn’t stop someone from just showing up at your door, kidnapping you, tying you to a pole, and beating you until you give the keys.
Coldcard sold itself as a completely safe way to keep your bitcoin safe on your own device. It wasn’t attached to the internet so it was considered perfectly safe.
Unless of course the way it picked your secure passwords has a simple coding bug that made the passwords super-easy to guess. Then people could guess your password and then trade them without your knowledge.
And that’s exactly what happened. A simple condition check bug in the code meant that instead of using high-quality cryptography, it used very flawed, easily guessed passwords. Attackers simply used brute force attacks and were able to drain 1,196 wallets in 41 minutes. Since the hack, around $130 million has been stolen. All without the owners every plugging into the internet nor having any clue.
Leave it all behind as a digital nomad resident?
Moving abroad is a process, but here are 4 countries that are relatively more easy to move to if you can work as a digital nomad.
- Spain – Sunshine, warm culture, stunning scenery, and affordability for those with a U.S. income. They launched its digital nomad visa in 2023 for freelancers, the self-employed, and remote employees. Apply from the U.S. and you’ll be issued a one-year visa, but apply from Spain and you can get a three-year permit. Before you go, gather key documents in the U.S., especially your FBI background check and apostille, or certificate of authentication, since they’re more complicated to obtain once you’re abroad
- Greece – Greece offers two separate options for remote workers: a digital nomad visa and a digital nomad residence permit. You have to apply for the digital nomad visa, which grants a one-year stay, from your home country. But you can apply for the digital nomad residence permit, which is valid for two years, once you’re already in Greece. You’ll need to show proof of monthly income of at least €3,500, health insurance, and a rental contract or property ownership.
- Netherlands – allows freelancers and self-employed U.S. citizens to live and work in the Netherlands by registering a new or existing business and depositing €4,500 into a Dutch business bank account. Remote employees don’t qualify, meaning you can’t be a W-2 employee.
- Albania – While not on most people’s radar, U.S. citizens can stay in Albania for up to a year, visa-free. Those who want to stay longer can apply for a residence permit in-country.
Quantum techniques working with traditional computers
It turns out that classical computers may be able to solve some problems that we thought could only be solved using quantum computers. There has been a few recent cases of researchers finding ways to use quantum approaches with classical computers – and solving real problems.
Last year, researchers modeled a quantum spin glass system using the D-Wave Advantage2 quantum computer. An impressive feat that they claimed could only be solved by a quantum system.
Now, a team from the Flatiron Institute in the US has achieved similar results from a classic computer setup, with the key innovation being new compression algorithms that process the necessary mountain of math in a more efficient way.
The CCQ team achieved their breakthrough by developing and implementing new tools based on tensor networks, which Tindall likens to “a zip file for the wave function where you’ve taken all this information, and you’ve compressed it into this mathematical data structure full of these small tables of numbers that are interconnected to each other.”
The tensor networks made the problem feasible for classical computers. Tindall performed many of the initial calculations on a laptop computer using code from a high-performance tensor network software library developed at the CCQ called ITensor. The recently published simulations exemplify how the ITensor team is discovering new ways to repurpose tensor methods for novel applications. Those simulations capture the three-dimensional dynamics using a 3D tensor network.
So, even if quantum computers are still a few years away, the research is yielding fruits today.
Actual great medical advice
Dr Seth Capehart has an amazing channel full of really good, no-nonsense health recommendations that are backed by an actual doctor talking about the cases he sees day in and day out.
He’s not selling anything. No diet systems, testosterone supplements, or anything else. He talks about how most of those things are pointless if you’re not addressing root causes anyway. Instead, he gives the very clear facts about modern living that are killing most of us and the very easy fixes each of us can make to change our bodies and dramatically extend our lives. You don’t have to watch too many of his videos to hear the common thread again and again. Almost all the problems we are facing (diabetes, being overweight, hormonal imbalances, etc) are because of these few factors:
- Sleep Deprivation: Poor sleep cycles caused by artificial light, under-diagnosed apnea, and overstimulation prevent vital physical and cognitive recovery, lowering stress tolerance, and metabolic function.
- Sedentary Lifestyle: Humans evolved for constant low-intensity movement, yet most people now sit for 10-12 hours a day, which leads to muscle atrophy, insulin resistance, and chronic inflammation.
- Chronic Stress: We are stuck in a perpetual state of ‘fight or flight’ due to modern pressures, leading to hormonal imbalances, weakened immunity, and long-term burnout.
- Processed Foods: Modern diets consist largely of lab-created, addictive foods that disrupt satiety signals, destroy gut health, and fuel systemic inflammation.
- Social Isolation: Despite being digitally connected, modern humans are lonelier than ever, which is physiologically damaging and linked to increased inflammation and mortality.
His solutions are clear, easy, and fact based:
- Move Like a Human: Aim for 8,000–10,000 steps daily and lift heavy things 2-3 times a week. Incorporate short bursts of high-intensity movement
- Eat Real Food: Focus on meat, fish, eggs, vegetables, tubers, and fruits. Avoid anything that didn’t exist 100 years ago.
- Manage Stress: Utilize breathwork, nature exposure, and intentional periods of silence to shift into a parasympathetic (rest and digest) state.
- Prioritize Sleep: Ensure 7–9 hours of quality sleep by keeping a strict routine and eliminating screens/caffeine/alcohol before bed. Get a sleep apnea test if you snore or wake up with dry mouth or sudden starts in the night.
- Foster Real Connections: Move interactions offline and prioritize face-to-face time with family and community.