randycupertino

I'm on GLP-1 and it's completely stopped my urge to online shop. I used to browse/shop for fun and out of habit or when I was stressed out or wanted a treat etc. Entirely resolved! I've also lost 40lbs on it.

He throws huge temper tantrums and pouts so much when he loses at board games while traveling on the facebook private jet so all his staff conspires to let him win.

I read the book. Also Sheryl Sandberg comes off pretty badly, buying $13,000 worth of lingerie for her "cutie" personal assistants and asking them to wear skimpy pajamas and snuggle with her in the bed on the corporate jet.

There is a lot of corporate private jet related drama in the book.

Good news only!! Why are these history museums just focusing on "how bad slavery was." https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/19/politics/trump-slavery-museum...

> “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future,” Trump wrote.

He also asks for two dossiers each day filled of good news only. If there isn't enough good news they fill it with flattering photos: https://www.vice.com/en/article/trump-folder-positive-news-w...

> One White House official said the only feedback the White House communications shop, which prepares the folder, has ever gotten in all these months is: “It needs to be more fucking positive.”

> White House staffers then cull the information, send out clips to other officials, and push favorable headlines to a list of journalists. But they also pick out the most positive bits to give to the president. On days when there aren’t enough positive chyrons, communications staffers will ask the RNC staffers for flattering photos of the president.

> In Utah on Wednesday, State Senate President J. Stuart Adams—one of the most powerful Republicans in the state—lost his primary election after supporting a major data center development near the Great Salt Lake, in one of the clearest signs yet of the growing political risks tied to the industry.

> At the local level, the fallout was just as direct. “Do I think that the data center vote cost me the election? Yes I do,” former Box Elder County Commissioner Lee Perry said after conceding his primary race, after voting to advance the same project.

Lilly is paying $50 million as a "stalking horse" for Sangamo Therapeutics capsid delivery program, "zinc finger" gene-editing and modular integrase platforms and brain disease treatment.

Astellas is paying $50 million for the Fabry disease late-stage gene therapy program.

Bayer heavily lobbied Trump to obtain this beneficial verdict: https://usrtk.org/pesticides/bayer-lobby-tracker/

Single center study out of China with a slurry of documentation errors. Unsurprising it was retracted.

How do delivery robots get the food to the door? Do people have to come out of their building to meet them on the street?

> A senior clinician at the National Institutes of Health, Ranganath Muniyappa, requested access to the drug for the unnamed patient in April. Muniyappa cited a diagnosis of refractory obesity with obstructive sleep apnea and pulmonary hypertension, a potentially life-threatening disease characterized by high blood pressure in the lungs.* The request reportedly drew the attention of top health officials, which STAT noted was indicative of the patient’s influence.

https://www.statnews.com/2026/06/23/eli-lilly-unusual-weight...

I try to view it like any other hobby one could obsessive over. It could be triathlons, or world of warcraft, or gardening, or rock climbing. Are any better than the others?

I have a coworker/friend who is a "Disney Adult" - she has an entire room in their 4br house that is designated to Disney paraphernalia, including a $16,000 swarovski crystal Cinderella purse and $3k jeweled mini mouse ears. They are members of Club 33 which is $33,000 a year to join and have a timeshare that was integral to a wider family drama fighting over the usage rights for. She will go on global vacations to visit Disney parks but not see any of the local sites.

> David Holz is the Founder & CEO of Midjourney, a generative artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platform that allows users to generate unique artwork such as characters, images and depictions through short text prompts.

I guess they pivoted from making ai-artwork to ultrasounds?

> the customer can tell INSTANTLY they're AI

I had to call Geico's claims department yesterday and their AI customer service agent had a surfer bro accent, said "no worries" and "hang tight" and "I gotchu" while trying to follow-up on my claim which made it even more infuriating to interact with. Like... stop with the affectations and fake trying to be hip just be professional and succinct please!

> putting on an inauthentic mask their entire life because a book told them to.

I think the key difference- at least for the book I mentioned - is that it actually teaches to you take a genuine interest in those around you. It's not a mask or a ploy, it is making you engage positively in a way that yields genuine connections.

Also the AI chat just straight up lies to you and is flat out wrong. When I landed in Peru and was trying to get my phone working, verizon AI told me my account had international calling set up and was working fine but when I finally got to a human they were like "oh I see what the problem is your account doesn't have that option activated, let me add it for you right now." It was a huge stressor as I was there for various meetings and couldn't call my contacts or use my phone! Trying to use the stupid AI agent wasted 2 hours of my jet-lagged time it was so miserable trying to get through to a human who could help me.

Geng Hongwei is a former biomedical Ph.D. student in Beijing who is going viral exposing academic fraud and data manipulation among prominent researchers in China.

This is his channel: https://space.bilibili.com/1732848825

and a recent paper: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08989621.2026.2...

How to Win Friends and Influence People helped my career a ton. I stopped having to job search and started getting pulled up as people I knew from work advanced they would bring me with them. I haven't had to job hunt in 9 years and it's solely because that book made me more likable and personable.

It made me enjoy life more too, because I have a diaspora of cool and interesting connections who would go to bat for me if needed. I'm friends with the grocery store checkout guy now, he asked me to go antiquing with him two weeks ago. I made friends in my neighborhood, I have a lady I walk with every week who offered to help me garden and even when ordering flooring from Home Depot the dude invited me to come to NASCAR with him and his buddies.

It honestly just changed my perspective to see the good in everyone and through this process boosted my personal, professional and family relationships immensely.

Personally I noticed that being on a GLP-1 has cut my spontaneous urges to online shop.

> Private equity firm LongRange Capital is buying Pizza Hut, excluding the mainland China business, for about $1.5 billion

I mean, he gave his rationale why it wasn't public. He was a calculating, manipulative dude who was super PR-savvy and knew how to cultivate press and hype. His entire unruly hair, driving a 2010 Corolla and gaming-while-pitching-VCs thing were all components of the neurodivergent genius savant branding.

Look at some of own statements:

> Kelsey Piper: so the ethics stuff - mostly a front? people will like you if you win and hate you if you lose and that's how it all really works?

> Sam Bankman-Fried: yeah

> SBF: I mean that's not all of it

> SBF: but it's a lot

> KP: you were really good at talking about ethics, for someone who kind of saw it all as a game with winners and losers

> SBF: ya

> SBF: hehe

> SBF: I had to be

> SBF: it's what reputations are made of, to some extent

> SBF: I feel bad for those who get f*** by it

> SBF: by this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shiboleths [sic] and so everyone likes us

> I honestly can't think of a worse name for a company that provides intel for strategic decision making.

Well their motto is basically "Be Evil and Get Rich" so I think the name fits.

Peter Thiel routinely defends Mordor - "they had technology! The rest of the world was just agricultural luddites."

He did that for PR. He stated he also secretly donated to the right.

> SBF claims he gave tens of millions in untraceable donations to Republicans

> Although federal election receipts show that Bankman-Fried donated almost exclusively to Democrats, he claimed on a November phone call with YouTuber Tiffany Fong that he donated an equal amount to Republicans and Democrats.

> “All my Republican donations were dark,” he said, referring to political donations that are not publicly disclosed in FEC filings. “The reason was not for regulatory reasons, it’s because reporters freak the f—k out if you donate to Republicans. They’re all super liberal, and I didn’t want to have that fight.”

> Given that he donated nearly $40 million to Democrats in the 2022 election cycle—and he admitted to giving an equal amount to Republicans—his total political contributions may have actually been around $80 million.

https://time.com/6241262/sam-bankman-fried-political-donatio...

> One thing FDA clarified in the updated guidance is that companies can release products that use sensors to “estimate, infer, or output” blood pressure and blood glucose readings without approval, if they are intended for wellness purposes. In a speech at the Consumer Electronics Show the day the guidance was announced, the FDA commissioner at the time, Marty Makary, said his agency would “get out of the way” of products that weren’t making medical or clinical claims. “This reduces the amount of subjectivity by regulators and guesswork by developers,” he said.

This is "wellness but not intended for medical use" but I think will be very popular on the market and drive a lot of visits to MDs based on device bp readings.

Yes Gawker was unethical and shouldn't have posted his personal details nor an illegally obtained sex tape, however billionaires shouldn't be able to destroy, censor and control media by deploying their unlimited resources to financially annihilate media outlets in endless litigation to take down reporting they don't like.

Free press is already under attack in so many countries, it is dangerous that now a single rich guy can weaponize his unlimited resources to wage legal war over his own personal vendettas because his ego got hurt.

One of my vendors who I have to call a lot for biopsy emergencies recently change from a phone-tree with a keypad directory where you type in your party's extension to an AI-voice recognition system and you CANNOT get through to the correct person AT ALL it is infuriating. You ask for Bryce Martens and it sends you to someone totally different. There's not even an option to type in the correct party anymore.

Ageism is huge in the workplace. It sucks but it definitely happens. I had a young manager complaining that "his job was to teach a bunch of old bald guys with saggy balls how to use excel" - I was sitting there thinking about how I had 20 years on him but he probably didn't realize in my case because I dye my hair.

If you need your job and income, taking steps to prevent facing this bias can be beneficial.

I would say with inflation, wealth inequality and skyrocketing housing, gas and grocery prices as well as super high amounts of consumer debt and families stretching to keep up it feels a lot like pre-bust 2005/2006 economy out there right now. We might not be on the cusp of a subprime mortgage bank crisis but it does feel ominous lately.

Now do a no-tech highest quality repairable washing machine, no tech high-quality repairable refrigerator and no tech high quality HVAC!!

fwiw I asked my friend in IT who worked on the Claude rollout if they routinely read out prompts and he said no, they watch category of use and can usage stats then have a few alert flags if it is asked specific things such as security breaches, explicit keywords or about violence but otherwise they don't read it.

Longevity research is the most overhyped, commercially driven scam and fraud hotspot in modern science. Anti-aging docs and researchers print beaucoup bucks milking the rich narcissistic boomer cow who doesn't want to age, can't accept their mortality and is willing to spend a fortune trying to stave off the inevitable.

> In 2021, Adventist Health used the blue zones brand to market a $600 million Miami luxury tower that, in addition to boasting a “blue zones center” combining longevity medicine and advanced diagnostics, featured on-site cosmetic and plastic surgery.