Thom Kozik

@PabloPeniche I genuinely just ran into two guys having a conversation earlier today, about which dispensaries in LA will let them buy weed with their EBT cards (those with the cash option).

Here’s how you can sell your food stamps to buy fentanyl in San Francisco. My friends and I from SF10x did some investigative journalism.

@Jason Sadly, this isn’t a new video, nor is AI. It’s been around for a while. It’s just getting recycled into the news again.

Someone just told me this video might be AI... is it? If so, it fooled me!

Concerning.

@Jason @ZohranKMamdani Insane

They’ve blown past 50% in taxes, and they plan to go straight to 60% — and eventually to 70%. @ZohranKMamdani is a communist, and he will eventually use these emergency powers to seize your assets … all these socialist lunatics know how to do is seize assets and redistribute them. FIGHT THE POWER

@pmarca Vastly so. My reactions have ranged from pleasantly surprised to downright blown away by the questions Opus 4.6 and 4.7 have asked. Good experiences in the past with ChatGPT Codex, and Gemini— will have to go back and try them again.

Asking AI to ask questions is hugely underrated.

Your brain has a circuit that doesn't know you live in a city. Its only job is to monitor whether birds are still singing. Right now, in this room, it is on. The circuit predates primates. Mammals have been using ambient soundscape continuity as a predator-detection system for roughly 200 million years. Birds stop singing when something larger moves through their territory. For most of mammalian history, a forest full of song meant no large predator was nearby, and the cessation of sound was the warning. Your nervous system never updated this software. The Max Planck Institute tested the inverse in 2022 with 295 participants. Six minutes of birdsong dropped anxiety with a medium effect size. Six minutes of traffic noise raised depression with the same. The effect worked on subjects who lived in dense urban environments and had no regular contact with nature. The brain still ran the check. Birdsong sits in the 1,000 to 8,000 Hz range. Your brainstem reads continuous patterns in that band as a signal that nothing dangerous is currently moving through the environment. EEG data shows birdsong at 45 to 50 decibels boosts alpha wave activity by 14.1% relative to silence. Alpha is the brainwave signature of relaxed alertness. Push the same birdsong above 60 decibels and the response flips. Stress markers rise 29%. The circuit only trusts the signal at the volume of quiet conversation, which is exactly the volume birds sing at from a typical distance. Three things happen simultaneously when the brain registers ambient safety. The amygdala downregulates. The parasympathetic nervous system takes over from the sympathetic. Heart rate variability rises, cortisol drops. The posterior cingulate cortex, which sits at the center of the rumination circuit, quiets down. King's College London tracked this through a smartphone study with over 1,200 participants and found the mood lift lasted hours after the sound stopped. People diagnosed with depression got the same response as healthy controls. Most of what gets labeled mental fatigue is hypervigilance running in the background. Birdsong tells the circuit it can stand down, and the brain reallocates the freed compute everywhere else. A quiet park feels different from a quiet office because the parks have sentinels.

Looking forward to this month's Westside Digital Mix at LouLou Santa Monica this Thursday, April 30. For 11+ years, Westside Digital Mix has brought together creators, innovators, and thought leaders across the Westside for smart conversations on media, entertainment, and technology. Advance Tickets: bit.ly/WDM_Apr_30_2026 WDM’s Featured Guest this month is Darren Cross, the co-founder of distlr, and author “No One Planned This: How Platforms Rewired Entertainment.”

@Jason And yet, how many H1B’s are they trying to fill?

did three wildly profitable companies cut 30,000 people today? Really? Tell me more about AI doomerism

@elonmusk Can’t wait for the next RTL at Vandenberg!

Falcon flies every few days. You can see launches in person from Florida or California.

Remember when I placed Canada in the elite Stage 5 Suicidal Empathy tier? There you go.

@BillGatesOHell @Austen Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every now & then

@Austen Yup. I used to kinda like Alex Jones. He's always been a little weird, but he's been right sometimes. As of late, he's unfortunately gone off the deep end.

Well, credit where credit is due…

Many

We aren’t far from this being reality, are we?

California's population grew 0.4% in the last decade. The number of state employees grew 24.5%. Total state spending grew 48%, inflation adjusted. You have to ask - where did all the money go?

@ScottGustin put whoever was in charge of this in charge of Disney

@obiwade @lukOlejnik Many AWS services have incredibly poor quality UX's, coupled with and design & broken functionality. Is it any wonder that the "experts" who built these are incapable of steering AI tools to successful execution?

Amazon is holding a mandatory meeting about AI breaking its systems. The official framing is "part of normal business." The briefing note describes a trend of incidents with "high blast radius" caused by "Gen-AI assisted changes" for which "best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established." Translation to human language: we gave AI to engineers and things keep breaking? The response for now? Junior and mid-level engineers can no longer push AI-assisted code without a senior signing off. AWS spent 13 hours recovering after its own AI coding tool, asked to make some changes, decided instead to delete and recreate the environment (the software equivalent of fixing a leaky tap by knocking down the wall). Amazon called that an "extremely limited event" (the affected tool served customers in mainland China).

@Jason Hoping the same. Can’t help but notice the NYT still being its usual self in that headline; as if he simply passed away from old age, in his sleep.

Praying for the people of Iran, who have suffered far too much for far too long under evil, sadistic leaders. Hoping this goes well for humanity

Me when I hear @Jason’s continued use of the word “Replicants” to describe OpenClaw Agents