Don

To show appreciation, been running a crazy offer of "Free McDonald's meal for Health Sector staff" when they come thru with the McDonald's App. It went viral and Hundreds and Thousands showed up to get it as we ran it for one week ✌️❤️ Some pics. #McDEmployee 🇸🇦 #COVID19 #McD

"Twentieth Century Impressions of Ceylon: its history, people, commerce, industries, and resources", edited by Arnold Wright (first published in 1907) gives insights into what it was at the turn of the Twentieth century. It is now made available online ⬇️ archive.org/details/twenti…

Footage of McDonalds in 1984 might be the most radicalizing thing you watch today. How do we get this back?

@hitsjunkie It's been 9 years! DAMN!

9 years ago today, Kendrick Lamar dropped his fourth studio album ‘DAMN.’ 📀 What’s your favorite song from this album?

This movie really is a documentary about the illegal arms trade, masquerading as a fictitious movie!

If Mad Men gets better with rewatches. You are aging better too, understanding that the Show wasn't about a cool suave man in the thick of Advertising, but about a man grappling with the consequences of choices he made.

@Lord_Sugar But, can you do this today in England?

40 YEARS AGO TODAY - On 7 Apr 1986 I announced that Amstrad had bought, from Sir Clive Sinclair, the worldwide rights to sell and manufacture all existing and future Sinclair computer products, together with Sinclair's intellectual property rights. It was a momentous day for me.

I had a pair of shirts and pants in my drawer for such situations. Then I came to Saudi Arabia and didn't need to do that.

This is why billionaires donate to museums: A billionaire buys a painting for $100,000 holds it for five years, commissions an appraiser who values it at $10 million, donates it to a museum, and claims a $10 million tax deduction, saving $3 to 4 million in taxes on a $100,000 investment, all completely legal.

Advertisements can tell you a lot about the metaphysics of a nation

@WZG1889 University of Dundee

I go to uni in one of those towns where the uni is the sole thing that’s there and I’ve always wondered how regular people and families live in places like that.

A Soviet psychologist walked into a café in 1927 and watched a waiter do something impossible. He remembered every open order at every table. Perfectly. Without notes. Without effort. Then a table paid their bill. She asked him to repeat the order. He couldn't remember a single item. She spent the next two years figuring out why. What she found is now the operating system underneath every platform fighting for your attention. Her name was Bluma Zeigarnik, and she was a graduate student at the time, sitting with her professor Kurt Lewin, watching the waiters work the room. What caught her attention was something so ordinary that it had been happening in restaurants for centuries without anyone asking why. The waiters could remember every open order with perfect accuracy. Table four wanted the schnitzel with no sauce. Table seven had changed their wine twice. Table twelve owed for three coffees and a dessert. Every detail, held without effort, without notes, without any visible system at all. But the moment a table paid their bill, the information vanished. Completely. Lewin tested it on the spot. He called a waiter back minutes after a table had settled up and asked him to recite the order. The waiter could not do it. Not partially. Not approximately. The information was simply gone. Zeigarnik went back to her lab and spent the next two years turning that observation into one of the most replicated findings in the history of psychology. Here is what she proved, and why it changes how you think about attention, memory, and almost every piece of media you have ever consumed. She gave participants a series of tasks. Some tasks they were allowed to finish. Others were interrupted before completion. Then she tested recall across both groups. The unfinished tasks were remembered at nearly twice the rate of the completed ones. Not slightly better. Nearly twice. The brain was holding the incomplete work in a state of active tension, returning to it, keeping it warm, refusing to file it away. The finished tasks were closed, archived, released. The unfinished ones were still running. She called it the resumption goal. When the brain commits to a task and cannot complete it, it opens a file that stays open until resolution arrives. That open file consumes a portion of your cognitive bandwidth whether you are thinking about it consciously or not. It surfaces in idle moments. It pulls at the edge of your attention during other work. It is the thing you find yourself thinking about in the shower when you were not trying to think about anything at all. This is not a flaw in human cognition. It is a feature. The brain evolved to finish things. An open loop is a signal that something important is unresolved. Keeping that signal active increases the probability that you will return to it and complete it. In an environment where most tasks had real survival stakes, this was an extraordinarily useful mechanism. In the modern world, it is the most exploited vulnerability in human attention. Netflix did not invent the cliffhanger. But it industrialized it in a way no medium before it ever had. When a show ends on an unresolved question, it does not just create curiosity. It opens a file in your brain that stays active until the next episode closes it. The autoplay countdown that begins at 15 seconds is not a convenience feature. It is a precise calculation about how long the average person can tolerate an open loop before the discomfort of not knowing overrides every other intention they had for the evening. One more episode is not a choice. It is your brain doing exactly what it was designed to do: return to what is unfinished. The writers who built Lost, Breaking Bad, and Succession understood this intuitively without ever reading a psychology paper. Every episode ended on an open question. Every season finale answered three things and opened five more. The entire architecture of prestige television is a Zeigarnik machine running at industrial scale. But television is not where this gets dangerous. Every notification on your phone is an open loop. Every unread email is an open loop. Every task you wrote on a list and have not yet crossed off is an open loop. Each one is consuming a small but real portion of your available attention, pulling fractionally at your focus, degrading your capacity to be fully present in whatever you are actually doing right now. TikTok's algorithm does not just serve you content you like. It serves you content that ends one loop and immediately opens another, keeping the resumption system permanently activated so the cost of stopping always feels higher than the cost of continuing. The research on this accumulation effect is striking. Psychologists studying cognitive load have found that unfinished tasks do not sit passively in memory. They actively interrupt. They surface at the wrong moments. They are the reason you are reading something and suddenly remember an email you forgot to send. The brain is not malfunctioning. It is running its resumption system exactly as designed. It is just running it across forty open loops simultaneously, in an environment that generates new ones faster than any human nervous system was built to process. The most important practical implication Zeigarnik's research produced is one that most people use backwards. David Allen built his entire Getting Things Done system on the insight that the only way to close a cognitive open loop is to either complete the task or make a trusted commitment to complete it later. Writing something down in a system you actually trust has the same effect on the brain as finishing it. The file closes. The bandwidth is released. This is why writing a task down feels like relief even before you have done anything about it. You have not solved the problem. You have simply told your brain that the loop is registered and will be returned to, which is enough for the resumption system to stand down. The inverse is equally true and far more destructive. Every task that lives only in your head, unwritten and unscheduled, is an open loop burning cognitive resources around the clock. The mental cost is not proportional to the size of the task. A tiny nagging obligation consumes the same active tension as a major project. Your brain does not discriminate by importance. It discriminates by completion. Zeigarnik published her findings in 1927. The paper sat in academic literature for decades before anyone outside psychology paid attention to it. Then television got good. Then the smartphone arrived. Then the entire attention economy was engineered, largely by people who understood intuitively what she had proven scientifically: an open loop is the most powerful hook available to anyone who wants to hold human attention. Netflix knew it. Instagram knew it. Every designer who ever made a notification badge red instead of grey knew it. The café in Vienna is long gone. The mechanism she discovered there is now the operating system underneath every platform fighting for your time. Every "to be continued." Every unread notification. Every thread that ends with "part 2 tomorrow." All of it is the same waiter, the same unpaid bill, the same brain refusing to let go of what it has not yet finished. Zeigarnik noticed it over coffee in 1927. A century later, it is the most valuable insight in the history of media. And nobody taught it to you in school.

The Short Happy Life of Francis McComber

🚨 ElevenLabs charges $5 to $99/month for AI voice cloning. Their Business plan costs $1,320/month. Someone open sourced a voice AI that clones any voice from a short clip. 30 languages. Studio quality. Free. It's called VoxCPM2. Give it a short clip of anyone's voice. It clones their accent, emotion, tone, and pacing. Then generates any speech you want in their exact voice. 48kHz studio quality. Type "A young woman, gentle and sweet voice" and it creates that voice from scratch. No reference audio. No voice actor. No recording. You describe a voice in words. It builds it. 2 billion parameters. Trained on 2 million hours of speech. 30 languages. One command to install: pip install voxcpm Here's what VoxCPM2 does: → Voice Design: describe any voice in words. Gender, age, tone, emotion, pace. AI creates it from nothing. No reference audio needed. → Voice Cloning: upload a short audio clip. AI clones the voice perfectly. Timbre, accent, rhythm, pacing. → Controllable Cloning: clone a voice AND control the emotion. "Slightly faster, cheerful tone." Done. → Ultimate Cloning: provide audio + transcript. Every vocal nuance faithfully reproduced. → 30 languages. Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and 21 more. No language tags needed. → Context-aware. It reads the text and adjusts emotion and rhythm automatically. News sounds like news. Stories sound like stories. → Real-time streaming. RTF as low as 0.13 on an RTX 4090. Faster than playback speed. → Runs on 8GB of VRAM. → Fine-tune with 5 to 10 minutes of your own audio using LoRA. Build a custom voice model. → 48kHz output. Studio quality. No external upsampler needed. Here's the wildest part: On the Minimax-MLS voice similarity benchmark: → English: VoxCPM2 scores 85.4%. ElevenLabs scores 61.3%. → Chinese: VoxCPM2 scores 82.5%. ElevenLabs scores 67.7%. → Arabic: VoxCPM2 scores 79.1%. ElevenLabs scores 70.6%. A free, open source model is producing more realistic voice clones than a service that charges up to $1,320/month. Professional voice actors charge $250 to $1,000+ per project. AI voice platforms charge $5 to $100/month. Recording studios charge $200/hour. This runs on your GPU. Locally. No API costs. No per-character pricing. No subscription. Free forever. Already hit #1 on GitHub Trending. Built by OpenBMB and Tsinghua University. 2 billion parameters. Apache 2.0 License. Free for commercial use. 100% Open Source.

@dlondonwortel Who goes to a library to commit suicide?

Bobst library at NYU: featuring the most beautiful suicide-prevention screen ever designed.

@kirawontmiss How do they identify who's on either side? Uniforms would have helped.

no way it’s actually real

@allkanyewest Runaway

What was the first Ye song you listened to today?

@CraigDavid Release it on DVD Craig!

2 sold out shows at Hammersmith Apollo celebrating 25 years of Born To Do It 🩵✨ I don't have the words to describe what these nights meant to me & my band 🎶 Playing this album front to back with all of you singing every word… that's the dream right there 🙏🏽🔥 Thank you for making every single moment so special 😮‍💨💫 #BornToDoIt

How are we going to do this now with Gemini or AI telling us "add a strong call to action"

Forget @AnthropicAI , Google could blackmail pretty much every adult male in the world.

There is no McTry. Only McDo.