Puy du Fou is an “insane historical theme park with no rides”. They re-create lots of historical spectacles for visitors to enjoy. And they aren’t joking. Chariot races in a Roman circus, viking adventures in real boats, and plays.
This clip is from “Le Dernier Panache”(“The Last Stand”), a spectacular show featuring groundbreaking stage technology. It was created in 2016 at Puy du Fou located outside Nantes France. This play follows the destiny of a French naval officer, a hero of the American Revolutionary War, whose life takes a dramatic turn in 1793 in a final battle for freedom.
It found that illegal immigration created an almost 1-to-1 increase in local employment and did not measurably affect wages, but the ongoing housing shortage meant that there was a 30% growth in house prices and a 20% growth in rent prices.
The report said the large increase in unauthorized immigration into the U.S. from early 2021 to early 2024 added roughly “seven million people to the U.S. population, nearly double that of legal immigration.” The white paper said illegal immigration is responsible for “roughly 30% of total employment growth over March 2021 to March 2024.”
The authors of the white paper concluded, “We find that unauthorized immigrant worker flows increased local employment approximately one-for-one, without generating significant declines in local wages during the early 2021 to early 2024 boom period. At the same time, these inflows raised local house prices and rents, with little evidence of increases in housing supply. Thus, while the influx of these immigrant workers acted as a positive supply shock to local labor markets, it acted simultaneously as a demand shock to local housing markets, boosting rents given relatively inelastic short-run housing supply.” The U.S. was also dealing with COVID-19 during much of this time period, which economists at the time said had an impact on employment and housing.
This kind of data gives us proof and evidence instead of rhetoric and simply wishing for certain things to be true when they may not. It debunks the idea that immigrants are likely stealing jobs or driving down wages (though local phenomenon could see these effects). It also tells us the very real problems of housing shortages and zoning laws – problems almost entirely created by political policy and not a lack of organizations or companies wanting to build houses.
Claude Code Channels is quickly becoming a practical alternative to OpenClaw for people who want to connect Claude to chat platforms without setting up a heavier agent framework. It is simpler to get running, works with a Claude subscription out of the box, and gives you a straightforward way to interact with a local Claude Code session through Discord.
You need to start Claude command line, then install the official Claude channels Bum plugin. You can then start Claude and run /plugin marketplace commands to install plugins for Discord and other applications. Set up some authentication keys, and then restart for access.
You can see how to set up Claude Code Channels and connect Claude code to Discord using this article.
These guys did a good job capturing what it’s like staying in a fire tower during winter weather. There’s nothing like staying in a fire tower alone for a few days – especially in winter when the wind is blowing, snow covers all the forest roads so that you are an entire day’s snow walk from any help.
I stayed at Warner Mountain in winter and it took almost all the short daylight hours to snowshoe the 10 miles into the cabin at the top of the peak. These guys were smart and used a snowmobile – but snowshoeing or cross-country skiing makes it even more of an adventure. You need to pack in all your gear for the whole stay and you really get to feel how far you are from civilization after you spend a whole day going through largely untrodden snow in the wilderness to a tower.
One of the things they don’t catch as much of in this video is the slow tick of time, probably because there are several of them to entertain each other. If you stay in a fire tower for more than 2-3 days alone, you start to shift into what I think of as ‘tower time’. Your day isn’t focused on work hours, when shops open, or people/society schedules. There is no 8-to-5. Instead, you start living in step with the rising and setting sun – and your day focuses around long, quiet hours without TV, radios, internet, and instead filled with reading, small chores such as cutting wood, cleaning, writing in a journal, lighting fires, and most importantly – meals.
You tend to wake up at least once when the sun just starts to lighten the horizon like they did – usually some single digit hour of the morning just as light starts filling the horizon. The air is cold and often damp from your breath perspiration during the night. It’s not unlike camping, but you’re in a bed in a room.
As the day passes, without the distractions of any sign of civilization, you shift into your own patterns during the day. Naps, reading, eating, tending the fire, going on short walks, and reflecting/thinking. The day passes without any sense of ‘what time is it’.
As evening approaches you do those small things to prepare for night. Putting chairs back, picking up things you left outside, and finally cooking. As you eat and the watch the sun go down, you might stay up for a while watching the stars all come out. Starry nights out in these wildernesses is amazing compared to urban areas. You find yourself going to bed when the sun goes down – only to get up the next day and enjoy it all again.
How a developer on paternity leave changed the modern warfare forever
Gui Wainwright was once a war correspondent that became a technology entrepreneur. While on paternity leave, he wondered if he could use his coding skills to do something for Ukraine? A former MI6 chief and relative Sir Alex Younger gave him the inspiration for how, over a cup of tea. What he did was to completely change modern warfare forever.
Eighteen months later, Wainwright created the world’s first known network of fully autonomous drones on a real battlefield: Terminator-style, kamikaze drones enabled with AI to find and kill targets independently without any human interaction. It allowed Ukraine to turn an asymmetric war of attrition that Russia could easily win into one in which it allowed one man in a bunker with a computer to potentially field 10,000 drones simultaneously and hold 1,000 miles of land. A war in which as early as March 2026 Russia was losing 30,000 troops a month – with almost 90% of them dying by drones.
Wainwright first focused on assault in which drones were strapped with explosives and given a clearly defined kill box. Drones were then turned loose, completely autonomously, into the kill box. Anything it identified was a valid target: vehicles, troops, or weapons. Being autonomous, they could not be jammed by most conventional jamming systems.
He is now are moving on to the next advancement of defensive and denial operations in which drones fly in, settle on the ground in cover, and await enemy encroachment to then pounce and attack invaders. “Think about it as a sophisticated minefield”.
The software is the magic. The drones already have extensive supply systems. To protect the software, he says they have taken measures to “protect code security and prevent them from falling into the wrong hands” – hinting they are boobytrapped.
While he’s giving the software to the Ukraine for free, the company has a development team already at work in Estonia and is in detailed talks with four other countries’ militaries. Many of whom want to start fielding solutions in the next 12 months.
The introduction of super-cheap, super-disposable attack drones has completely changed the nature of warfare. $500 off the shelf drones with a little C4 can destroy million dollar planes, ships, tanks, and refineries. They can completely cripple and cut off supply lines. Capital ships and million dollar smart missiles are being rendered useless. Warfare on land, sea, and air will now be fought with tons of small drones in brutal 1-on-1 fights.
It’s probably why everyone from the Navy to the capital are completely changing tactics from expensive, complex weapons systems that cannot last for a sustained war into small, modular, disposable attack drones and drone defense systems.
Laura Ramoso is a comedian and the daughter of a German mom, an Italian dad, and has a crunchy granola Canadian aunt (wow – what a house that must be like to grow up in). This whole series of her imitations is nothing but pure gold.
Tokenmaxing is the new ‘lines of code’ dumb metric
When we measure effort instead of value, we lose sight of what we are trying to achieve
Like lines of code produced per day and story points, AI token usage is now being tracked by most large tech companies. Even to the point performance reviews depend on high usage.
The natural response: tokenmaxing. Tokenmaxing is a way of using AI that absorbs tremendous amounts of AI tokens without regard to efficacy.
Prompt flooding: stuffing massive codebases, documentation, and context into every prompt, burning tokens on context the model doesn’t actually need.
Agent swarms: running multiple AI agents in parallel to maximize code output, regardless of whether the work is coordinated or coherent.
Background loops: keeping AI sessions or agents running continuously in the background, racking up token spend without clear ownership of what is being produced — or why.
Bryan ONeill finds the better question is to ask does this reduce friction for a user, close a gap in a workflow, or improve reliability for a customer – or is it merely ‘activity’.
He argues, and I have also found, that spec-driven development is far better: a method where engineers write detailed specifications first and AI generates code against them. But the spec should now go further and be the place where engineering intent and business value get defined together. The spec is where you answer, “Why does this matter, and what problem are we solving?” before a single token gets spent.
Each generation inherits the task of shaping its own era, of guiding history to become a place where the dignity of every person is safeguarded, justice is promoted and fraternity is made possible. Yet every era also runs the risk of creating an inhumane and more unjust world. Whenever humanity is in danger of marring its true identity, we Christians lift our eyes to the Incarnate God, knowing that it is “only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of humanity truly becomes clear.”
Pope Leo XIV has released his very large encyclical letter MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS – SAFEGUARDING THE HUMAN PERSON IN THE TIME OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.
We all know the super-hard worker that puts in long hours and gets everything done. And – ironically – a lot of times they never get promoted.
I don’t agree with everything, but here I think he hits the nail on the head: high performers often get stuck being “heroes” in operational meetings/roles while remaining invisible to the people who actually authorize promotions.
Every have fuzzy childhood memories of going somewhere? I remember going to Hueston Woods Lodge when I was very little on a family vacation. I was taking a trip down memory lane and got lost looking it up because I remembered the name, but was looking for ‘Houston’ Woods.
I remember the odd shaped high-pointed main building, the big pool, and the hiking trails. I also remember walking down to the dock. It’s nice to see it’s still around and still looked almost the same. Maybe I should go visit it again someday…
