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Shapes Beyond Their Outlines

Rachel Crowell’s article turns a survey of mathematicians’ favorite shapes into a tour of how modern mathematics thinks. The premise sounds almost playful: ask specialists to name beautiful or intriguing forms and explain why they matter. But the answers quickly show that, for mathematicians, a shape is rarely just an outline. It can be a way to classify spaces, encode choices, study motion, compare dimensions, or translate a hard problem into a more workable language.

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Techmeme surfaced this May 25, 2026 story in its Techmeme cluster, and the direct source used here is the Vatican’s May 15, 2026 encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas.

AI as a question of power

The most interesting part of Magnifica Humanitas is that it does not treat AI mainly as a product category, a productivity tool, or a near-term policy problem. It treats AI as a test of who gets to shape the conditions of human life. That makes the document much broader than a normal technology-policy statement, and it explains why Techmeme’s cluster drew in everything from straight news coverage to arguments about Anthropic’s presence at the Vatican.

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A Bright Spot In A Weak Drinks Market

The article uses whisky to explain a surprising corner of Chinese consumption. Most alcohol categories in China are struggling. Beer is weak, wine has faded since its peak, and even baijiu, the country’s dominant spirit, has suffered falling sales as younger consumers drink less and overall spending remains sluggish. Yet whisky is moving in the opposite direction.

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White House lawn cleared after apparent gunshots (r/news)

• No_Newspaper8: Trying soooo hard for that ballroom
• vhs2220000: I thought the National Guard had that place on lockdown
• kea87: Skipped Don Jrs wedding to work on his false flag in DC

Ukraine’s capital Kyiv hit by massive missile, drone attack (r/worldnews)

• GiorggioAntonioni: We’re under attack for more than 3 hours as of now. It’s pretty loud…
• Gullible-Evening-702: Putin can only attack civilians with results.
• justplainmike: Slava Ukrani

Ebola treatment tent set ablaze again in Congo, with 18 suspected cases leaving (r/news)

• Hungry_Shake6943: Why would you do this
• ncc74656m: Remember, Fauci literally has to have personal security because of the same kind of threats and hate in the US. We’re no better than these people.
• WARxxPIGG: damn. is this not the plot for the movie Outbreak

World has 6 months to avert major food crisis, says UN as Hormuz struggle drags on (r/worldnews)

• vwapnerd: There are a few thousand people globally who have the ability to change all of this. They refuse.
• DeltaMx11: Time to start learning how to garden
• DifficultyWithMyLife: Just like with climate change, the world’s response will be: “Oh, well.”

What’s the “Widowmaker” of your career field or hobby? (r/AskReddit)

• HutSutRawlson: I’m a musician… the two biggest hazards are either drug use or driving home tired after a late gig.
• Drascio1773: Alcoholism is the widowmaker of the alcohol industry. From producers to salespeople, distributors to retail/bar sales. 20%+ alcoholism rate that I’ve seen many people ruin their lives in this career. It can be lucrative and a lot of fun but it can also take hold and be tough to shake.
• Crazyboutdogs: Veterinary works here- suicide. We have one of the highest rates of any profession. Compassion fatigue, abuse by clients, low wages/super high stress all play a big part. It’s so bad we have entire foundations battling it.

TIL Obi-Wan Kenobi’s home planet is named “Stewjon” a play on the name of “Daily Show” host John Stewart. During an interview about Star Wars, John asked Lucas the name of Obi-Wan’s home planet, and he answered Stewjon, jokingly. It was then made canon, after being mentioned in several guide books. (r/todayilearned)

• gavinashun: so dumb lol
• dae_giovanni: *Jon Stewart. you wrote “Stewjon”… and still went with “John”. lol
• TessaFractal: I wonder how many times Lucas has been clearly taking the piss, and it’s been written down as if it was deeply important canon.

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Microsoft basically told employees you all suck this year (Blind)

• hkhgtf (Amazon): Billionaires are weaponizing AI against the middle class.We need to elect a govt that would standup for the greedy billionaires. Vote socialist democrats.
• ohanal (Salesforce): They know the job market sucks, they could easily get away without any increase at all, which seems what they actually did.
• LRWPT21 (Microsoft): Rewards portal has been open for managers since 5/21. Adding screenshot of instructions received. What a joke.

Meta is dead. Morale is dead. (Blind)

• aint shit (Amazon): It is a gross company. Why would you expect anything different?
• avgbeing (Apple): They fired and saved what? 3-4B annually?
• rQmp05 (SpaceX): Stop being an idiot, there is no overarching mission at Meta , there hasn’t been for decades it’s been dog eat dog TC maxxing nonsense. Name one internally developed product in the last 5 years that yall have successfully scaled.

Ordinary WiFi can now identify people with near perfect accuracy (r/technology)

• swollennode: Yeah we know there are a lot of research being done with this. This require the WiFi router to have the firmware necessary for mass adoption. This is probably why the FCC was banning routers and allowing others to go through.
• Bainik: This is super unsurprising. There have been proof of concept level papers about using wifi hotspots for keystroke detection on nearby keyboards for a decade or so. The jump from there to here seems extremely small.
• SoggyFist: With all the shit on my desk? Nah

Americans’ AI hate wave might just be gathering steam: Data centers could hike power costs in some states over 50% by 2030 (r/technology)

• not_right: Needs to be the law that if you want to build a data centre you also have to build the (sustainable) power supply for it.
• Alternative_Swan_497: But just think about how much wealthier the ultra-rich will be!
• Yakety_Sax: Can someone please explain to me why we are subsidizing the increased strain on the grid instead if just having the Data centers pay more?

Stop trying to make Grok happen — Reuters report suggests government and enterprise customers don’t like xAI’s chatbot. Does anybody? (r/technology)

• Silicon_Knight: Don’t look at the spaceX IPO then. lol. Their whole plan is 90% of revenue coming from Grok with something like 70T in value lol.
• inotocracy: I’d say its ability to analyse social media content (twitter) in real time, whether it be text, images or video is pretty impressive.
• Doomu5: It’s quite funny when people use it to fact check Musk.

Agent Use is gonna drop off a cliff once its all usage based (r/ExperiencedDevs)

• Eliarece: As a developer from a third world country, it has been very depressing to see American compagnies spend the equivalent of my yearly salary on one month of token for one dev
• aitchnyu: But the companies got a time window when people generated Rube Goldberg machines they cant understand nor update by hand.
• SinbadBusoni: Well, it wasn’t fun while it lasted.

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What happened

Anthropic’s official research blog published Project Glasswing: An initial update, a May 22, 2026 post about the first weeks of its effort to use Claude Mythos Preview and related tooling to find vulnerabilities in systemically important software before similarly capable models become widely available.

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Quick facts

• Difficulty: MEDIUM
• Problem: Maximum Width of Binary Tree
• Topics: Tree, Depth-First Search, Breadth-First Search, Binary Tree

Problem gist

The input is the root of a binary tree. The task is to find the largest width across all levels.

The subtle part is how width is defined. It is not just the number of real nodes on a level. The width runs from the leftmost real node to the rightmost real node on that level, counting the missing null positions between them as if the tree were laid out like a complete binary tree.

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Seeing Mines with Particles from Space

Adam Bluestein’s article turns a mining story into a physics story. The pressure begins with copper and other critical minerals, whose demand is rising as grids, electric vehicles, batteries and other clean-energy systems scale up. Existing mines are being asked to produce more, even as their ore gets poorer and new discoveries take many years to become working operations. The result is a basic problem of vision: mining companies need to know much more about what is underground before they dig, blast or send workers into unstable spaces.

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This summary covers The Economist’s April 25th, 2026 Science & technology item listed in the contents as Well Informed: Bone broth's benefits and published under the headline Is bone broth good for you?.

The article treats bone broth as a useful case study in wellness marketing. The drink has become fashionable because it sounds both ancient and scientific: simmer bones and connective tissue for long enough, and the result contains protein, collagen, amino acids and other compounds associated with the body. That makes it easy to sell as a shortcut to weight loss, better skin, stronger bones, joint health and gut repair.

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The Pragmatic Engineer surfaced this May 20, 2026 article, and the original post is Google Cloud deletes Australian trading fund’s infra.

A backup outside the blast radius

The story is alarming because the failure was not a familiar cloud outage. It was not a data center burning down, a region going dark, or a bad deploy taking one product offline. According to The Pragmatic Engineer’s recap, Google Cloud accidentally deleted UniSuper’s cloud subscription, and that administrative mistake removed the data associated with it. UniSuper had replicated across two Google Cloud regions, but the replica lived inside the same provider-level blast radius, so it disappeared too.