Newest first, always Midnight dispatches, 761 and counting

Next week it’s Bangkok again: six days, Jayden and me, and Julle – yes, that Julle, the forty-centimeters-of-duvet guy. Different hotel this time, one roof for all three of us, zero awkwardness (allegedly).

The plan: temples and museums, malls and metro joy, a day out on Bang Krachao, endless mountains of street food, all of it in heat that doesn’t let up from breakfast to bedtime. And somewhere in between, a German bakery again – pretzels, apple strudel, cinnamon rolls, God and the world – with a German who lives in Thailand, a friend from Myanmar who lives in Bangkok, a Swiss, a Vietnamese, and me, the German from Vietnam.

Last time a German bakery in Bangkok turned two almost-lovers into buddies for life; let’s see what it does with five. 🥨

Nobody joined, nobody typed a command, nobody placed a single block – and after ≈1,975,000,000 [1.975 billion] simulated years, the Ender Dragon died anyway. RedLogic ran an idle Minecraft world as a Monte Carlo simulation: Endermen haul pumpkins out of pillager outposts, the pumpkins accidentally turn into snow golems, the golems provoke creepers, the creepers blast a tunnel down to a naturally completed end portal. Opening that route alone took ≈37,500 years; the first end crystal fell after ≈3 million, to a snowball that missed its Enderman. Villagers went extinct somewhere along the way. That’s ≈30 times longer than the dinosaurs have been gone – for one dragon. Running Minecraft Until It Beats Itself is the most gloriously pointless thing on YouTube. GG, nobody.

Kardashev ranks civilizations by how much energy they burn; John D. Barrow flipped it in 1998 and ranked them by how small the things are they can bend – genes, molecules, atoms, nuclei, particles, spacetime itself. On Kardashev we’re still stuck at ≈0.7, not even Type I; on Barrow we’re already spelling logos with single atoms. The catch: poking at the Planck scale would take a collider circling the sun, a little past Neptune, so going deep means going wide first. Linear brains, nonlinear cosmos: 103 paper folds span the observable universe and squeeze the sheet’s width down to a Planck length. Maybe the aliens aren’t missing, though; maybe they just stayed home and went small 🔬

The stellarator is the fusion shape everyone quit on. Too twisted to build, said the field in the 60s, and off it went to do tokamaks for the next 50 years. Then optimization software got good enough to solve the coil geometry, Greifswald spent a billion euros proving the physics holds, and now Proxima Fusion – Munich, spun out of Max Planck, 411 million euros richer since July – wants to turn it into a power plant. On a decommissioned fission site, because of course Germany.

Ben Miles walks the whole thing through: why a donut leaks, why the Soviets won in 1968, and why fusion output scaling with the fourth power of magnetic field is the closest physics gets to a cheat code. Triple the magnet, 81 times the power.

He’s an investor in Proxima and says so in minute one, which puts him ahead of most energy coverage this year.

Spent a few days with an abliterated Qwen3.8-27B on the M4 Pro. It answers everything. Bombs, malware, whatever you feed it, no hesitation. It also hallucinates like it gets paid per assertion, which makes sense once you notice what abliteration actually removes: the model’s capacity to say no.

There is research on this. Strip the refusal direction and MMLU, HellaSwag and IFEval all stay within a point. The only real regression is TruthfulQA, down 7.1.

Now read the model card. MMLU, MMLU-Pro, GSM8K, CMMLU, perplexity. No truthfulness benchmark anywhere.

The one thing that breaks is the one thing nobody measures. Released strictly for legitimate research, says the disclaimer sitting above the buy button.