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Somebody used AI to port the ENTIRE Need For Speed Underground 2 game into a web browser, making it PERFECT for the iPhone Duo!
Everything works, including Online Multiplayer! Over 10,000 players online right now. Props to @Avdeyev318
Here's the link: nfsu2.xyz
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BREAKING: A major bank in Paraguay has failed, leaving nearly 60% of the country's adult population unable to access their accounts.
Ueno Bank has around 3 MILLION customers and $2.8 BILLION in deposits, including hundreds of millions in public funds.
The central bank has taken emergency control after the bank's financial condition collapsed, freezing withdrawals, transfers and card payments.
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Read the FBI alert on the Binance theft carefully. It does not ask THORChain to block anything. It asks "THORNode operators". That is a different request.
THORChain has no company, no CEO and no address for a subpoena. It has about a hundred people running nodes with keys. The FBI just handed each of them a list of 1,078 wallets and a sentence saying these belong to North Korea. Nobody is ordered to do anything. But from today, no operator who routes one of those addresses gets to say he did not know.
In September, Bitget asked THORChain to block its stolen funds. The answer was no, on principle, and the principle held because the request came from a company. The same request from the FBI does not go to the protocol. It goes to the people. A protocol can have a principle. A node operator has a jurisdiction.
The only thing that paused the laundering this week was an Ethereum reorg that made THORChain refund 10 ETH twice. The network stopped itself to protect its pools. Whether the operators will stop it on purpose is now a personal decision for each of them, made with the FBI's list in hand.
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Airbnb is dead. Well it’s not dead but it’s going to be dying soon.
The Bear case for Airbnb.
I’ve been bullish on Airbnb as a company for many years. But my outlook on the business changed this week.
Let me tell you why.
In 2012 I purchased my first Airbnb property. Over the years that one property has turned into a portfolio of high-end Airbnb’s that generates almost $1M a month in rental income.
Using ai agents for the first time this week has completely changed my outlook on the company.
Airbnb is facing an existential threat that most of the market is completely missing.
With Airbnb pushing its mandatory host-side commission to 15.5%, the middleman tax has never been higher.
Enter AI agents. (Hark, Dot, Muse, Grok Bot, etc)
Right now, booking a vacation rental requires navigating a siloed app and paying heavy platform tolls.
But your AI agent won't care about Airbnb's brand wall. When you know the property you want to book and you ask it “what’s the cheapest way to book the property” it will query property management system APIs directly, find the exact same home, and execute a direct booking that saves everyone 15%.
Airbnb's entire model relies on holding supply captive behind a closed interface.
When AI agents can autonomously search, verify reviews, negotiate terms, and book direct with property operators, that walled garden turns into a leaking pipe.
The middleman tax's days are numbered.
I’m predicting that Airbnb’s growth rate will slow down significantly in the next 24 to 36 months. And within 5 years they will be seeing negative growth.
The same can be said for most other online marketplaces that don’t have unique inventory that can only be booked directly on their platform and nowhere else.
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Duo-Man offers the complete walkman experience on the iPhone Duo. Open the Duo to pick and 'insert' the cassette, Close the Duo to start listening.
Yes, I actually recorded the button clicks and static noise from a real Walkman!
It was fun making this at @bitrig hacks today.
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Duo-Man offers the complete walkman experience on the iPhone Duo. Open the Duo to pick and 'insert' the cassette, Close the Duo to start listening.
Yes, I actually recorded the button clicks and static noise from a real Walkman!
It was fun making this at @bitrig hacks today.
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🦔55% of companies that laid off workers citing AI now regret it, according to Forrester. Two-thirds are already rehiring. A survey of 600 HR leaders found over a third had rehired more than half the roles they cut, often within six months and at higher cost. Klarna bragged about replacing 700 customer service workers with AI, then quietly started hiring humans again when quality collapsed. Ford is rehiring engineers to fix problems automated systems couldn't handle. Forrester projects AI automates about 6% of jobs by 2030. Six percent.
My Take
Companies fired people, replaced them with AI, watched things break, and are now paying more to bring people back than they saved by cutting them. I think it exposes how poorly most executives understood what their own employees actually did. The work that's easy to see, writing code, answering tickets, processing claims, looked like the expensive part. The work that's hard to see, the institutional knowledge, the judgment calls, the context about why things are done a certain way, turned out to be what held everything together.
This reminds me of the offshoring wave in the 2000s. Companies moved everything they could overseas, discovered the hidden costs a year later, and quietly brought it back under a different name. Same impulse, same blindness to what the people they cut were actually doing all day. The difference is that offshoring at least put humans on the other end. This time they replaced humans with a tool that hallucinates, can't handle edge cases, and has no memory of why the last three attempts at solving this problem failed. Forrester says 6% by 2030. Over half the companies that swung bigger than that already regret it.
Hedgie🤗
fortune.com/2026/08/22/execu…
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