Author: n Nate Andersonn

It’s an incredible time to be a guitarist who doesn’t want to own a bunch of $2,000 amps and an expensive pedalboard of gear. Amp and pedal simulators, which have been around for decades, have in the last few years finally come into their own as nearly indistinguishable sonic replacements. Even John Mayer is now willing to ditch his beloved tube amps for digital models.

I certainly don’t have Mayer’s chops or gear budget, but I do love messing with this sort of tech and have purchased everything from NeuralDSP‘s Archetypes series to Amplitube and Guitar Rig. Last week, as part of an early Black Friday sale, I picked up two amp/effects suites from British developer Polychrome DSP—Nunchuck (Marshall amps) and Lumos (clean through mid-gain tones). They are both excellent.

Any reasonable person should be satisfied with this tech stack, which models gear that collectively costs as much as my house. After my Polychrome DSP purchases, I reminded myself that I am a reasonable person, and that I could therefore ignore any further amp sims that might tempt my wandering eye.

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Last month, a DoorDash driver in upstate New York delivered an item to a local house in Oswego—only to find the front door open and a man apparently unconscious or asleep on a couch in the front room. The man was also quite naked, with pants and underwear around his ankles, and he was fully visible from the porch.

The DoorDasher was a 23-year-old woman named Olivia Henderson, and she felt like the whole situation was some kind of creepy exploitation play. Was this guy purposely exposing himself to her? Was he even asleep? Should she have to endure the sight of random male genitalia just to make a few bucks?

She did not think so, and she decided to do something about it. Henderson filmed the man from outside the home, and she later posted the video on TikTok to shame him. Naturally, it went viral.

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Helping companies pay ransoms to digital extortionists is kind of a weird business.

On the one hand, you “negotiate” with cybercriminals and in so doing may drive down the costs of recovering from a particular ransomware incident. On the other hand, you’re helping criminals get paid, funding their operations and making further attacks more likely.

And there’s always a temptation built in to this kind of work. Seeing lucrative sums being whisked away through cryptocurrency exchanges and “mixing services”… Realizing from up close just how vulnerable companies are… Learning that modern ransomware can operate as a service where you essentially “rent” the code from its developers in return for a cut of the profits…

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The University of Pennsylvania has a somewhat unusual distinction: It is the alma mater of two of the planet’s most polarizing figures, Elon Musk and Donald Trump. As the political power of both men rose over the last year, the US government began to pressure Penn, first by pulling its research funding and then by targeting the school for past actions related to a transgender swimmer.

After the “sticks” were deployed, a “carrot” was offered. Penn became one of just nine schools nationally to be offered a special “compact” with the federal government, which would give the feds broad control over the school and its speech in return for preferential access to federal funds. Penn declined to sign the deal. (Making the whole surreal situation stranger was the fact that one of Penn’s own wealthy boosters apparently helped the Trump administration write the compact.)

In other words, Penn has become an obvious target of the Trump administration; now it has been targeted by a hacker claiming to share Trump and Musk’s grievances over affirmative action and “wokeness.”

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“Opening locks” might not sound like scintillating social media content, but Trevor McNally has turned lock-busting into online gold. A former US Marine Staff Sergeant, McNally today has more than 7 million followers and has amassed more than 2 billion views just by showing how easy it is to open many common locks by slapping, picking, or shimming them.

This does not always endear him to the companies that make the locks.

On March 3, 2025, a Florida lock company called Proven Industries released a social media promo video just begging for the McNally treatment. The video was called, somewhat improbably, “YOU GUYS KEEP SAYING YOU CAN EASILY BREAK OFF OUR LATCH PIN LOCK.” In it, an enthusiastic man in a ball cap says he will “prove a lot of you haters wrong.” He then goes hard at Proven’s $130 model 651 trailer hitch lock with a sledgehammer, bolt cutters, and a crowbar.

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Yesterday, Donald Trump announced on social media that he had been planning to “surge” troops into San Francisco this weekend—but was dissuaded from doing so by several tech billionaires.

“Friends of mine who live in the area called last night to ask me not to go forward with the surge,” Trump wrote.

Who are these “friends”? Trump named “great people like [Nvidia CEO] Jensen Huang, [Salesforce CEO] Marc Benioff, and others” who told him that “the future of San Francisco is great. They want to give it a ‘shot.’ Therefore, we will not surge San Francisco on Saturday. Stay tuned!”

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Here’s a job pitch you don’t see often.

What if, instead of “work-life balance,” you had no balance at all—your life was your work… and work happened seven days a week?

Did I say days? I actually meant days and nights, because the job I’m talking about wants you to know that you will also work weekends and evenings, and that “it’s ok to send messages at 3am.”

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Earlier this month, the Trump administration made nine elite universities an offer they couldn’t refuse: bring in more conservatives while shutting down “institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas,” give up control of admissions and hiring decisions, agree to “biological” definitions of sex and gender, don’t raise tuition for five years, clamp down on student protests, and stay institutionally “neutral” on current events. Do this and you won’t be cut off from “federal benefits,” which could include research funding, student loans, federal contracts, and even student and faculty immigration visas. Instead, you may gain “substantial and meaningful federal grants.”

But the universities are refusing. With the initial deadline of October 20 approaching, four of the nine universities—the University of Pennsylvania, Brown, University of Southern California, and MIT—that received the federal “compact” have announced that they will not sign it. [Update: A fifth school, the University of Virginia, has now declined the deal.]

In addition, the American Council on Education, which represents more than 1,600 colleges and universities, today issued a statement calling for the compact to be completely withdrawn.

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