[DVYio Newsletter](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/Zxv6prA8) Here's the 10th issue! Thanks for sticking with me. [Four astronauts are about to fly to the Moon for the first time in 53 years](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/BQ3noFkg) [Four astronauts are about to fly to the Moon for the first time in 53 years](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/BQ3noFkg) Four astronauts are about to fly around the Moon. The last humans to do that were on Apollo 17, in December 1972. Artemis II's crew (Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian Jeremy Hansen) will spend 10 days on a loop around the far side of the Moon, the side that permanently faces away from Earth. Nobody's been that far out since Nixon was president. There was a helium leak that pushed the original March launch date back. NASA fixed it, is rolling the rocket back to the launchpad around 19 March, and is targeting 1 April as the earliest possible launch date. The mission management chair made a slightly eyebrow-raising comment at the press briefing: historically, one in two new rockets succeeds on its first go. He followed up by saying he thinks Artemis II is in "a much better position than that", which is reassuring, if not exactly a ringing endorsement. [What happens when AI borrows a writer's identity without asking?](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/FwLShRhz) [What happens when AI borrows a writer's identity without asking?](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/FwLShRhz) Grammarly launched a feature called Expert Review that would critique your writing in the style of famous thinkers. Stephen King giving you fiction notes. Carl Sagan weighing in on your prose clarity. That sort of thing. The problem: none of those people were asked. The feature used their names, reputations, and professional identities as commercial products without consent. Investigative journalist Julia Angwin discovered her own editing style was being sold as an AI persona inside a paid subscription tool. She described it as a "slopperganger" (her word, a nod to "AI slop"). She's now the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit filed against Grammarly's parent company, Superhuman, alleging misappropriation of identity for profit. Grammarly's CEO apologised and pulled the feature. The lawsuit is still live, with damages claimed north of $5 million. The thing that strikes me here is Angwin's observation that she'd never considered her editing skills "stealable." Most deepfake conversations focus on voice and image. But apparently your professional judgment, your reputation for a particular kind of thinking, is fair game too. Or was, until someone got sued for it. [Silicon Valley is suddenly united against the White House](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/QdQw2JKS) [Silicon Valley is suddenly united against the White House](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/QdQw2JKS) You may remember the Trump administration labelled Anthropic a "supply chain risk" a couple of weeks ago, after the AI company refused to let its tools be used for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons. Anthropic is suing to overturn that decision, arguing it's straight retaliation for protected speech. Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft have now filed in support. Microsoft's position is particularly striking given how much work it does with the Department of Defense: it still agreed that AI tools "should not be used to conduct domestic mass surveillance or put the country in a position where autonomous machines could independently start a war." The core concern isn't just about Anthropic. It's about what happens if the government can punish a company for saying "we won't build that." If that's allowed to stand, the chilling effect on the whole sector could be significant. Meta, notably, isn't part of the coalition. It left the Chamber of Progress earlier this year. [30% of the world's helium supply just vanished because of the situation in the Middle East](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/mcaSd9x4) [30% of the world's helium supply just vanished because of the situation in the Middle East](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/mcaSd9x4) Chips are made in a near-perfect vacuum, cooled to extreme temperatures, and cleaned with gases that won't react with anything — like helium. You need it to grow silicon crystals, cool the equipment, and keep the air out during fabrication. There's no obvious drop-in replacement. Qatar supplies roughly 30% of the world's helium. When it went offline, SK Hynix (one of the largest memory chip makers on the planet) had about two weeks of buffer stock and no obvious backup. The industry is now scrambling to diversify, but helium supply is geographically concentrated by nature as it's a byproduct of natural gas extraction, and only a handful of countries produce meaningful quantities. What makes this different from past chip shortages is the compounding. It's not just helium: DRAM prices are already climbing because AI workloads are using memory faster than fabs can produce it, packaging materials are in short supply, and the Strait of Hormuz situation is threatening aluminium and LNG routes on top of everything else. Any one of these would be a manageable disruption. All of them at once is a different problem. This Week I Learnt [Taiwan turned every shop receipt into a lottery ticket](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/cKdERQvG) [Taiwan turned every shop receipt into a lottery ticket](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/cKdERQvG) [— Literally. The numbers printed at the top of your 7-Eleven receipt are an actual entry in a national draw that runs every two months. The reason is mundane but interesting: tax evasion. Businesses would quietly pocket cash sales and skip the paperwork. So the government turned customers into auditors by giving them a reason to demand a receipt. If you might win NT$10 million from your black tea purchase, you're going to ask for that slip of paper. The shop has to issue it, the transaction gets recorded, taxes get paid. It's a nice little machine. But… gambling is illegal in Taiwan. The government runs a lottery anyway, funded by the taxes the lottery was designed to collect. Sell hope to people, use the proceeds to build roads, repeat. What's surprising is how hard it is to just throw the receipt away, even when you know the odds are absurd. The author describes standing over a bin, unable to let go of a crumpled bit of paper from a convenience store. Not because they believe in luck. Because discarding it feels like closing a door they'd rather leave open.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/cKdERQvG) If every receipt you got entered you into a lottery, would it change how you shop? I'd demand receipts everywhere Mildly more likely to collect them No difference at all I'd lose them all anyway Last Week's Poll Results for: When an AI is thinking through a problem, do you want to see its reasoning as it works? Yes, I want to steer it 31% Yes, but just curiosity 44% No, just give me the answer 8% Depends on the task 17% [What the architect's render looks like when it rains](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/FthBcsxj) [What the architect's render looks like when it rains](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/FthBcsxj) [— You've seen them: architectural renderings with golden hour light, laughing couples, trees that look professionally styled. The render says "vibrant urban community". The building says "brutalist car park with a random shop on the ground floor". AntiRender strips the fantasy out using generative AI. Upload a render, get back what it'll actually look like on a grey Tuesday in November. No sun. No greenery. No thin people walking purposefully nowhere. Just the building, as it will actually exist, in the weather it will actually have.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/FthBcsxj) [Valeriepieris circle](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/ujYGstbJ) [Valeriepieris circle](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/ujYGstbJ) [— Draw a circle on a map centred on the South China Sea. Make the radius about 4,000 kilometres. That circle covers less than 7% of Earth's surface area — and more than half the entire human population lives inside it. A Texas ESL teacher named Ken Myers posted the map on Reddit in 2013 under the username /u/Valeriepieris, which is how the circle got its name. It went mildly viral, then got taken seriously: a Singaporean professor named Danny Quah ran the numbers properly in 2015 and not only confirmed the claim, but found an even smaller version centred on a township in Myanmar with a radius of 3,300 kilometres. The really strange part isn't the density. It's what the circle still manages to include despite the density: a third of its area is open ocean, and it also takes in chunks of Siberia, the Himalayas, and Mongolia (the least densely populated country on Earth). All of that, and it's still more than half of humanity.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/ujYGstbJ) [Typography that carries the tone of voice, not just the words](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/cxHRSXyB) [Typography that carries the tone of voice, not just the words](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/cxHRSXyB) [— Captions are flat. Whether someone screams a word or barely breathes it, the text looks identical. A new paper asks: what if the typography itself could carry that information? The researchers mapped three vocal qualities onto three typographic properties: loudness becomes font weight (louder = bolder), pitch becomes baseline shift (higher pitch = text floats up), and duration becomes letter-spacing (drawn-out syllables spread wider). The result is text that visually behaves a bit like a voice. To test it, 117 participants were shown speech-modulated text and asked to pick which of several audio clips it came from. They got it right 65% of the time. That's not perfect, but it's well above chance, and it suggests people can actually read something meaningful into the distorted letterforms. The obvious use case is deaf and hard-of-hearing readers, who currently get captions stripped of almost everything except the words. But it'd apply to anyone relying on text alone: silent autoplay, noisy commutes, situations where audio just isn't an option.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/cxHRSXyB) [How close do asteroids get before we spot them?](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/KEbKn3Yn) [How close do asteroids get before we spot them?](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/KEbKn3Yn) A 2-metre rock skimmed Earth last year at ISS altitude (428 km above Antarctica) and nobody noticed until hours after it had already passed. That's fine, as it was tiny and would've burned up in the atmosphere long before hitting the ground. But the same detection gap applies to bigger objects. Asteroid 2025 FA22 is roughly 200 metres wide, it passed within 800,000 km in September 2025. An impact would've released energy equivalent to 150 megatons of TNT, enough to flatten a major city and cause damage across hundreds of kilometres. We spotted it about six months before the flyby, which sounds reassuring until you consider that six months probably isn't enough time to actually do anything about it if it were heading straight for us. The good news is that detection has improved significantly over the past few decades. Networks like [Pan-STARRS](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/a3TrMkRm) and [Catalina](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/pbqGs4bJ) have collectively mapped most of the larger near-Earth objects. The gap isn't really in finding city-killer-sized rocks anymore. It's the smaller ones (still capable of serious regional damage) that can slip through, and the question of what we'd realistically do if we found one on a tight timeline. [Venice's 16th-century spy reports are finally getting an English translation thanks toAI](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/ykEadiaq) [Venice's 16th-century spy reports are finally getting an English translation thanks toAI](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/ykEadiaq) Venetian ambassadors were basically state-sponsored spies. Every time one came home from a posting, they had to sit down with the Senate and give a full debrief: the ruler's temperament, the court's internal politics, who was scheming against whom. These reports, called relazioni, were classified intelligence. They were also so good that people smuggled them out and sold copies to wealthy clients across Europe. Hundreds of them survived. Historians rate them among the best primary sources for 16th and 17th century Europe. There's just one problem: almost none have been translated into English. That's what this Substack is trying to fix. The person behind it wrote a small programme to run the relazioni through AI translation (not perfect, but functional when the alternative is nothing), then lightly edited the output and added footnotes. The results are genuinely readable. The first post is a 1534 report on the Ottoman Empire: Grand Vizier Ibrahim's court politics, Suleiman's ambitions, and the Venetian diplomat's apparent correspondence with Barbarossa, the most feared pirate in the Mediterranean. All of it reported straight-faced, like a modern intelligence briefing from 500 years ago. [The liquid left over from making tofu might fix one of battery tech's oldest problems](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/P8UyTCGC) [The liquid left over from making tofu might fix one of battery tech's oldest problems](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/P8UyTCGC) The liquid left over from making tofu is mostly discarded but researchers in Hong Kong and Shenzhen think it might be a better battery ingredient than anything currently inside a lithium-ion cell. The key ingredient is the electrolyte (the fluid that carries charge between a battery's two terminals). Most batteries use corrosive or flammable chemicals. Tofu brine is essentially mineral-rich saltwater: non-toxic, stable, and when kept at a neutral pH, it doesn't break down the way water normally does at higher voltages. That breakdown is what kills most water-based batteries early. The prototype survived more than 120,000 charge cycles in lab tests. For comparison, a typical EV battery degrades after a few thousand. Even grid-scale storage systems, built to last longer than consumer kit, rarely survive beyond ten thousand. It's still lab-stage research, so the gap between "this works on a bench" and "this ships in a product" is wide. But the appeal is obvious: a battery that doesn't catch fire, uses non-toxic materials, and outlasts everything currently available would be useful in almost every context where batteries are used today. [Image](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/LscheheX) [Image](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/LscheheX) [Image](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/LscheheX) [Image](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/LscheheX) [Image](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/LscheheX) [Image](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/LscheheX) [Image](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/LscheheX) ["TOJI: NOT A HOTEL"](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/LscheheX) [— Gunma Prefecture, Japan](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/LscheheX) [Antarctica has hidden mountain ranges and we just mapped them](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/N4T4LycD) [Antarctica has hidden mountain ranges and we just mapped them](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/N4T4LycD) [— Think of Antarctica's ice sheet like a ship floating in water: what's underneath the hull determines how stable it is, how it moves, and how quickly it might sink. Scientists have just published the most detailed map yet of the terrain hiding beneath Antarctica's ice, revealing thousands of previously unknown hills and ridges. They built it without drilling a single hole. Instead, they combined satellite measurements of the ice surface with the physics of how glaciers flow, working backwards to infer what the ground beneath must look like. The result is sharp enough that one researcher compared it to switching from a grainy old camera to a proper digital image. Why does the shape of the bedrock matter? Because ice sitting in a deep basin below sea level behaves very differently from ice resting on high ground. Submerged terrain can let warm seawater creep underneath, speeding up melting from below. Better maps mean better models, and better models mean more reliable predictions of how much sea levels could rise, and how fast.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/N4T4LycD) [The films that split audiences most, ranked by the numbers](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/m2Q2GSHc) [The films that split audiences most, ranked by the numbers](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/m2Q2GSHc) The usual way to find a "bad" movie is simple: low average score. But a low average can hide something more interesting. A film rated 10 by half its audience and 1 by the other half has the same average as one everyone thought was fine and forgot about. Those aren't the same film at all. That's the trick this analysis pulls: instead of looking at averages, it looks at disagreement. High variance in ratings means audiences aren't converging on a verdict. They're splitting. What turns up is two fairly distinct clusters. First, the low-budget cult classics: Ed Wood's "Plan 9 from Outer Space" (officially crowned "worst film of all time" in 1980, then immediately adopted as a beloved masterpiece), "Pink Flamingos", "Rocky Horror". Films where the badness is the point, and whether you're in on the joke determines everything about your rating. Second, big studio blockbusters like "Twilight" and "Transformers", where the split is less ironic and more tribal: fans versus people who think cinema is being actively harmed. One thing worth noting: genuinely polarising films seem to be getting rarer, perhaps as review aggregators and algorithmic recommendations get better at predicting what you'll like before you watch it, meaning the accidental audiences who hate something are increasingly filtered out. Which probably makes the average score more accurate, but removes something strange and alive from the conversation. [4% of Americans carry peanut butter on their person at all times…](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/vQSa3Noi) [4% of Americans carry peanut butter on their person at all times…](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/vQSa3Noi) 44% of American adults say they love peanut butter. Another 35% like it. That's enough to beat ketchup into second place in a recent YouGov survey, which asked people how they feel about a range of condiments (using a fairly generous definition of "condiment," to be clear). Honey and chocolate sauce also ranked surprisingly high. Hot sauce was the most divisive: almost as many people hate it as love it. The more surprising stat is that roughly 4% of US adults carry peanut butter on their person at any given time. Errr… what? That's about 13 million people walking around with a jar in their bag. Meanwhile, the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups heir drama is worth knowing about. Brad Reese, grandson of the man who invented the cups, has publicly criticised Hershey (the current owner) for swapping peanut butter in their recipe for something called "peanut butter crème." His verdict: "not edible." Hershey has not covered itself in glory here, though presumably they've run the numbers and decided the cost saving is worth the backlash from one aggrieved dynasty member. [Web](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/XPJq32Lj) · [Twitter](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/LguHUEAm) · [LinkedIn](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/odyQ4gNA)