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You’re not crazy. The internet does feel genuinely so awful right now, and for about a thousand and one reasons. But the path back to feeling like you have some control is to un-spin yourself from the Five Apps of the Apocalypse and reclaim the Internet as a set of tools you use to build something you can own & be proud of — or in most of our cases, be deeply ashamed of.

A truly beautiful essay proposing a return to independent publishing.

For these three systems, newly entering the public domain today are: works by people who died in 1955, for countries with a copyright term of “life plus 70 years” (relevant in UK, most of the EU, and South America); works by people who died in 1975, for countries with a term of “life plus 50 years” (relevant to most of Africa and Asia); films and books (incl. artworks featured) published in 1929 (relevant solely to the United States).

Public Domain Review article highlights works entering the public domain in 2026, including books by William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, and Hermann Hesse.

Gen Z listeners are 27% more likely to purchase vinyl records than the average music consumer, despite having grown up in the era of Spotify. In fact, half of U.S. vinyl buyers today don’t even own a record player – they buy records as tangible tokens of fandom and identity

via lightcapai.medium.com

Then, as restaurants started to publicly decry the hefty commissions these apps collected, some diners rebelled. This was the “delete your apps” era. We did not delete our apps. In fact, we’re more hooked now. Data from the National Restaurant Association suggests demand for restaurant delivery is growing.

Expedite article analyzing **that** viral Reddit post about food delivery app algorithms.

The first price point for usable solar technology that I can find is from the year 1956. At that time, the cost of just one watt of solar photovoltaic capacity was $1,865 (adjusted for inflation and in 2019 prices).10 One watt isn’t much. Today, one single solar panel of the type homeowners put on their roofs produces around 320 watts of power.11 This means that at the price of 1956, one of today’s solar modules would cost $596,800.12

Our World In Data explaining why renewable energy prices have dropped dramatically, showing how solar and wind technologies have become cheaper than fossil fuels within just 15 years.

A research paper examines how technology learning curves vary over time, challenging the traditional constant learning rate model. via construction-physics.com

Article grey market of peptides and underground pharmaceutical communities.

Tyler Cowen's Friday assorted links cover topics ranging from adaptive political economy to the resurgence of folk deities in Taiwan. via The source of this content is Marginal REVOLUTION.

Venkatesh Rao reviews the novel "There Is No Antimemetics Division," exploring a world of self-censoring ideas and the organization that contains them. via Ribbonfarm

Recipes that provide a "wow factor" for minimal effort is the topic of a recent question posted on MetaFilter.

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is sending usable engineering data back to Earth, indicating its systems are healthy after the team devised a workaround for a problem in the flight data system. via The source of this content is the NASA Voyager blog.