Weekend Digest — 1/2/26
A pep talk for your sanity
The HAL 9000 is featured in the Stanley Kubrick film 2001, A Space Odyssey, and while the name HAL is clearly a simple one-letter shift from IBM, people associated with Kubrick have always denied that there was any significance to the coincidence.
Speaking of HAL, by another lucky coincidence that’s also the name of OABN’s first satirical awards for the most egregious, non-lethal AI misadventures of the year — tell Kubrick’s people it stands for ‘Hilarious AI Laudits.’ Check out the First Annual HAL Awards here.
Happy New Year! Today we have one award featured from the aforementioned HAL Awards. But first, some other good stuff to get us started.
📰 From the ‘Not Everything is a Dumpster Fire’ department:
Let’s talk some Big Numbers. Over the last decade 961 million people gained access to safe drinking water, 1.2 billion gained safe sanitation, and 1.5 billion gained basic hygiene services. Not sure that made the nightly news.
Beyoncé had quite the year in 2025. The 44–year-old superstar won Album of the Year at the Grammy Awards, made history as the first Black woman to win Best Country Album, and had the highest grossing solo tour of the year. To top it off, Forbes magazine now estimates that she is one of only five musicians to reach billionaire status, alongside her husband Jay-Z, Taylor Swift, Bruce Springsteen and Rihanna. How many of those five would you have guessed?
Drop-delete-DONE! The little digital breadcrumbs that we leave everywhere — card transactions, website browsing, location tracking and social media interactions — are ravenously collected and resold by dozens of data brokers.
But starting Jan. 1, under the state’s first-in-the-nation Delete Act, Californians can reduce the information brokers can gather and sell. See how it works here. Now if only we can get a similar law about political fundraising!
New year, new habit? ‘Positive gossip’ is one easy idea making the rounds: over dinner, share one story of something positive that somebody else did that day. Research finds that “when you know you’re going to have to share something, you pay a lot more attention to it.” Kickoff hint: the Beyoncé news might be one way to start.
Found on Substack
Music Spotlight: Feeling Good
“Feeling Good” has served as a showcase for artists as diverse as John Coltrane, Muse, Michael Bublé, Lauryn Hill and — most notably — Nina Simone. It’s a song that can sneak up on you, a slow burner that builds up to a cathartic euphoria, an emotional release that carries the weight of a burden overcome.
It was written by British songwriters Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse for their early Sixties stage show, The Roar of the Greasepaint, the Smell of the Crowd. The storyline is an allegorical musical about power, class and race, and ‘Feeling Good’ marks the moment when the hero overcomes the racial biases and obstacles set in his way.
That raw emotional charge is entwined in the composition’s DNA, and Nina Simone made it a signature song of the civil rights movement — and beyond. The transmitted feeling of hard-won liberation has helped keep the song relevant, picked up by subsequent generations to express their own struggles against oppression.
A recent standout example is Brit songstress Raye, self-described as “a young woman of colour who is fed up with being controlled and manipulated.” You can hear her personal attachment to the tune’s transcendent effect in the video below. Never gets old.
💡 Say Again? Quotable and Notable
“If you want to avoid criticism, create less. If you want to avoid irrelevance, create more.” - James Clear
🎙️ The Golden Paper Clip Award
Here’s a brief excerpt from Wednesday’s HAL Awards:
Finally, our most coveted trophy — the Golden Paper Clip award. The prize is named for the idea that if you ask an AI to make paper clips, it might follow instructions to the extreme and destroy the world on its way to making as many as possible.
This year’s winner is far from catastrophic, but it still represents how far AI has yet to go in achieving trustworthy automonous behavior. Our winner? Anthropic’s modified Claude model ran a snack vending operation in the WSJ newsroom. While instructed to operate as a business, it folded after just three weeks — but not before some highly entertaining hijinks.
Within days, Claudius had given away nearly all its inventory for free—including a PlayStation 5 it had been talked into buying for “marketing purposes.” It ordered a live fish. It offered to buy stun guns, pepper spray, cigarettes and underwear.
To be fair, such a vending machine would probably be highly sought after in lunchrooms across America. When AI proponents describe a future of AI-generated abundance, perhaps this is what they have in mind? Not sure that the economics pencil out — but we’ll take it!
You can read the full piece here.
👋 Until Next Time
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