All rise

Good morning Staker! Here’s what’s cookin’ today. Walmart’s summer sales provide relief for frustrated consumers; Understanding AI’s leader-follower model; Why we love to stare into a fire; and get ready for new music from Def Leppard🤘 

Let’s get into it!

For hundreds of thousands of years of human history, dominance likely played a large role in determining who was the leader of a pack.

However, humans have evolved and dominance is secondary. In civilized human society, it’s knowledge and wisdom that typically determine who people freely chose to follow.

People can still be subjugated by force, but when it comes to choosing a leader, knowledge and wisdom are the standard. According to an essay by Zachary Garfield, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Mohammed VI Polytechnic in Rabat, Morocco, AI is now leveraging the human leader-follower dynamic.

Garfield described his observations of human interactions with agentic AI, noting people don’t just ask these models questions—they ask them for advice. For example, it’s not “What are the options?” it’s “Which option should I choose?”

While the scientific community referred to the human mind as an expensive computer for decades, now the dynamic has flipped: the expensive computers are now being delivered as minds.

VR headsets never really took off as expected, partly due to cost constraints, but also because not many people are willing to walk around with a computer on their face.

When it comes to smart glasses, they blend in easily and can be mistaken for regular specs at a glance.

However, if you look closely—and more people do these days in certain situations—you can tell they’re not everyday frames. For starters, the camera is often visible and the temples are abnormally bulky, because they may contain batteries, speakers, or other components.

Companies are aware of the barriers to sales caused by this design, but in a world increasingly more surveilled and on edge about privacy invasions, it’s even more important for brands to make it clear their products aren’t breaching privacy.

Solos is putting that into practice with a newly launched privacy kit, ensuring it’s done its part to make sure the public feels secure in the presence of its products.

The kit includes transparent temples, making it obvious the interiors aren’t loaded with things like recording devices, speakers, or batteries and a camera blocker which doesn’t simply hide it, but turns it off.

For most people, the fascination with fire burns as bright as the fire as itself. Staring into a firepit as the flames flicker leads most of us to lose track of time.

Why is it that fire has such a captivating grip on human attention? According to Dr. Daniel M.T. Fessler, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, it’s a product of the evolutionary concept of “prepared learning.”

The concept suggests humans are naturally equipped with the ability to learn important things fast, but not hardwired to immediately understand other things.

Fire is one of those other things, and because human curiosity is such a key evolutionary trait, its grip on our attention can last for as long as it takes until it’s satisfied.

According to Fessler’s ethnographic research, peoples all around the world who still cook and heat their homes almost exclusively with fire will teach their young to master it well before adulthood. In almost all such cases, children have mastered fire by 10 years old, after which they lose interest in it.

For almost everyone else though, fire remains worthy of their attention. It can save them, but also end them. It can be tamed, or it can burn everything down. It can—and must—be respected.

Fans of Def Leppard know the band has a pretty recognizable and authentic sound. If one of their songs comes on the radio, it’s pretty clear right off the jump it’s them.

It’s possible the tone and production of the British outfit’s upcoming 13th studio record will be the same as fans are used to, but according to frontman Joe Elliot, that’s likely where the similarities will end.

In a recent interview with France’s Oui FM, he discussed the album and why it’s likely to be released about a year after its first single, Rejoice.

“The album won't be out until early ’27, ‘cause we’re still recording it,” he said. “We were actually recording parts of it [during the Vegas residency] on days off—we would go down into the basement of the casino and set it up as a studio…So we're still actively recording now, and mixing.”

“I will tell you this much: we’ve written the fastest song we’ve ever done. And we’ve also written the most ridiculously over-the-top, pretentious, massive, big, kind of bombastic song that we’ve ever written too; and lots of stuff in between.

“So it’s very varied. It’s a very eclectic collection of tunes.”

The cinema is cool

During the hot days of July, you could always get relief from the sun with a trip to the movies. If you caught a bunch of July releases throughout the ’80s, you’ll have no trouble with today’s trivia! 📽️