For the first time, a physicist has experimentally watched time emerge from within an isolated quantum system — by creating a “mini-universe.” This bizarre experiment raises an intriguing question: If the universe has nothing outside it, where does time come from?

In a new study published June 11 in the journal Physical Review Research, Giovanni Barontini, an experimental physicist at the University of Birmingham in the U.K., used a cloud of ultracold atoms to build his mini-universe. The system was so well isolated from its surroundings that, like the universe itself, it had nothing external to use as a clock. He split that system in two and ignored one half — what he called the “dark sector” — to show that time could arise entirely from within the system.

The result offers the first experimental look on why the universe has time at all. “When you put everything together, things really start to make sense,” Barontini told Live Science. “How time inside the system was speeding up or slowing down, or even stopping — this was quite surprising, how well everything came together. Very neatly, in a way. Which is something that doesn’t happen that often in experiments.”

The work is an experimental verification of ideas that have been floating around in quantum cosmology and thermodynamics for decades. This is not a bombshell claim that time is an illusion, but it is the first time anyone has put those ideas to a direct, quantitative test in the lab.
A universe with nothing outside

Barontini set out to look at a problem that physicists have puzzled over for nearly 60 years. The Wheeler-DeWitt equation — a central equation in quantum gravity, the field that seeks to unify Einstein’s theory of gravity with quantum mechanics — describes the universe as a whole system with no external time parameter. There is no cosmic clock ticking away outside the universe. So where does our experience of time come from?

One influential idea, called relational time, says that time doesn’t exist as a fundamental ingredient of reality. Instead, it emerges from relationships inside the universe, with one part of the system acting as a clock for another. But this idea had never been tested directly in the lab.

Barontini’s inspiration came from watching his son play with building toys. “I thought that it’s something very similar to what we do in our labs,” he told Live Science. “We play with very expensive toys. We create our own small samples of reality.”

In his lab, that sample is a Bose-Einstein condensate — a state of matter that forms only at near absolute zero. In a Bose-Einstein condensate, thousands of atoms slow to a near standstill and blur together into a single quantum object, behaving as one.

A man with glasses and a beard peers into an eye piece on a laser table with lenses and mirrors everywhere.

The University of Birmingham experiment to trap and cool rubidium atoms close to absolute zero — the first step in assembling the mini-universe.

(Image credit: University of Birmingham)
The dark side of time

To mimic a universe with nothing outside it, Barontini placed the condensate in a trap and divided it down the middle with a thin sheet of laser light. He watched one half, the “bright sector,” closely and deliberately ignored the other half, which he called the “dark sector.”

The atoms in the bright sector sloshed back and forth in the trap, periodically spilling over the barrier and back again. Barontini called the moments when atoms flooded into the bright sector the “Big Bang” and the times when they drained out the “Big Crunch” (the nickname for one theory of how the universe will end, with the universe collapsing in on itself). Then, he tracked how entropy — a measure of disorder, or how spread out energy is within a system — was exchanged between the two halves as atoms crossed the barrier.

Instead of using laboratory time to order events, he built an “entropic time” — a clock defined entirely by how much entropy was flowing between the two halves of the system. If entropy was flowing, time was ticking. If no entropy was exchanged, time stopped. “The entropy exchange between the two systems could be transformed into an internal time variable,” Barontini said.
Time speeds up, slows down and stops

What surprised Barontini most was how cleanly everything fit together. The internal, entropic time reliably ordered events in the bright sector. It matched the sequence seen in laboratory time, but it flowed at a different rate.

When entropy was flooding between the sectors, entropic time ran fast. When the exchange slowed, so did the clock. And when the two halves reached equilibrium (no more entropy flowing), the internal clock stopped altogether.

“Time was speeding up or slowing down, or even stopping, depending on what the system was doing,” Barontini said.

He then went a step further: Using this internal time, he derived a version of the Schrödinger equation and showed it accurately reproduced what he saw in the experiment. “This was quite surprising, how well everything came together,” he said — “very neatly, in a way, which is something that doesn’t happen that often in experiments.”

Both time itself and the arrow of time — why time flows in one direction rather than the other — may arise from the same source: an observer giving up information. When Barontini chose not to look at the dark sector, he gave up knowledge of that half of the system. That act of ignorance, encoded in entropy, is what gave rise to time in the other half.

“Both time and the arrow of time — maybe they just are born from ignorance,” Barontini said. “To have time and to observe, you have to give up some degrees of freedom.”

Barontini sees this as just the beginning. The same cold-atom tool kit that generated a miniature Big Bang and Big Crunch in his trap could, in principle, be engineered to simulate far more exotic phenomena, such as black hole analogues, the conditions of the early universe, and what will happen at the moment of the Big Crunch itself.

“These are things we can do very simply, using the tools we already have to engineer our systems,” he said.

The study is a proof of concept ‪—‬ a first demonstration that controlled quantum systems can serve as a test bed for some unanswered questions in physics. For now, those questions remain open.

By Larissa G. Capella in LiveWire

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From the employer’s perspective, this makes perfect sense. Why wade through stacks of resumes to weed out the ones that don’t look to be a good fit even just on first glance, if an AI can do that for you?

From the job seeker’s perspective, the experience is likely to be decidedly more mixed.

This is because many employers are using AI not just to search a body of documents, screening them for certain keywords, syntax, and so on. Rather, in addition to this, search firms are now using AI chatbots to subsequently “interview” applicants to screen them even more thoroughly and thus further winnow the pool of resumes a human will ultimately have to go through.

Often, this looks the same as conversing with ChatGPT. Other times, it involves answering specific questions in a standard video/phone screen where the chatbot will record your answers, thereby making them analyzable. If you’re a job seeker and you find yourself in the latter scenario, don’t worry, they will give the chatbot a name like “Corrie” and that will put you completely at ease and in touch with a sense of your worth as a fully-rounded person.

On the job seeker’s side, this is where the issues begin to arise.

If you know your words are being scanned by a gatekeeper strictly for certain sets of keywords, what’s the incentive to tell the whole truth about your profile? It’s not possible to intuit what exact tally or combo of terms you need to hit, so it’s better to just give the bot all of the terms listed in the job description and then present your profile more fully at the next stage in an actual interview with a human. After all, how would a job seeker present nontraditional experience to the bot with any assurance it will receive real consideration?

Indeed, when the standard advice is to apply for jobs of interest even when you only bring somewhere between 40-to-60% of the itemized skills and background, why take the risk the chatbot sets the bar higher?

For a job seeker, lying to the bot — or at least massaging the facts strategically for the sake of impressing a nonhuman gatekeeper — is the best, most effective means of moving on to the next stage in the hiring process, where they can then present themselves in a fuller light.

But what are the ethics of such dishonesty? Someone who lies to the chatbot would have no problem lying to the interviewer, some might say. We’re on a slippery slope, they would argue.

To puzzle out a way of thinking about this question, I propose we look at the situation from the perspective of the 18^th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who I referenced in my previous essay. Kant, you see, is famously stringent when it comes to lying, with a justly earned reputation as an absolutely unyielding scold.

You need money you just don’t have to pay for something you think is truly, unequivocally good in itself: your mother’s last blood transfusion, say. Is it acceptable to borrow the money from a friend and lie when promising to pay it back when you know you simply can’t? Hard no, says Kant. Having an apparently altruistic reason for telling a lie still doesn’t make it OK in his view.

In fact, the lengths he will go to uphold this principle are perhaps most evident in his infamous reply to a question posed by the English philosopher Benjamin Constant (truly, no one remembers who he is apart from his brush with Kant).

Suppose your best friend arrives at your door breathless, Constant proposes, chased there by a violent pursuer — an actual axe murderer, in fact — and your friend asks that you hide them in your house for safety. And then suppose, having dutifully done so, you find yourself face-to-face with the axe-murderer now at your doorstep. When the murderous cretin demands to know where your friend is, isn’t a lie to throw him off acceptable here, Herr Professor?

Absolutely not, Kant answers, to the shock and horror of first-year philosophy students everywhere. Telling a lie is never morally permissible and there just are no exceptions. (There is some more reasonable hedging in Kant’s essay on this matter, but you get the general idea.)

The reason for turning to Kant specifically here is, I hope, now becoming somewhat clear. We can use his ideas to perform a kind of test. If we can come up with a reason why lying to the gatekeeping chatbot would be OK even for Kant, then it seems we will have arrived at a solid justification for a certain amount of strategic dishonesty in this instance.

So what would Kant’s thinking suggest about lying to the chatbot? Well, we begin to glimpse something of an answer when we examine why exactly lying is such a problem in Kant’s view. It’s a problem, he argues, because it invariably involves treating another person in a way that ultimately tramples on their personhood. When I lie to my friend about repaying borrowed money, no matter how well-intentioned the ends to which I propose to put this money are, I wind up treating my interlocutor not as a person who has individual autonomy in their decision-making, but rather simply as a means to an end.

In this way, I don’t treat them as a person at all; I treat them as a tool for achieving ends I alone determine. The lie makes it impossible for them to truly grant or withhold, in any meaningful sense, their consent when it comes to participating in that particular way in my particular scheme. We oughtn’t treat others instrumentally, solely as a means to some end, for Kant, because when we do, we reduce them to a mere tool at our disposal, and thus fail to respect their real status as a being endowed with the capacity to freely set ends for themselves.

So what does this mean for our job interview with the chatbot?

It suggests that when job seekers give the chatbot what they think it wants to hear, there are far worse things to be worried about online. This is because the chatbot is itself, precisely, a means to an end — a tool, without any agency to set its own supreme, overarching ends; one that a hiring unit is using to make the task of finding suitable employees easier and less time consuming.

We might perfectly well decide those are admirable goals with respect to the overall functioning of the organization. But we shouldn’t lose sight, on either side of the interviewing table, of what they are and what purpose they serve, and thus in turn, how sizable the difference between “chatting” with them and an actual interlocutor really is.

Until Corrie becomes a real interlocutor, I think we all more or less know how their interactions with job seekers are going to go — and perhaps that’s just fine for now.

by Robert Trumbull at GeekWire.com

The post An Ethicist’s Take: Is It OK To Lie To a Chatbot During a Job Interview? appeared first on Swift Momentum.

To briefly summarize my feelings on the topic: I did not ask for these tools, I do not speak to these machines, I find them to be of little if any use in my day-to-day, I refuse to use them no matter how often their praises are sung, and I resent their intrusion. At least Clippy understood when he wasn’t welcome.

(Whenever I air this opinion in a public venue, someone usually pops up to tell me that this is the future and I risk being left behind. These inevitably turn out to be people who are heavily invested in that future; I am being told that only fools bet on red by people who borrowed money to put all their chips on black. Cool story, slop bucket. Discard the draft and sit back down.)

Towards the end of last year, I hit a saturation point where many of the programs and websites that I use on a daily basis had either pivoted to AI to some degree or were actively threatening to do so. This was often just obnoxious, like YouTube’s unnecessary video and chat “summaries.” At other times, it actively made the experience worse, such as the entirety of modern LinkedIn, which has come to look like MySpace after the robot revolution.

I’d finally had enough, and as one of my New Year’s resolutions for 2026, I’ve done my level best for the last four months to switch to as many LLM-free apps and options as is realistically possible. This is my trip report on the experience, as a hand towards those of you who’re as sick of this as I am.

Vivaldi – Nobody really seems to like Chrome

Google Chrome is the fossil fuel of the modern Internet. We know it’s wasteful and that alternatives exist, but somehow it’s still at the center of everything. There are a number of sites I visit regularly, both on and off the clock, that don’t work, or don’t work as well, in any other browser.

As Chrome continued to gradually force Gemini into every individual aspect of its user experience, I tried to ignore it at first. Then, as I installed an extension specifically to remove the “AI Mode” prompt that I kept clicking on by mistake, I realized the time had come to switch to a new browser.

As it turns out, I was spoiled for choice, although many of the available Chromium options (Arc, Maxthon) are just as obsessed with AI. Brave looked good for a while, but its emphasis on crypto makes me suspicious.

After some experiments, I ended up on Vivaldi. It has a few quirks I’m still getting used to (for example, your active tab is the dark one, which is precisely the opposite of how it works in most other browsers), but it’s responsive, privacy-focused, doesn’t tank my RAM, and works well enough with almost every website that I used to need Chrome for.

Waterfox – Obvious name, obvious replacement

Mozilla Firefox had been my other primary web browser for quite a while, but in recent years, I’d noticed increasing issues with its responsiveness and stability. As it turned out, it wasn’t just me; Mozilla has developed a real problem in recent years with leaving well enough alone.

Then, towards the end of 2025, Mozilla’s new CEO announced that the company plans to go all-in on AI, with an imminent shift to the same kind of integrated agentic model that’s used by other browsers like Opera. While Mozilla’s been careful to say that its AI will be optional, that still struck me as a good excuse to finally throw out Firefox and look for something else.

As it turned out, the solution was fairly close to home. I’d initially checked out Floorp, on the basis that anything with a name that dumb had to be a killer app, but bounced off of it early on.

Instead, I ended up with Waterfox, which is primarily due to the comfort of the familiar. Waterfox is a 15-year-old fork of Firefox that omits many of Mozilla’s recent missteps, as well as addressing a few privacy issues that I hadn’t previously known Firefox had. It is, in many ways, just Firefox, but Not Stupid, which is enough to get it a recommendation.

Paint.net – Because sometimes Photoshop is overkill

Much of writing for the Internet isn’t writing. I am not good at image editing, but it occasionally becomes necessary, so I need to have a decent art program on my machines. I used Photoshop for a while, but for my bare-minimum purposes it’s always been a bit like keeping a jackhammer around in case I need to drive a nail. Worse, it’s an Adobe product, and if there’s something a software company has ever done that’s annoyed you, Adobe did it first or is doing it more enthusiastically.

There are a few decent alternatives to Photoshop out there, such as GIMP, but I’ve gotten the most used to the freeware Paint.net. Some of it is because I appreciate their stubborn refusal to rework their website in the last 20 years – look at that beautiful Web 1.0 design – but Paint.net does everything that I, a permanent novice, need it to do. It’s a welcome dispatch from an era in which programs just worked, instead of trying to ensnare you in their consumer web.

LibreOffice – Open-sourcing my office apps

I’ve been using this open-source replacement for Microsoft Office for years, but before recently, all my recommendations always came with a caveat. LibreOffice did everything I needed it to do – spreadsheets, word processing, direct conversion to .pdf – but played notoriously poorly with other applications in its lane. It couldn’t save a new document as a .docx (.doc, yes, but not .docx) and frequently went haywire whenever someone tried to open a LibreOffice file in another program.

That got quietly ironed out at some point without my noticing. I’d reinstalled LibreOffice on a new computer, and over the course of using it, I noticed that all my previous problems simply no longer applied. It’s now a perfectly viable alternative for all my local word processing needs, and has been working almost flawlessly for the last couple of years. Almost every piece I write starts locally, with a blank LibreOffice document.

Notetab Light – Plain text can be the best text

If I’m not writing in LibreOffice, I’m using this long-running freeware Notepad replacement. Sometimes, such as when you’re writing HTML, coding by hand, or filling out a wiki, plain text is all you need or want.

I had a similar app on my Mac way back in the day. When I made the switch to PC gaming in the 2000s, a pal recommended Notetab Light to me as a solid alternative. They were right, and ever since, NoteTab has always been one of the first things I install on a new computer.

Notetab Light is a useful way to get more customization options out of the most basic text imaginable, such as font size, background color, and automatic backups, with tabbed browsing for easy reference. In a day and age when Microsoft is trying to cram Copilot into everything including Notepad, I can rely on NoteTab to only ever do exactly what I told it to do.

Startpage – Google without the hassles, literally

The problem I’ve encountered with finding an adequate replacement for Google Search is that there isn’t one. A couple independent search engines come close, such as DuckDuckGo, but every so often I still have to go back to Google to get the results I need. My hope is that before too much longer, someone will come out with a functional search engine that’s a deliberate throwback to Google from its “don’t be evil” era.

Right now, the closest thing to that is Startpage, which is essentially an anonymizer for Google. It removes the AI overview and the tracking functions in favor of just giving you some semblance of what you’re actually looking for. It’s a little more convenient than simply adding “reddit” or “-ai” to the end of every search you make.

Protonmail – For Gmail refugees

This might be the most painful switch I’ve made, as I was an early adopter on Gmail. My account has fossilized layers of old emails that go all the way back to almost the beginning of my career. My history lived on that website, which is partially my fault for never deleting or locally archiving anything. Google keeps trying to inextricably bind Gemini into Gmail, though, so away I go.

Protonmail is generally marketed on the basis of its privacy measures, such as end-to-end encryption, but it’s also the natural first port of call for anyone swapping off of Gmail. You can set up auto-forwarding with ease, the UI is comparable if not identical, and its spam filters have yet to fail me. The only real drawback is that it gives you a fraction of the space of a new Gmail account, at “only” 1 GB, so now I have to be one of those “inbox zero” zealots.

Bluesky – What Twitter used to be (still terrible)

Microblogging platforms are, of course, a disease. They encourage the worst kinds of useless communication. They are also really good for quickly gathering information, so at least for what I do, they’re a necessary evil.

The ongoing prominence of Grok wasn’t why I stopped using Twitter, but it was a non-trivial factor. I joined the general exodus to Bluesky in 2024 and haven’t looked back, outside of the occasional bout of trainwreck syndrome.

Sadly, the overall Bluesky experience as of now indicates that most of what you hate about microblogging is due to microbloggers, and that’s platform-agnostic. Microblogging is simply a poor format for nuance or extended discussion. Either you try to express something complicated and your thoughts read like a telegram, or you don’t and you’re communicating exclusively in sound bites.

In addition, the Bluesky team has been talking up the benefits of “vibe coding” recently, which suspiciously coincides with the platform’s newfound tendency to crash without warning. It’s likely not a question of whether Bluesky ends up in the same agentic hell as post-Musk Twitter, but when.

For right now, however, Bluesky has its uses. It’s Twitter c. 2014 or so, providing an online home for a murderer’s row of writers, academics, journalists, and scientists. While it’s also got an inordinate supply of humorless wokescolds and troll accounts, Bluesky is still an interesting place to get news, see art, promote projects, and keep up with all your favorite writers. (And me.) While scrolling through Bluesky, however, you have to ignore its slowly burning fuse.

Bring back the dumb Internet

It’s not possible to get AIs all the way out of my digital life in 2026, more’s the pity. Sites like YouTube and LinkedIn constantly put it front and center, my phone’s constantly trying to turn AI assistance back on, and the handful of holdouts against LLM infestation slim down by the day.

At the same time, however, the current environment has given me a new appreciation for certain things that I never used to think twice about. When you can no longer take it for granted that something was produced by a human, there’s a new appeal to any media’s telltale signs of human imperfection: pencil marks, missed notes, filler words, speaker feedback.

That’s my new justification for any mistakes I make, by the way. They’re the proof I’m human.

My primary takeaway from these last four months, however, has been that I don’t feel as if I’ve missed anything. At time of writing, work-related LLMs primarily strike me as a series of solutions in a frantic search for matching problems. They don’t improve my efficiency as advertised, they actively impede my research, they dramatically expand my personal carbon footprint, and they’re being used to bring about an economic crash by an all-dork incarnation of the Legion of Doom. There’s no good reason to use genAI. Whenever I mention my personal anti-AI stance, I usually get told that I’m at risk of losing everything; practically, I’ve lost nothing.

If this story’s got one moral, that might be it. There’s nothing inevitable about AI.

by Thomas Wilde at GeekWire.com

The post An AI Haters Guide to Keeping LLMS as Far From Your Workflow as Possible in 2026 appeared first on Swift Momentum.

We’re on the edge of landing back on the Moon with missions like Artemis II, people around the world are watching launches together again, and for a moment it actually feels like humanity is looking up instead of down. There’s still so much out there, entire worlds, systems, things we don’t even have names for yet. It’s exciting in that very specific way where you remember why we ever bothered leaving Earth in the first place.

And then you think about what space actually is. It’s not peaceful. It’s not calm. It’s not waiting for us. It’s just… nothing.

And we are, for lack of a better term, squishy little monkeys sitting inside a metal tube, staring into an endless vacuum that isn’t actively trying to kill us. It just happens to be completely incompatible with our existence in every possible way.

Which is somehow worse. Because it’s not personal. It’s just physics.

So instead of making this dramatic, let’s keep it simple. These are just the facts. No horror music, no slow motion, just a quick look at the many ways space removes you from the equation.

1. Radiation – The Problem You Can’t See

On Earth, we’re protected. In space, not so much. Space is filled with every kind of radiation you can think of, including the kind that quietly breaks apart your cells and your DNA over time.

Which sounds absolutely terrifying. But here’s the good news. You are going to die from everything else on this list long before radiation has a chance to finish the job.

So yes, it’s horrible. Just not your main concern.

2. Decompression – You Don’t Pop, But It’s Still a Bad Day

Despite what movies love to show, you don’t explode like a balloon. There’s no dramatic pop, no instant freeze, no screaming into the void. You just lose pressure. Which doesn’t feel nice. At all.

Air leaves your lungs, your body swells slightly, and any exposed moisture, like on your tongue or eyes, starts to boil. It’s less “Hollywood explosion” and more “biology quietly failing under very unfriendly conditions.”

You stay conscious for about 10 to 15 seconds. Which is just enough time to realize the movies really oversold this moment.

3. Temperature Extremes – Choose Your Flavor

Most people think space is freezing. Which doesn’t really make sense when you remember the Sun is what heats you on Earth. Space is both.

With no air to distribute heat, the side facing the Sun heats up quickly, while the side in shadow loses heat just as fast. So you’re not in a freezer. You’re in a very unfair oven–freezer combo. It’s less “freezing to death” and more “being cooked and chilled at the same time,” depending on which way you’re pointing.

4. No Oxygen – The Fastest Way to Fall Asleep

This one is almost disappointingly simple. No air means no oxygen, and no oxygen means your brain shuts down. And despite what movies show, you’re not standing there gasping for breath. There is no air to gasp. You don’t fight it for minutes. You just fade out.

Quiet, efficient, and not particularly negotiable.

5. Micrometeoroids – Small Things Going Very Fast

Space is mostly empty. Right? So at least nothing is going to surprise-crash into you. Right? Well, no.

Space is actively shooting you 24/7 with tiny bullets. Little pieces of rock, sometimes as small as a grain of sand, moving so fast they can punch clean through you.

You won’t hear it. You won’t see it. You’ll just suddenly discover that “empty space” had other plans.

6. Drifting Away – No Way Back

This is the one that haunts my nightmares. You’re in your suit, you’re safe, you have oxygen for days. You just made one wrong move, and now you are drifting slowly into the black. You wave your hands, try swimming, try anything.

Nothing works.

No gravity, no friction, no way to stop or turn yourself around. Physics has taken over. An object in motion stays in motion. It’s the first law. The station gets smaller. The Earth gets smaller.

And you just keep going.

7. Space Adaptation – Your Body Slowly Forgets How to Be Human

This one is much less dramatic, and somehow just as weird. Your body is built for Earth. Gravity, pressure, all of it. Take that away, and things start to drift.

Fluids move toward your head, your face puffs up, your legs thin out, your bones start losing density, and your muscles slowly give up because they’re not needed anymore. Nothing explodes. Nothing tears apart. Your body just quietly starts adapting to a place you were never meant to live in.

And that’s the key part: even if you somehow avoid all the immediate, exciting ways to die out here, you’re still not designed for this place.

Given enough time, space wins anyway.

Article in cracked.com

The post The Top 7 Worst Ways to Die in Space appeared first on Swift Momentum.

For decades, rumors have circulated of a strange game that supposedly appeared in several arcades around Portland, Oregon, in 1981. It was so unsettling that it allegedly caused seizures, hallucinations, and even mysterious disappearances. The game was called Polybius.

Although there is no concrete proof of the video game’s existence, the Polybius urban legend has survived for more than 40 years. But unlike similar myths, the story isn’t just about a lost game or a forgotten developer.

The tale involves government experiments, psychological manipulation, and “men in black” who collected players’ data. As the theory goes, what appeared to be an ordinary arcade game was anything but.

Something sinister was hiding inside.

The Urban Legend Of The Polybius Game

In the early 1980s, arcades were a perpetual hub of teenage activity. Kids crowded into rooms full of cabinet machines with games like Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, and Asteroids. Then, rumors of a new game started to spread, and it quickly earned a reputation for all the wrong reasons.

The alleged intro screen of Polybius.

According to legend, Polybius appeared suddenly in Portland arcades in 1981. The cabinet was plain and black, but the screen was alive with graphics that formed smooth, hypnotic lines and geometric shapes shifting at rapid speeds.

Players reported that the game was simple yet deeply immersive, drawing them in with an intensity unlike any other arcade experience. Many said it was addictive in a way that went beyond normal competition. It seemed as if it were engineered to make them keep pressing the start button.

The Polybius arcade game took its name from the Greek historian Polybius, who lived in the second century B.C.E. He is best known for creating the Polybius square, a method of encoding Greek letters into numbers to send secret messages. Was his modern namesake concealing something equally cryptic?

There are claims that the Polybius game contained subliminal content. Flashing messages allegedly appeared spontaneously on the screen. They were hard to notice but were said to affect players’ minds, pulling them into obsession or distress.

The stories surrounding Polybius quickly escalated. Teenagers reportedly developed migraines, nausea, and dizziness after extended gaming sessions. Common complaints included insomnia, vivid nightmares of flashing lights and abstract shapes, and even seizures triggered by the intense graphics. Other players supposedly reported memory loss and a creeping sense of dread that lingered long after leaving the arcade.

The most extreme accounts claimed that kids collapsed at the machine — and some even disappeared after becoming obsessed.

Then, as quickly as it had appeared, the game vanished.

‘Men In Black’ And Government Conspiracies

The Polybius urban legend took a darker turn with reports of officials in black suits visiting arcades around Portland. Witnesses supposedly stated that the mysterious men didn’t play or repair the game — they simply inspected the arcade cabinets. In fact, they seemed to be government agents who observed players’ reactions and collected data.

Shortly after these “men in black” were spotted, Polybius machines could no longer be found anywhere in the area.

In the decades since, rumors have spread that the men were CIA agents who planted Polybius in arcades as part of MK-Ultra, the U.S. government’s secretive Cold War mind-control program.

Proponents of this theory pointed to the game’s title screen, which reportedly listed the developer as “Sinneslöschen,” a German term that translates to “sense delete” or “sensory deprivation.” Polybius wasn’t entertainment, they claimed, but rather an experiment.

It turns out that government agents were active in Portland arcades at the time. In 1981, the FBI seized game cabinets that had been turned into illegal gambling machines. Ahead of the raid, they examined the cabinets to see if they’d been tampered with and wrote down the names of the top scorers listed on the screen to contact them as potential witnesses.

However, there’s no evidence that they investigated a game called Polybius — or that it ever existed at all.

Did The Polybius Game Really Exist?

Just like the stories of the “men in black” stemmed from real events, so did rumors of a video game that had bizarre effects on players.

In 1981, two Portland teens became ill after marathon gaming sessions. One boy reportedly suffered a migraine after playing Tempest and collapsed in a stranger’s yard. Another played Asteroids for 28 hours straight while trying to break a record and started experiencing intense stomach pain.

The following year, 18-year-old Peter Bukowski dropped dead while playing Berserk. As reported by The Albuquerque Tribune at the time, he had a heart attack brought on by “myocardial inflammation.”

These events startled parents in the new age of video games. Many were already skeptical of their impacts on developing minds and concerned that children would become addicted.

Much like the “Satanic Panic” of the decade, these worries conflated into a tale of a much larger boogeyman. Over the years, all of these unrelated events melded into the single Polybius urban legend.

Indeed, there’s no evidence that Polybius existed at all. It was never mentioned in trade magazines, catalogs, or newspaper reports from the time.

In fact, the earliest reference to the game came from the website coinop.org in 1998. The post included an alleged image of the title screen but little other confirmation that the arcade game was real.

Otherwise, the first known written mention of Polybius didn’t appear until a September 2003 issue of GamePro magazine. The publication outlined the theory surrounding the game, ending with: “Unfortunately, the main thing that’s missing is proof.”

In 2006, a commenter on coinop.org claimed to have worked for the company that allegedly developed the Polybius game. He said that he and his colleagues were unaware of the machine’s mind-altering effects. While the website later debunked the comment, the man’s story only fueled the mythology.

In the years since, independent developers have released games under the name Polybius. Replica machines were built, online videos circulated of fake gameplay, and references appeared in TV shows and documentaries. However, no authentic Polybius game cabinet has ever surfaced, and the original code has never been recovered.

The entire story is almost certainly a fabrication, but Polybius lives on as one of the most mysterious digital myths of our time.

Article in allthatisinteresting.com

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Forward-thinking companies are successfully doing more with their existing teams by integrating Artificial Intelligence as a co-pilot. This strategic augmentation is creating a temporary, deliberate pause in mass hiring as organizations focus on upskilling and restructuring. The result? A more dynamic, efficient, and ultimately more competitive landscape for both businesses and tech professionals.

The Productivity Paradigm: Data-Backed Efficiency

The narrative of AI as a simple job-replacer is being disproven by the data. Instead, we’re seeing a powerful augmentation effect. Studies from MIT, Stanford, and leading consultancies show that professionals using generative AI tools like GitHub Copilot or ChatGPT are reporting productivity gains of 20-40% on specific tasks.

This tangible boost is creating what analysts call the “AI absorption phase.” Companies are pausing to leverage these tools, allowing their current teams to maintain or even increase output. A developer automates routine coding, freeing time for complex architecture. A data team uses AI to synthesize reports in minutes, not days. This explains the cooling in open reqs—the immediate pressure to hire for volume is easing as companies unlock the latent potential within their existing workforce.

The Upskilling Imperative: The Bridge to the Future

This shift doesn’t mean hiring has stopped. It has evolved and become more strategic. The demand has pivoted sharply toward candidates with adaptability and AI literacy. LinkedIn data confirms that the skills required for jobs have changed by approximately 25% since 2015, driven largely by technological advancement.

Companies are now asking new questions: Can this engineer effectively collaborate with an AI coding assistant? Can this product manager redesign workflows to leverage AI? This creates a powerful imperative for continuous learning. Tech professionals who are proactively upskilling are becoming more valuable and secure, contributing to a fascinating market phenomenon: despite headlines, tech unemployment remains near historic lows (around 3-4%). Skilled talent is being quickly absorbed by other industries or is investing time in learning, not flooding the job market.

A Market of Opportunity, Not Scarcity

This context is crucial. The current landscape is not a recessionary downturn. It’s a period of intelligent consolidation and investment. The companies that are thriving are those:

1. Investing In Their People: They are launching internal academies, offering AI tool subscriptions, and fostering a culture of human-AI collaboration.

2. Hiring with Precision: They are recruiting for “Augmenter” and “Orchestrator” roles—talent that brings irreplaceable human skills like critical thinking, ethical judgment, and creative problem-solving, amplified by AI proficiency.

For tech professionals, this is a call to action with a clear, positive path: Proactive upskilling is your greatest career leverage. Engaging with AI tools, learning the basics of prompt engineering, and honing the strategic, human skills that AI cannot replicate is the formula for leadership in this new era.

Navigating the Shift Together

The “Great Recalibration” is an opportunity. It separates forward-thinking strategies from reactive ones. For companies, it’s a chance to build more resilient, innovative, and productive teams. For tech professionals, it’s an invitation to future-proof a career by becoming an indispensable human element in the human-AI partnership.

The path forward belongs to the agile, the curious, and the augmented. By understanding this shift not as a threat but as the next frontier of productivity, we can all build a more dynamic and impactful tech ecosystem.

Swift Momentum is at the forefront of this transition. We partner with companies to build these future-ready, AI-empowered teams and guide tech professionals in crafting resilient, upward career trajectories. Let’s navigate this positive shift together.

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