Week Links: 4/26/26

To riff on a Kenneth Koch poem, One Spectacle May Hide Another:

California Man in Custody After Shooting at Dinner Attended by Trump, NYTimes.

On Facebook and LinkedIn accounts that appear to be connected to him, Mr. Allen described himself as an independent game developer, posting about a game called “Bohrdom” that he had released in 2018. Described online as “a skill-based, non-violent asymmetrical fighting game loosely derived from a chemistry model that is itself loosely based on reality,” the game appeared to have almost no reviews and almost no followers on its linked social media accounts before Saturday.

Kash Patel needs a new alarm sound to wake-up. Suggestion:

More knock-on effects from the war:

The Helium Crisis That Won’t Go Away, Lever News

A crucial resource is being choked off from the world amid the ongoing conflict between the United States and Iran — and it’s not oil. It’s helium.

The rare, nonrenewable gas is a key ingredient for more than just party balloons. It’s needed for lifesaving medical procedures, groundbreaking research, and the current tech boom underpinning much of the U.S. economy. The gas was also vital in the recent Artemis II mission that sent four astronauts around the moon and back.

But the war in Iran has cut off a significant portion of global helium resources, leading to a 50 percent price increase and warnings of a debilitating supply shortage. And although the U.S. and Iran are working to open key shipping routes in the region, the arrangement is far from certain, and the monthlong closure that has already transpired will still lead to supply shocks.

This made me think about a remarkable set of images from Cuba. Despite the restrictions on shipping to Cuba, these therapy clowns managed to provide a birthday party, and even helium balloons, to children whose chemotherapy has been interrupted. Credit to People’s Dispatch.

As the US siege continues to kill in Cuba, an interesting history to recall:

Why hurricanes rarely kill in Cuba, PreventionWeb

Cuba's focus on hurricane preparedness dates back to Hurricane Flora. Flora devastated the east of the island in 1963 - the same region now struck by Melissa. On the eve of its landfall, the government had introduced a sweeping land reform to nationalise all but the smallest farms. Party militants and soldiers had been dispatched across the island. When Flora hit, people found these representatives of the revolution enduring the hurricane alongside them. Fidel Castro flew east to lead the rescue operations. Historian Mikael Wolfe argues that Flora transformed the rebel army from "a controversial force of expropriation" into "a nearly universally admired source of rescue".

Voting is linked to living longer, Penn Today

In the study, published in the Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Studies, Handy and her co-author, Sara Konrath of Indiana University, tracked older adults who voted in the 2008 presidential election and those who did not and examined participants’ risk of dying over the next five, 10, and 15 years.

The researchers find that older adults who voted experienced a significantly reduced mortality risk, with those in poorer health benefiting more from voting 15 years later. These results are not explained by participants’ prior wealth, education, civic engagement, or political affiliation, says Handy. And even when their candidate lose, voters still have a lower risk of dying years later.

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AI Watch

How Amazon’s AI Algorithms Raise the Prices You Pay, Washington Monthly

Central to Amazon’s monopoly power, the complaint alleges, are sophisticated AI-driven pricing systems that draw on torrents of real-time data and “can detect any price change virtually anywhere on the internet.” Amazon has used these algorithms not only to adjust its own prices in real time, but to monitor how competing retailers’ algorithms react, probe their strategies, and learn how to shape their behavior—including how to induce them to raise their prices.

The FTC singles out what it calls Amazon’s ‘anti-discounting’ algorithm. According to the commission, it was conceived by Jeff Wilke, Amazon’s former head of Worldwide Consumer, to avoid what he described internally as a “perfectly competitive market,” in which rivals compete on price and drive down profits. Instead, Wilke argued for Amazon to adopt a “game theory approach,” predicting that if it did, both the company’s and its competitors’ prices “will go up.”

Three reasons why DeepSeek’s new model matters, MIT Technology Review

For V4-Pro, DeepSeek charges $1.74 per million input tokens and $3.48 per million output tokens, a fraction of the cost of comparable models from OpenAI and Anthropic. V4-Flash is even cheaper, at about $0.14 per million input tokens and about $0.28 per million output tokens, making it one of the cheapest top-tier models available. This would make it a very appealing model to build applications on.

In terms of performance, V4 is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a huge jump from R1—and it seems to be a strong alternative to just about all the latest big AI models. On the major benchmarks, according to results shared by the company, DeepSeek V4-Pro competes with leading closed-source models, matching the performance of Anthropic’s Claude-Opus-4.6, OpenAI’s GPT-5.4, and Google’s Gemini-3.1. And compared to other open-source models, such as Alibaba’s Qwen-3.5 or Z.ai’s GLM-5.1, DeepSeek V4 exceeds them all on coding, math, and STEM problems, making it one of the strongest open-source models ever released.