Chaos & Amazement #2528 Context Engineering, The Velvet Sundown, and the Pentagon Pizza Index
In this week’s *Chaos & Amazement*, you’ll find signals of where AI is heading, what pizza might reveal about geopolitics, and a band that may not even exist but already has fans.
Tech News
US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) wants new tech to dig through seized phones, looking for everything from hidden messages to specific objects in videos. They're ramping up efforts, searching way more devices than before. https://www.wired.com/story/cbp-wants-new-tech-to-search-for-hidden-data-on-seized-phones/
Denmark is stepping up to tackle deepfakes by proposing copyright protection for individual likenesses, including voice and facial features. This could give people the power to fight misuse of their digital selves. A much-needed move! https://www.fastcompany.com/91360589/denmark-copyright-yourself-it-might-be-the-only-way-to-stop-deepfakes
Context Engineering is new term gaining traction in the AI world. The conversation is shifting from "prompt engineering" to a broader, more powerful concept: Context Engineering. https://www.philschmid.de/context-engineering
Fresh AI
Video generator app Pollo AI launched in January with a simple formula: 14 faceless TikTok accounts posting daily AI slop videos in three formats (Alien AI, Jesus AI, Fat Pigs AI). Result: 361M TikTok views, 110K downloads, $20K MRR. What I learn from this: the watermark-to-search funnel works at scale, even if the videos themselves are pure crap. See for yourself: https://tiktok.com/discover/pollo-ai
A band called The Velvet Sundown has only existed for a couple of weeks and it’s all AI. Are the 937,000 listeners on Spotify all wrong? Or will we soon see someone wearing their merch? https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/apple-and-spotify-are-sleepwalking-into-an-ai-music-crisis-and-the-velvet-sundown-mess-shows-they-need-to-act-fast
Demo of a new AI feature by Higgsfield AI called “Soul.” It generates hyperrealistic images and videos that look like they were shot with phones or conventional cameras. The prompts were optimized with ChatGPT. https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/s/0jvcq9FweM
From my blog
No blog posts this week because I was walking the Via Yprensis, part of the Camino de Santiago. Probably not the wisest choice to do it during a heatwave, but I pushed through and reached the finish. Around 75 km in three days. https://compostelagenootschap.be/op-weg/pelgrimswegen/stappen/vertrekken-belgie-luxemburg/via-yprensis/ [in Dutch]
Weird and Wonderful
30 minutes with a stranger: data visualization of over a thousand conversations with strangers, to explore at your own pace. https://pudding.cool/2025/06/hello-stranger/
The Pentagon Pizza Index tracks pizza orders near the Pentagon to predict military events. It’s a funny idea but also kind of terrifying.
Map of Reddit: “Each dot is a subreddit. Two dots within the same cluster are usually close to each other if multiple users frequently leave comments on both subreddits.” https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-reddit/
See this genius realtor video by @kylehuckabee. It looks like the Alamo!
