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INCAN TOMB SURVIVES 600 YEARS WITHOUT BEING LOOTED
For about 600 years, every grave robber on the north coast of Peru walked past the Utzh An compound at Chan Chan and kept walking. The Inca conquered the place. The Spanish looted it. Modern shovel guys picked over the rest. Somehow all of them missed the one door that mattered, and on September 8 Peru's Ministry of Culture announced that archaeologists finally got through it. Jorge Meneses and his crew cleared sand from the entrance inch by inch, and about 16 inches in they put a flashlight through the gap and saw funerary bundles sitting untouched. Final count inside the platform: 38 people, quartz and shell jewelry, silver and copper plated necklaces, and a wooden chest holding 20 embroidered textiles covered in seabirds and monkeys. One of the two side chambers held no bodies at all. Just weapons and metal emblems. An entire room of swords and priceless metals, sealed for six centuries. One burial breaks the pattern. Chimú elites were laid to rest flexed or seated flexed, but this person was placed fully extended at the bottom of a chamber. Researchers are weighing two explanations, a sacrificial ritual or an enormous gap in rank, and they are careful to say neither is proven. Gabriel Prieto of the University of Florida, who was not on the dig, called it the discovery of the decade.
XBOX CALLS SONY BROKE AND STEALS THEIR DEV
PlayStation announced Physint in early 2024 with studio boss Herman Hulst doing the honors on the Columbia Pictures lot, which in hindsight was a lot of pageantry for a game they'd cancel. In mid-June, per Kojima, his studio "unexpectedly received notice" that PlayStation Studios was pulling the plug. Sony's public statement called it a "difficult decision to step away." Jason Schreier got the actual math at Bloomberg. The budget was climbing fast even though the game is still years from release, deadlines kept slipping, and Death Stranding and its sequel both missed Sony's internal revenue expectations. The real sticking point was exclusivity. Sony didn't want to drop hundreds of millions on another game that wouldn't stay locked to its hardware, and both Death Stranding games were timed exclusives that wandered off to other platforms later. Kojima Productions owns the franchises, so Sony was renting. Kojima then spent three months shopping the project and landed at Xbox, which will publish it on console and PC and also grabbed the film and TV rights to Physint and to OD, the horror game with Jordan Peele. Xbox's line to Bloomberg: "Betting on Kojima-san is an easy call." That is a hell of a thing to say about a bet the other guy just folded.
Sources (3)
- variety.com - Hideo Kojima's 'Physint' Moves From PlayStation to Xbox as 'Death Stranding' Creator Plots TV and Film Projects With New Publishing Partner
- bloomberg.com - Hideo Kojima's Physint Video Game Dropped by PlayStation, Goes to Xbox
- dualshockers.com - Insiders Reveal Why Sony Stepped Away From Kojima's New Project
BOND MARKET TOUCHES 5%, IMMEDIATELY PRETENDS IT DIDN'T
The 10-year Treasury yield reached 5.014% on Monday, its highest level since October 2023, and then lost its nerve and slid back under 5% before the afternoon. It started the day at Friday's close of 4.938%. The reasons are boring and expensive. Large deficits, heavy debt issuance and sticky inflation have all pushed up the term premium, the extra pay investors want for holding long bonds instead of rolling T-bills, and surging crude prices piled on. Real 10-year yields hit 2.622%, the highest since 2008. Treasury also has to unload $13 billion of 20-year bonds on Tuesday, which is a rough week to go door to door. The Fed is widely expected to raise rates at this week's meeting, and CME's FedWatch put hike odds around 90%. The coverage splits on why. The wire copy hangs it on deficits, issuance and inflation. Breitbart counters that market-based inflation expectations and longer-term consumer expectations haven't moved much, then takes a lap through 2024, when the yield fell below 4% and the Fed cut by half a point in September under Biden. Everyone agrees the number is 5. Nobody agrees whose fault it is. Meanwhile Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has been leaning on an expanded buyback program to hold down the long end, in a market where $1.2 trillion changes hands daily. Bring a bigger bucket.
POLICE IN FOUR COUNTRIES ARE GETTING REPORTS ABOUT THE CAT IN THE HAT
The internet has decided the scariest thing in the world is a seven-foot Dr. Seuss cat standing in a driveway at 2 a.m. Some clips are a person in a costume, a lot of them are AI slop. Either way, police departments around the global are getting reports of the strange occurence. In Grand Junction, Colorado, cops got word of a post claiming someone dressed as the Cat in the Hat would turn up at West Middle School. By Monday had arrested a 14-year-old. The department's release said the posts are "intended to cause alarm and fear," which is a weird sentence to write about a rhyming children's book character. Tennessee's Office of Homeland Security said it has its Threat Assessment Center on this. Big league stuff. Overseas the cops got funnier about it. South Yorkshire Police confirmed no reports of the cat anywhere in the county and added that his associates Thing One and Thing Two are also unaccounted for. Gardaí in Wexford explained the whole thing is an AI prompt dropping the cat into photos of places you recognize, then clarified he is not hiding in Curracloe. In Canada, a teenage girl was chased down the street by someone in the costume. She got home safe. Police there called a "joke" that makes people fear for their safety extremely concerning. New Jersey reports no major incidents yet, which in New Jersey means give it a week.
TRUMP SAYS THE ONLY GUARDRAIL AI NEEDS IS A 'HIGH IQ' PRESIDENT, MEANING HIM
Dario Amodei published a roughly 3,800-word essay Saturday titled "We Must Pace the Frontier," asking every frontier lab, his own included, to slow down how fast it makes models smarter. Sam Altman agreed. Demis Hassabis agreed. Elon Musk posted "Dario is right," which is three more words of agreement than Musk gives most humans. Monday, the president answered with an avalanche of Truth Social posts. "The only control or 'guardrails' that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT," he wrote. He called AI fear a hoax, crowned himself "Hoax Buster" in his fifth AI post of the day, and said Amodei is "pretending to be a perfect little angel." He also floated a "SICK conspiracy" against AI and data centers that only China is happy about. China's Foreign Ministry spent that same Monday criticizing calls to slow AI down. Former AI czar David Sacks says the labs can pace themselves without a rulebook. Democrat John Fetterman sided with Trump, warning that American overreaction hands the lead to Beijing. The feud is old. In February the administration cut Anthropic off from federal agencies after Amodei refused to loosen terms blocking mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, and Trump called the executives "leftwing nut jobs." Wall Street skipped the philosophy. AI stocks slumped Monday while cybersecurity stocks rallied, because somebody always sells the locks.
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