Aakash Gupta

If the Sun disappeared right now, you would get another 8 minutes and 20 seconds of a completely normal sky. NASA's figure for how long sunlight takes to cover the 93 million miles to us is about eight minutes and 20 seconds. Earth moves along its orbit at 29.78 kilometers per second, so over those 500 seconds it travels about 14,900 kilometers. That is farther than the 12,742 kilometers across the planet itself, and nothing on Earth would notice. Then the lights go out. Earth's core is still hot, though, and that heat reaches the deep ocean, where life might hang on near hydrothermal vents. Until 1977, scientists thought every food chain on Earth depended on the Sun. That February, John Corliss and Tjeerd van Andel dove in the submersible Alvin 2.5 kilometers down the Galapagos Rift and found food chains running on chemicals from the vents instead. There were no biologists on the mission, so the geoscientists collected the specimens themselves, and when the ship's formaldehyde ran out they preserved them in vodka. You'd think a vent animal wouldn't need the Sun at all, but some of them depend on oxygen made by photosynthesis, and the oxygen in the ocean is a byproduct of it. Even down there the Sun isn't fully out of the picture, which is why "for a while" is the honest answer. Then there's gravity. Newton's theory treats gravity as acting instantly at any distance, which would have Earth feel the Sun vanish at once. Einstein's general relativity says changes in gravity travel at the speed of light, so the pull would disappear at the same mark as the light. Physicists answering this exact question on the University of Illinois Physics Van site say any change in the Sun would have no influence here for 8 minutes. That got tested in 2017. Two neutron stars collided about 130 million light-years away. The gravitational waves reached us first, and the Fermi and INTEGRAL space telescopes caught the gamma-ray burst from the same crash 1.7 seconds later. After a trip that long, that gap pins the speed of gravity to within about 3 parts in a quadrillion of the speed of light. So the dark and the drift arrive at the same second, and a collision 130 million light-years away is the measurement that backs it.

Dan Bilzerian's dad owed the government $62 million, told a judge he had $15,805 to his name, and sat in jail for almost a year instead of paying. Meanwhile, a trust for Dan and his little brother owned 2.3 million shares of the company Dad ran. When the trust got those shares in 1997, they were worth about $12 million. That's the trust fund Dan keeps getting asked about. Here's how it got built. Paul Bilzerian was convicted of securities fraud in 1989, and in 1993 a federal judge ordered him to pay back $62 million. The next year he set up a trust for his two boys. That same summer, a holding company he owned with his wife got the right to buy 6 million shares of Cimetrix, a Utah software company he ran, for 16 cents a share. Those rights got handed down through family entities, and by the time everyone cashed them in, the shares were worth over $31 million. The kids' trust ended up with 2.3 million of them. Another 2.9 million went to a partnership owned by a family trust set up in the Cook Islands. By 2000 he hadn't paid one penny of the $62 million, and he said as much in court. The judge locked him up for contempt in January 2001. He got out about a year later through a settlement, which matches what Dan says in this interview about signing over a third of his fund to get his dad released. Over twenty-plus years the SEC spent $8.6 million chasing him and collected $3.7 million. That's $2.32 spent for every dollar recovered, and all in they got back about 6% of what he owed. Dan's book says the trust was worth around $96 million at its peak and that what was left sold for about $1.3 million. When your whole trust is one tiny stock, it goes wherever that stock goes. Then he admits he let people think he was a rich kid blowing his dad's money because that's what got him invited to private games with billionaires. Those games want a guy with deep pockets who everybody figures can't play. Paying $1,500 a month for his share of a $20 million mansion made him look like that guy. And his $10.5 million morning checks out, since he owned 25% of a player who won $42 million in one night. Ignite ran on the same idea, just with public shareholders. The company lost about $50 million in 2019. Dan got pushed out as CEO in December 2023, and in his own lawsuit against his dad he says he was a figurehead who never ran anything. In 2024 the SEC charged Paul, who had no official job at Ignite, with booking $4.6 million in sales that never happened in late 2020, while the stock went from 42 cents to $1.20. Dan wasn't charged. Honestly, the poker money might be the cleanest money in the whole family.

A new hire waits two weeks for a first paycheck, and about ten software companies get paid for her on day one. I had our AI employee add it up from public pricing pages last week. It came to roughly $1492 a year in subscriptions for one extra person, whether or not she ever opens them. I wanted the number for a deep dive on software pricing, so my growth lead asked him for it in Slack. He came back with a little page where you pick your tools and a headcount, and it shows what the bill comes to. He'd run the tool list by us before building anything. I still went through every price against the vendor's own pricing page before I trusted the total, and they're list prices, so if you've negotiated a contract yours will be lower. Charging per seat, meaning one fee for every person with a login, made sense back when software was something a person sat down and used, since headcount was a decent stand-in for the value you got. But a vendor's revenue goes up every time your payroll does, even if the new person logs in twice a year. I'd rather put that money toward the person we just hired. O8 is a 20-person digital agency, and nineteen of the twenty use Viktor every day. Seth Viebrock, who founded it, estimates the extra capacity at $200,000 to $400,000 a year. He's upfront that it's his own estimate and nobody ran a formal time study, and a person still reviews everything before a client sees it. With a per-seat tool they'd pay for all nineteen, and pay again the day the twentieth person starts. At O8 that twentieth person can start handing him work without anyone buying another seat. Vendors are going to have a hard time charging by the chair once a good chunk of the work gets done by someone who doesn't need one. If you want one on your team, hire @viktor_com. Free to start. #AIemployee Paid Partnership

If you've watched Star Wars on Disney+ or Blu-ray, you've never actually seen the movie that came out in 1977. George Lucas went back and changed it, and the original hasn't had a real theatrical release in over 40 years. On February 19, it's coming back. The changes started with the 1997 Special Edition. Lucas re-edited the cantina scene so Greedo shoots at Han first, and he added a CGI Jabba the Hutt scene that was never in the original. When a reporter asked him in 2004 why he didn't just put out both versions, he said the Special Edition was the one he wanted out there, and the other movie was "on VHS, if anybody wants it." Back in 1988, Lucas went to Congress to fight Ted Turner's plan to colorize old black-and-white movies. He said people who alter classic films for profit are barbarians, and he warned that someday old negatives would get "replaced by new altered negatives." Nine years later, he did pretty much exactly that to his own movie. The Star Wars negative was in rough shape after two decades of use, so the restoration team took it apart, washed the different film stocks separately and put it back together. While it was apart, they cut the new effects shots right into it. So the master copy of the 1977 film turned into the Special Edition. When the Library of Congress picked the original for the National Film Registry in 1989, Lucas wouldn't give them a copy. As of 2014 the Library still didn't have one anybody could watch. What brought it back was an old film print sitting in London. Most American prints from 1977 were on Eastmancolor stock, which fades to a pinkish brown over time. The British prints used dye-transfer Technicolor, and that stuff barely fades at all. The BFI had one in its archive and screened it in June 2025. Kathleen Kennedy, who was running Lucasfilm at the time, got on stage to tell the crowd it wasn't an illegal screening. Six months later Lucasfilm confirmed the 50th anniversary release would be the original 1977 cut, with Han shooting first. Today they announced the full rollout. It's playing on thousands of screens around the world in IMAX 70mm, regular 70mm, 35mm and 4DX, and it's the first time the original has ever been shown in IMAX. To be fair to Lucas, his 1988 speech was mostly about directors' rights against studios, and he always saw changing his own movie as his call to make. He also told Congress that people "yet unborn" should get to see a generation the way it saw itself. On February 19, anyone born after 1997 finally gets that chance.

Kevin Hart bet $200,000 on the worst hand at the table. Then he told the poker pro holding pocket queens exactly what he had. He had ten-three. He told Sam Kiki he didn't have a king, and he was telling the truth. That sounds insane until you know how pros think. Mike Caro, the guy who basically wrote the book on poker tells, has a rule every serious player learns early, "weak means strong, strong means weak." Most people at a poker table act the opposite of their hand without even thinking about it. A guy who's really beat goes quiet and prays you check. So pros learn to flip whatever you show them. So when Kevin says "I don't have a king," Kiki's brain flips it to "I have a king and I'd love a call." Now think about who's saying it. Kevin has been getting paid to make people believe him on camera for 25 years. Anything he says at that table, a pro is going to treat like a bit. Kiki has to figure out whether a professional actor is acting, with $200,000 riding on the answer. The part I love is that Kevin has been on the other side of this exact move, against the same guy. Last season on the same show, Kiki had pocket sevens in a $424,500 pot. Kevin was stuck in the tank, saying he didn't think Kiki had anything. So Kiki offered to let him see one of his cards. Kevin flipped it over and it was a seven. That was a real card from Kiki's real hand, and it still felt like a trick. Kevin called and lost the whole pot. Kiki holds the record on High Stakes Poker for the most money won in a single season. Reading people is his entire edge. That's what makes the truth so nasty against a guy like him, because the better you are at sniffing out lies, the longer you'll spend hunting for one that isn't there. Watch his face while he tries to figure out if Kevin Hart is joking.

A humpback whale is swimming in the Hudson River, and you can thank a sewage plant in Harlem for it. Up until 1986, New York dumped raw sewage straight into the Hudson every day. That March the North River plant at 137th Street switched on, and the daily dumping stopped for the first time in the city's history. The 1972 Clean Water Act is what pushed New York to finally build it. They even put a state park on the roof, Olympic-size pool included, and plenty of people swimming laps up there have no clue what's under them. Humpbacks go wherever the food is. Around New York that means menhaden, an oily little fish that fishermen call bunker. Menhaden live on plankton, and raw sewage sucks the oxygen out of the water that whole food chain needs. Once the river got cleaner, the bait fish had somewhere to be, and the whales started following them into the harbor. Then the fish got hammered from the other side. Their numbers fell about 75% between 1985 and 2008, and roughly 80% of the catch went to a single plant in Reedville, Virginia that ground them into fish oil and animal feed. In December 2012, East Coast fishery regulators crammed into a Best Western conference room in Baltimore and voted to cut the catch 20%, the first coastwide cap on menhaden ever. When a Virginia fisherman got up and said the fish were fine, the room booed him and the chairman threatened to clear it. Whale watchers logged five humpback sightings around New York in 2011. This August, a Staten Island nonprofit called Gotham Whale cataloged its 500th individual humpback. They ID each one by the pattern under its tail, which is as unique as a fingerprint. Warmer water up in New England and Canada is pushing some of them south too, to be fair. Still, a whale in the Hudson is what 50 years of boring sewage law looks like when it finally pays off.