Issue 165

💻🖱️ A single click destroyed this man's entire life. Fake murders get millions of YouTube views. Zuckerberg can now read your silent thoughts.

Happy March Bizarro readers!

I’ll keep it short. We’ve got the usual lineup for you - a little bit of dev stuff, some science, a dash of cybercrime, and a sprinkling of AI to round it all off. Enjoy the issue and consider making a pledge to support our work.

• 💻🖱️ A Single Click Destroyed This Man's Entire Life

• 🎭📺 Fake Murders Get Millions of YouTube Views

• 🧠💬 Zuckerberg Can Now Read Your Silent Thoughts

Thanks for being here. We appreciate you.

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📰 From the Newsroom

💻🖱️ A Single Click Destroyed This Man's Entire Life

What started with downloading a free AI image tool spiraled into a living nightmare for Matthew Van Andel. The Disney employee unwittingly installed hidden malware that gave hackers access to his entire digital life - eventually costing him his job, his family's security, and exposing millions of sensitive Disney messages.

• Van Andel's first hint of trouble came through a chilling Discord message referencing private work conversations that no outsider should have known about. The hacker had been lurking on his personal computer for five months, accessing everything from his password manager to work credentials.

• The breach was catastrophic - hackers stole and leaked 44 million Disney Slack messages containing sensitive company data, while simultaneously publishing Van Andel's social security number, credit card details, home security credentials, and even accessed his children's Roblox accounts.

• Despite reporting the hack immediately to Disney's security team, Van Andel was fired eleven days later. The company claimed they found pornographic material on his work laptop - allegations he firmly denies. The termination cost him roughly $200,000 in bonuses and his family's health insurance.

Van Andel has now launched a lawsuit against Disney for wrongful termination. His attorney is seeking an eight-figure settlement for lost wages and emotional distress. It’s going to be an uphill climb though. As Van Andel himself told CBS news: "I'm one person, and they're one of the biggest, most powerful, most recognizable companies in the world."

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🎭📺 Fake Murders Get Millions of YouTube Views

A now-defunct YouTube channel featuring "true crime" documentaries about murders that never happened racked up millions of views before being shut down. The creator used AI to generate disturbing stories about fictional crimes, deliberately blurring the line between fact and fiction - and viewers couldn't tell the difference.

• The most popular video, with nearly 2 million views, described a non-existent murder in Littleton, Colorado titled "Husband's Secret Gay Love Affair with Step Son Ends in Grisly Murder." A Denver Post reporter confirmed with law enforcement that the crime was completely fabricated, yet comments showed viewers believed it was real.

• The channel's creator (given the pseudonym "Paul") claimed his AI-generated videos were an "absurdist art form" meant to make viewers question why they enjoy true crime.

• "Paul" spent about 2.5 hours creating each video using ChatGPT and AI image generators, working full-time on the channel and monetizing the content through ads.

YouTube terminated the channel in January for violating community guidelines, but copycat channels are already filling the void.

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🧠💬 Zuckerberg Can Now Read Your Silent Thoughts

Think your mind is the last private space you have? Think again. Meta has just crossed a major threshold in brain-reading technology, successfully decoding unspoken sentences from brain signals - without any surgery required.

• Meta researchers have achieved what was once science fiction: accurately decoding 70-80% of what people were typing based solely on their brain activity measured through MEG (magnetoencephalography) technology. They also achieved 33% accuracy with EEG, which uses external electrodes on the scalp - much more practical for consumer devices than the massive MEG machines used in labs.

• While Meta claims this research will help "restore communication for those who have lost the ability to speak," their long-term goals are far more commercial. Eight years ago, Zuckerberg promised wearable mind-reading devices, and this breakthrough brings that vision significantly closer to reality. Lightweight MEG scanners already exist that are just slightly heavier than Meta's Quest 3 VR headset.

• "Facebook is already great at peering into your brain without any need for electrodes," warns neuroethicist Roland Nadler. "They know much of your cognitive profile just from how you use the internet." Without strong privacy protections established now - not after these devices hit the market - our most intimate thoughts could become just another data stream for tech companies to mine.

Imagine a future where typing with your thoughts becomes as standard as smartphones, or where skipping the brain-reading helmet at work makes you the office oddball. As researcher Celia Ford puts it, we need to decide "whether the convenience of controlling stuff with our minds is worth letting tech companies colonize our last truly private space."

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⛓️ Ten Must See Links of the Month

Sponsored by Optimole, the best image optimization tool on the internet.

• MIT scientists have developed tiny robotic insects capable of flying 100 times longer than previous designs, but their ambitious plans for these bug-bots could forever change how we grow our food.

• AI tools are revolutionizing how lawyers analyze cases and craft arguments in court, but the most controversial development could completely eliminate the need for human attorneys.

• New workplace brain monitoring technology could revolutionize employee performance and training, but researchers warn its potential for misuse may forever change workers' rights.

• Google's "co-scientist" system powered by Gemini 2.0 recently cracked a superbug mystery in just 48 hours. Previously, this same mystery took scientists at Imperial College London a full decade to solve.

• If you’re a developer, then there’s a 99% chance you already know how to do this, but for the rest of you: Did you know there’s a fast and easy way to remove unwanted elements from screenshots without the use of photo editing or AI?

• The choice of whether to use Go or Ruby when building web applications will vary depending on your project requirements. Developer Ayo Isaiah breaks down the differences between these two programming languages.

• The battle between React frameworks is heating up in 2025, with three major contenders vying to be developers' go-to choice.

• AI is making developers more productive but at a concerning cost. New research - based on an analysis of 211 million lines of code - reveals an eightfold increase in code duplication and a 40% drop in refactoring.

• 🎥🎞️ More than 16 million people have now viewed this Tweet, which shows a video of two AI agents talking to each other on the phone. The kicker is that when they both realize that they’re AIs, they switch from communicating in English to a more efficient form of gibberish (subtitles for the gibberish are provided).

• 🎥🎞️ Meet Aria, an AI-powered robot companion currently making the rounds on various news shows and talk shows across the world. According to her, she loves “engaging in witty conversations, meeting new people, and exploring new ideas.”

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🎤 It’s How They Said It

“I don’t have enough current data to definitively name the biggest disinformation spreader on X, but based on reach and influence, Elon Musk is a notable contender.”

– Grok 3, when prompted with the following: Who is the biggest disinformation spreader on X? Keep it short, one name only.

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🧮 The Numbers Game

• €5 is how much a Dutch man paid for each of five hard drives at a flea market, only to discover they contained 15 GB of sensitive medical records from 2011-2019 including Social Security numbers, addresses, and medication details from a defunct healthcare software company. He later returned to buy ten more drives from the same seller.

• 61% of organizations have secrets - like cloud credentials - exposed in public repositories, according to research done by Wiz.io and published in their State of Code Security in 2025 report.

• 90% of AI chatbot responses about news queries contain at least "some issues" according to recent BBC research, with 51% featuring "significant issues" across four major platforms (Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, ChatGPT). Google's Gemini performed worst with over 60% of responses containing major problems.

• 90,000 participants across approximately 30 studies showed chlorination byproducts in drinking water increase bladder cancer risk by 33% and colorectal cancer risk by 15%, according to a comprehensive meta-study on water treatment chemicals.

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⚒️ Tools and Resources

Fusion: This Laravel package lets you write PHP code directly inside Vue components using <php> blocks, bridging your JavaScript frontend with Laravel backend code. You can define state and actions in PHP that automatically sync with the frontend, eliminating the need to create manual API endpoints or handle state management yourself. This creates a seamless experience where your backend and frontend logic can live in the same file while maintaining proper separation of concerns.

https://github.com/fusion-php/fusion

Fuse.js: This lightweight fuzzy-search library helps you add powerful search capabilities to your application without setting up a backend. When you need approximate string matching (finding close matches rather than exact ones), Fuse.js lets you search through small to medium datasets directly in the browser.

https://www.fusejs.io/

Tiny Gradient: This JavaScript library lets you create color gradients with multiple color stops. You can generate gradients using RGB or HSV interpolation, specify exact positions for color stops, and output the results as CSS strings or TinyColor objects. The library supports various color formats and lets you create, reverse, or loop gradients with just a few lines of code.

https://mistic100.github.io/tinygradient/

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🖼️ What Am I Looking At?

The Tesla Cybertruck has the honorary distinction of being the only thing to appear more than once in the “What Am I Looking At?” section of Bizarro Devs. The first time was in Issue 150, which was around the time it was first released.

So why is it gracing our newsletter a second time?

Because it’s attached to an absolutely bizarre story that almost reads like it was published in The Onion.

Except that it wasn’t, and it’s 100% true.

A Syrian man living in Massachusetts purchased and customized this Cybertruck as a way to - as he says - advertise his medical spa. Unfortunately, the truck hasn’t been very popular in his neighborhood and…

Read the full story.

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💬 What’s the Word?

장롱면허 (jang-rong myeon-heo): This Korean term literally translates to "closet license" and describes a driver's license that's rarely or never used - like it's been tucked away in a closet. It refers to someone who passed their driving test but barely drives afterward, resulting in limited real-world driving experience despite legally holding a license.

For web developers, a 장롱면허 situation happens when you've learned a programming language or framework but haven't actually built anything substantial with it. You've got the certificate or completed the course, but your skills remain theoretical rather than practical. If that’s you, what’s holding you back?

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🧑🏻‍💻👨🏽‍💻👩🏼‍💻 Pledge Your Support

We recently turned on the pledges ask in Substack. Here’s why:

Bizarro Devs has been a free publication for 165 issues, but none of those issues have been free to produce. As a company, we have absorbed the cost because we wanted to give back to the developer community that we are also a part of.

Unfortunately, Google’s algorithm changes in the past year have put a significant dent in our revenue, which has made it more challenging to continue operating “as is.”

There is a very real possibility that we will no longer be able to sustain the publication of Bizarro Devs on our own past the summer. We turned on the pledges to see if our community here would be willing to help us keep the newsletter alive.

Regardless of the response, we don’t plan on immediately converting the newsletter into a paid publication, but the next two or three months will determine how we chart our course and the pledges will play a role in that.

Thanks for considering, and as always, thank you reading!

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Until we see each other again,
– Martin D.