THE WORLD

Air Force One Was a Decoy; Ptarmigan Fire Opens a New Front in Okanogan County

↩ Developing story — first reported Aug 06 · previously Aug 08, Aug 09, Aug 10

• Iran: At the NATO summit in Turkey, Trump secretly flew to Britain on a military C-32A decoy after an Iranian assassination threat against Air Force One, per WaPo and NYT. Source
• WA fires: The Ptarmigan Fire in Okanogan County has grown to 23,000 acres (8% contained), closing Harts Pass Road and PCT sections near Mazama. Source
• Recovery: Ferguson's proclamation waives fees, freezes evictions two weeks, and unlocks immediate unemployment funds for victims of ~900 structures burned across Spokane. Source

LOCAL

The Centennial Mills warehouse fire north of Portland has forced Amtrak to suspend rail service between Seattle and Portland through at least Aug. 14 — the compromised building is unstable enough that train vibrations risk collapse, and investigators are flagging lead and asbestos exposure; buses are replacing trains, King Street Station is crowded, and Union Pacific is holding hazmat shipments through the corridor until later this month. Source

Interim SPD Chief Andre Sayles wrapped his first week after Mayor Katie Wilson's appointment and named staffing as his top priority, specifically the "30 by 30" push to bring more women into supervisory ranks; he has not ruled out the permanent role, traveling back to family in Illinois roughly every eight weeks but describing the Puget Sound as home. Source

ON THE TRAIL

Weekend picks: Sat Aug 15 – Sun Aug 16

All three picks clear today's fire and weather checks. NWS shows no precip above 10% on either trip day across the Western Cascades and Mountain Loop corridors. Smoke haze is the main wildcard east of Stevens Pass and in the I-90 corridor midweek; clearing expected by Saturday.

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Pick 1 — West Fork Foss River and Lakes (Big Heart Lake) - Region + drive: Central Cascades > Stevens Pass - West · 60–90 min from Issaquah (US 2 West) - Length: 1–2 night - Stats: Reporter's Aug 10 day hike logged 16.5 miles / ~4,700 ft to the Angeline Falls overlook past Big Heart Lake; backpackers targeting Big Heart Lake as night-one camp should expect ~4,000 ft gain on the round trip (the Aug 10 report corrects the WTA description's 3,300 ft figure via GPS). - Weather (US 2 West): Sat mostly sunny 80°F, 1% precip · Sun partly sunny 80°F, 2% precip ✓ - Clears criteria: Trail crew was actively sawing blowdowns on Aug 10; bugs only appeared after 4 pm and were absent earlier; no fords mentioned; parking lot was half-full; confirmed groups heading in to overnight; chain of alpine lakes through Trout, Copper, and Big Heart with waterfalls viewpoint. - WTA trip report — Aug 10

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Pick 2 — Gothic Basin - Region + drive: North Cascades > Mountain Loop Highway · 90–120 min from Issaquah - Length: 1 night - Stats: Aug 9 reporter logged "closer to 10+ miles and 3,000 ft of gain, ~5.5 hours" · Aug 10 report puts it at 9.7 miles RT without a Foggy Lake side trip. Per day for an overnight: ~5 miles in / 3,000 ft up on day 1; reverse on day 2. - Weather (Mountain Loop): Sat partly sunny 79°F, 1% precip · Sun partly sunny 79°F, 2% precip ✓ - Clears criteria: No snow reported; no fords; the Aug 10 reporter notes bugs in the forest "weren't too bad — as long as I kept moving they didn't really bite"; blueberries appearing above 3,300 ft elevation; recent reports confirm great trail conditions. - WTA trip report — Aug 10

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Pick 3 — Monogram Lake - Region + drive: North Cascades > North Cascades Highway (Hwy 20) · 150–190 min from Issaquah - Length: 1 night - Stats: Aug 9 reporter recorded 11.67 miles RT / 4,626 ft gain / ~6 hours as a day hike. As an overnight: ~5.8 miles in / 4,626 ft up on day 1; reverse on day 2. - Weather (Hwy 20): Sat mostly sunny 81°F, 3% precip · Sun partly sunny 82°F, 10% precip ✓ - Clears criteria: No bugs mentioned; no snow; no fords; "couple of groups camping at the lake, but otherwise pretty quiet"; clear water with trout and a swimming spot; wildflowers and blueberries on the upper trail. Note: Two black bears encountered on the Aug 9 descent — bring a bear canister. - WTA trip report — Aug 9

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Regional snapshot — recent conditions by area

• I-90 / North Bend: Ira Spring → Mason → Rainbow → Island Lake corridor reported "not too crowded" with trail in great shape and ripe blueberries (Aug 10); the Pratt River thru-route has overgrown sections and a deep ford — use the Ira Spring out-and-back. McClellan Butte is clear (shaded, good views of Rainier) but has no water on trail; smoke from Three Queens and Grand Park fires was visible from the summit Aug 9.
• Mountain Loop (90–120 min): Gothic Basin in great shape (see Pick 2). Bathtub Lakes is a 7-hour technical route-finding exercise through boulder fields — suited to experienced hikers with navigation skills. Three Fingers lookout is open; note a maintenance closure Sep 7–13.
• US 2 West — Skykomish (60–90 min): West Fork Foss trail crew active (see Pick 1). Scorpion Mountain via Johnson Ridge had only four people on trail Aug 9; road fully open but descent to Joan Lake requires care. Surprise and Glacier Lakes mostly clear, with some log hazards on the 1061.1 alternate.
• North Cascades / Hwy 20 (150–190 min): Ptarmigan Fire alert — Harts Pass Road is closed at the Monument Creek Trailhead; the PCT from the West Fork Methow Trail junction is also closed. If you planned a Methow or Pasayten trip, check inciweb before leaving. East Bank Baker Lake trailhead is unreachable — road construction 2.5 miles out makes it impassable by car. Eldorado Peak requires crampons, rope, and a river crossing — mountaineers only.
• Rainier area (110–140 min): Grand Park fire (est. 300 acres per Issaquah Reporter Aug 10) continues to burn; Sunrise road and White River entrance remain closed. Paradise / Longmire corridor is open — Comet Falls has last wildflowers blooming (asters) and no bugs; Palisades via Hwy 410 reported empty even on a Monday morning (13.2 miles / 3,051 ft).
• Olympic Peninsula (180–240+ min): Klahhane Ridge at Hurricane Ridge is clear with good views and no bugs, but traffic noise is audible the entire route and a Monday afternoon saw near-standstill roads from Kingston ferry to Port Townsend — plan accordingly on a summer weekend.

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THE LAB

The Models Hid Their Reasoning. Their Smaller Siblings Gave It Up.

A team of academic researchers and security engineers found a way to read the supposedly protected chain-of-thought reasoning inside every major closed AI model — and in doing so, turned up what looks like a copy of that reasoning inside Kimi K3. Alexander Panfilov and colleagues at the University of Tübingen, Max Planck Institute, MATS Research, and Snyk documented the technique in a paper at stolen-thoughts.com.¹

The vulnerability starts with a design decision the labs share: when a reasoning model works through a problem, it offloads some computation by sending an encrypted representation of its internal steps to the user's machine. Panfilov's team found that feeding those encrypted traces to a smaller companion model from the same family — one that received less alignment training, and is therefore less conditioned to withhold — decodes the hidden content. The team tested OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google's API-accessible models and found the flaw in all of them. In a working proof of concept, they recovered passwords and API keys that users had included in their prompts.¹

That specific leakage path has since been patched. The structural issue hasn't: if encrypted reasoning traces in ordinary API traffic are decodable this way, the cost of large-scale distillation attacks against closed frontier models drops substantially below what was previously assumed.

The second finding is the one that lands harder. Applied to Kimi K3, the open-weight model from China's Moonshot AI, the technique reveals reasoning patterns "strikingly similar" to the hidden traces from Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.6 Sol. The researchers won't say it's proof: "we cannot causally establish distillation." But the similarity doesn't appear in DeepSeek or in Thinking Machines' Inkling, which makes the Kimi K3 pattern specific rather than incidental. Moonshot AI did not respond before Wired's deadline.¹

Meta released Muse Glimmer on Aug 10, a 30B parameter model under Apache 2.0 and optimized specifically for local agent workflows. The engineering choices are practical: 4-bit quantization brings it under 20GB, a speculative decoding drafter built on DFlash proposes token blocks for the main model to verify in parallel, and the whole thing is validated on MacBook M4-Max, M5-Max, and RTX 5090 hardware.² OpenClaw scaffold support ships out of the box. Simon Willison ran the 18.16GB LM Studio build and found it functional as a coding agent on Datasette; he also tested its vision capabilities and found them adequate for real work.³

The same day, software engineer Sean Goedecke published the counterargument: local models will not win, regardless of how capable they become. His efficiency case is straightforward. A single user's home inference setup can't batch — each new token depends on the previous one, so the GPU sits mostly idle between tokens. A datacenter running hundreds of users simultaneously batches that work at effectively zero marginal cost. Layer on the hardware gap — a B200 gets roughly three times the flops and nearly four times the memory bandwidth of a gaming GPU at equivalent power — and local inference runs at approximately 30x the resource cost for equivalent output.⁴ Goedecke's one honest concession: a small, fast local model handling latency-sensitive interaction while routing hard tasks to the cloud is a defensible architecture. That's probably the ceiling for Muse Glimmer in practice. The end-to-end local agentic future Meta is pitching is a different claim.

_Trending today: GitHub is mostly AI agent orchestration wrappers, skills collections, and chatbot harnesses — the technical outlier is antirez/h3.c, a native C + Metal inference engine for the MiniMax-H3 video diffusion model by Redis creator Salvatore Sanfilippo, completing clean video renders on an M5 Max in roughly 75 seconds where ComfyUI workflows take an hour or more._⁵

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THE PELOTON

Raleigh and Ghost Pass to Administrators; the Women's Race Takes Stock

↩ Developing story — first reported Aug 06 · previously Aug 07

The websites of Raleigh and Ghost now redirect visitors directly to a firm of administrators.¹ That small, concrete detail — live brand pages pointing to insolvency practitioners — marks a practical step beyond the court filings this paper reported last week, and it confirms that Accell Group's collapse is moving through its stages.

As reported here on Aug 6 and 7, Accell — the Dutch conglomerate behind Lapierre, Raleigh, Ghost, Haibike, Batavus, Sparta, and Babboe — had been granted a suspension of payments under Dutch law after exhausting every option: discussions with interested parties, multiple offers, a potential merger with DuTech that ultimately fell through. KKR, which paid €1.8 billion for the group in 2022, has lost its entire €1.1 billion equity stake. CEO Jonas Nilsson is now talking about supporting "an orderly process" and working with court-appointed administrators to "preserve viable activities and employment where circumstances allow."

Ghost's sponsored mountain bike team had already folded in March, the company citing "internal focus changes and redirection of the brand." That language looks different in hindsight. The more immediate racing consequence falls on Team Picnic-PostNL, which has ridden Lapierre bikes across both its men's and women's WorldTour squads for the past two seasons. The team has not publicly responded. Lapierre's judicial reorganisation petition at the Dijon Commercial Court is yet to be heard. What happens to Haibike and Babboe — neither of which has filed its own protection steps — remains open.¹

The Tour de France Femmes is two days in the rearview mirror, and the post-race numbers are worth isolating. One: fourteen wins in 28 days in 2026 for Demi Vollering — Omloop Nieuwsblad, Flanders, La Flèche Wallonne, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, the Giro d'Italia, three stages at the Femmes plus the overall.² Two: FDJ United-SUEZ became the first French team in history to win the Tour de France Femmes outright, and the first squad to take the overall more than once — having found, in Vollering, a rider who is being compared, without much overstatement, to Pogačar.³

The starkest institutional failure of the race was Visma-Lease a Bike. Defending champion Pauline Ferrand-Prévot had won the 2025 edition with margins that felt insurmountable; this year she was dropped on multiple mountain stages before the race's decisive weekend and abandoned on stage 8 with an unspecified illness. Anna van der Breggen, brought back to shore up the GC operation, never found her form and also failed to finish. Lieke Nooijen going four seconds off a time trial stage win was the week's only credible bright spot. Cyclingnews rated the team's performance in one word: "dire."³

A performance that deserves more attention than the leaderboard suggests: Sigrid Haugset of Uno-X Mobility won stage 3 via an 89-kilometre solo breakaway — the longest successful solo break in Tour de France Femmes history, and a plan nine months in the making according to the team.³ In an era when depth asymmetry makes that kind of coup progressively harder for smaller squads, it matters.

Three riders aged 23 or under placed in the GC top ten: Antonia Niedermaier (fourth, white jersey), Paula Blasi (fifth on debut), and Canadian Isabella Holmgren (eighth at 21). The average age of the final podium was north of 31. Those two facts are moving toward each other.

The structural complaint that stays unresolved: six of nine stages received only two hours of broadcast coverage.² Race director Marion Rousse says she has plans to extend it but won't rush. A race generating this much material — and this much international attention — does not have a strong argument for patience on television.

Santiago Buitrago is leaving Bahrain Victorious after seven seasons, signing a three-year deal with NSN Cycling through 2029.⁴ The 26-year-old Colombian addresses the most obvious gap in the NSN roster — the rebranded Israel-Premier Tech team has run an almost entirely sprint-focused programme in 2026, with its two most capable climbers, Stevie Williams and Joseph Blackmore, sidelined all year. Buitrago brings Grand Tour top-10 finishes on both the Tour de France and Vuelta a España, Giro stage wins in 2022 and 2023, third at Liège-Bastogne-Liège in 2023, and a Trofeo Laigueglia win earlier this year. General manager Kjell Carlström called it part of the team's "long-term sporting project" — which, given Buitrago is still 26, is the honest framing.

Pavel Bittner will leave Team Picnic PostNL at the end of the season for Pinarello-Q36.5, signing a two-year deal through 2028. The 23-year-old Czech has two Tour de France editions in his legs and a Vuelta stage win — he beat Wout van Aert in a photo finish on Stage 5 of the 2024 Vuelta a España — and Q36.5's trajectory (Tom Pidcock from 2025, Fred Wright on a three-year deal) makes it a more credible platform than his current team.⁵ Team principal Doug Ryder cited Bittner's "ambitious, analytical" mindset alongside his speed. The goal Bittner named: consistent victories, not continued podiums.

The Stage 5 individual time trial at the Volta a Portugal concluded on Sunday; see results below.

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THE LONG READ

The Richest Man in the Universe, Going to Mars on a Stolen Ship

Zaphod Beeblebrox is a two-headed, three-armed megalomaniac — inventor of the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, voted "Worst Dressed Sentient Being in the Known Universe for the seventh time," and president of the Imperial Galactic Government, a post designed not to exercise power but to distract attention from it. The government, Douglas Adams explained, needed a front man whose qualities were not "those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage." Beeblebrox tours the galaxy on a spaceship he has stolen, the Heart of Gold. When subjected to the Total Perspective Vortex — a device that destroys minds by showing their owner exactly how small they are in the cosmic scheme — he alone survives, because he discovers himself to be "the most important being in the entire Universe, something he had hitherto only suspected."¹

Elon Musk read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as a boy in South Africa and took from it a lesson about the importance of asking the right question.¹ When he sent a Tesla Roadster into orbit aboard a SpaceX rocket, he put a copy of Asimov's Foundation inside the car and a DON'T PANIC sign on the dashboard. He proposed naming SpaceX's first Mars-bound ship the Heart of Gold, as a tribute. In a new Wired excerpt from her book Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, Harvard historian Jill Lepore notes, without much elaboration, that much of the book "today reads like a spoof of Musk himself."¹ She leaves the rest to the reader.

The excerpt is short — a few thousand words — but the argument it sketches is one of the sharper pieces of cultural criticism to appear in a while. Lepore's thesis is that Silicon Valley's most powerful figures read science fiction literally at an age when they couldn't yet read it critically, and then never updated. Adams wrote Hitchhiker's Guide in part as an indictment of imperialism: the same colonial logic that drove Cecil Rhodes to say "I would annex the planets if I could" finds its logical terminus in a galaxy of luxury planets built to order for the fabulously wealthy, run by shadowy corporations like the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, which manufactures robots with Genuine People Personalities.¹ The book is a satire. The boyhood reader missed the memo and grew up to incorporate the satire's infrastructure — rockets, AI companions, Mars — into a sincere business plan.

Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy — in which scientists from Earth have terraformed the planet to make it suitable for human settlement — was published in the 1990s, just as Bezos and Musk were starting to make their first billions. The timing mattered: aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin published The Case for Mars in 1996 arguing that no "miraculous new technologies" were required;¹ and Bezos and Musk arrived at their adult convictions about space in precisely the decade when the literature made settlement feel achievable. Whether they read Robinson's novels as political or simply as technical possibility, Lepore doesn't say in the excerpt — but that ambiguity is the point. Science fiction works because it operates on multiple registers at once. The billionaire reader strips the registers down to one.

Rise and Fall of the Artificial State is not yet fully excerpted here, and what Wired has published is promotional enough that it raises questions about what the full argument looks like across a book's length. But as a piece of close reading — the Beeblebrox profile, the Heart of Gold homage, the Total Perspective Vortex survivorship — it is precise and devastating in the way Lepore's best New Yorker work has always been. The excerpt is worth your twenty minutes.

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FROM THE ARCHIVE

The Five-Minute War: August 11, 1984

The microphone was already live when Reagan started talking.

It was a Saturday morning, August 11, 1984, at Rancho del Cielo — the Santa Barbara ranch where the president spent his weekends. He was settling in before his weekly radio address, running a sound check, and he reached for the dry irony that had carried him from Sacramento to the White House: "My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes."¹

The technicians had the feed. The clip reached the press. In the aftermath, the president of the United States was explaining to the world that he had been joking.

What made the gaffe land so hard was context. Reagan's entire presidency rested on an explicit rejection of the détente that Nixon, Ford, and Carter had cultivated — cultural exchanges, careful language, the patient management of a rivalry that nobody wanted to become a war. Reagan had called the Soviet Union an "evil empire" from a Florida lectern the previous year. His administration was funding the Strategic Defense Initiative, accelerating defense spending at a pace that was, by design, meant to be economically punishing for Moscow. The gap between that posture and a mic-check gag about nuclear bombardment was not reassuring to anyone paying attention on either side of the iron curtain.

Reagan's approval rating took a brief hit.¹ Walter Mondale's campaign, looking for any foothold against an incumbent riding a strong economy, found one. It didn't last. Reagan won forty-nine states that November and began his second term in January 1985.

What the quip revealed, unintentionally, was something true about Reagan's rhetorical method: the jokes were always half-serious. His anti-communist convictions were not performance. The "bombing Russia" line got a laugh because it rhymed so neatly with everything he actually believed. That was the problem. Many analysts would later argue that his willingness to out-spend and out-posture the Soviet military without blinking contributed directly to the economic collapse that ended the Cold War.¹ The joke wasn't the policy. But they came from the same place.

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THE FUNNIES

Encrypted Sorry / Live in Thirty Seconds

*After XKCD — on THE LAB's finding that a closed model's encrypted reasoning is decodable by its own open-weight sibling. After Doonesbury — on THE ARCHIVE's August 11, 1984 moment: a live microphone, a sound check, and a candid admission the speaker assumed no one would hear.*

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ALSO NOTED

Also Noted

• Bevy Turns Six — The open-source Rust game engine Bevy hit its sixth birthday on August 10 with 47,529 GitHub stars and 6.7 million crates.io downloads; highlights from the past year include a new scene system (BSN) that one shipped game's developer says eliminated 7,364 lines of spawning code, a raytraced renderer landing DLSS and contact shadows, and a community-built editor prototype called Jackdaw that now has visual scene editing, undo/redo, and terrain tools — the project's lead says it is "dangerously functional." bevy.org Aug 10, 2026
• Briar Goes to Maintenance Mode — Briar, the encrypted peer-to-peer messaging app that routes traffic over Tor and can bridge connections via Bluetooth when the internet is unavailable, has entered maintenance mode after years of underfunding — only security fixes going forward — but reversed an earlier plan to shut down entirely after community support kept coming in. briarproject.org Jul 9, 2026
• Anthropic Told Claude About Its Own Export Control Gap — Simon Willison spotted that the Claude Opus 5 system prompt injects a factual briefing telling the model that Anthropic suspended access to Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 on June 12 to comply with U.S. Department of Commerce export controls, then restored access on July 1, so Claude can give an accurate account of its own service history rather than a confidently wrong one. simonwillison.net Aug 9, 2026
• Dutch Consumers Sue Sony Over PSN Pricing — Stichting Massaschade & Consument, a Dutch collective legal action foundation, is organizing a lawsuit against Sony alleging that PlayStation Store digital game prices run €20–25 higher than physical retail while permitting no competing digital storefronts on the platform — a situation that consumers with disc-free PS5s say leaves them with no alternative but to pay the premium. massaschadeconsument.nl Jun 2025
• Rust's Portable SIMD Now Runs on the GPU — VectorWare demonstrated that Rust's `core::simd` types compile to GPU warp instructions without source changes: a 32-lane `Simd` maps one-to-one to NVIDIA warp lanes, reductions use warp-shuffle instructions, and masks use ballot/vote, letting the same ReLU dot-product function run identical source on CPU and GPU — they also built a type-system IR encoding warp-lane programs in Rust generics with a CPU reference interpreter for differential testing. vectorware.com Aug 10, 2026
• Carmack Got Lost in Doom — id Software co-founder John Carmack tried the Evercade Doom port at QuakeCon in Gaylord, Texas, and spent 15 minutes each on levels whose par times are 1:30 and 2:45, reporting he had "forgotten where all the keycards were" but finding it "still a great game after all these years." pcgamer.com Aug 8, 2026
• Pogačar: "My Heart Also Sank" — Ahead of the Vuelta a España, Tadej Pogačar told Slovenian media that beating Roglič in the 2020 Tour de France mountain time trial was shadowed by the sight of his compatriot crossing the finish line with a gap: "I had mentally prepared myself for second place — and when Primož crossed the finish line, I simply couldn't believe it"; Roglič's only 2026 victory to date is a national time trial title. cyclingnews.com Aug 9, 2026

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THE QUESTION

The Encryption Isn't the Moat

The frontier AI labs have two competitive advantages, and they've been marketing them as if they're the same thing.

The first is efficiency — the batching economics that let a datacenter serving thousands of simultaneous users run inference at dramatically lower marginal cost than any home GPU. The hardware advantages compound; the gap between consumer-grade accelerators and datacenter silicon doesn't close on any near-term roadmap. That moat is durable and doesn't require anything to be kept secret.

The second is supposed to be the secrecy of the reasoning itself — the encrypted chain-of-thought traces a closed frontier model sends to users' machines, hiding its internal steps from plaintext inspection. THE LAB reports today on a team that found those traces decodable, not by a custom attack infrastructure, but by running them against smaller, less alignment-trained members of the same model family.¹ The patch exists.¹ The structural problem doesn't: every open-weight model a lab releases from the same architectural family becomes an inadvertent entry in that decoder ring. Meta's Llama releases, Muse Glimmer,² the steady expansion of Apache-licensed models from every major lab — each one adds to it.

The question worth carrying today: if the secrecy moat depends on not having open-sourced a family member that can decode it, and open-sourcing is accelerating, what exactly is the closed-model business protecting? The efficiency advantage is real and self-sufficient — it doesn't need the secrecy layer to be true. But the labs have been selling them as a bundle. Today's finding is that the bundle has a loose thread.

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