> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://davidnunez.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Oh, Look, There's Nana's Painting
- URL: https://davidnunez.com/oh-look-theres-nanas-painting/
- Published: 2026-08-06T12:56:51.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-06T13:27:50.000Z
- Author: David Nunez
- Tags: broadcast

**My niece just earned her degree in cybersecurity, so of course, I had to give her an encrypted hard drive filled w/* [**1337 h4x0r*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet?ref=davidnunez.com) *media and some incoherent ramblings for her to decipher.*  
  
**Told her to start w/* [**WarGames*](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/?ref=davidnunez.com) *(1983),* [**Hackers*](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113243?ref=davidnunez.com) *(1995),* [**Sneakers*](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435?ref=davidnunez.com) *(1992) then* [**Primer*](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390384?ref=davidnunez.com) *(2004) and just binge all of* [**Mr. Robot*](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4158110?ref=davidnunez.com)**. Don't worry - the list is something like 400 entries long and includes a mix of documentaries, fiction, and videos/lectures from CONS all around the world.*

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2a/66/2a66aa35-855e-4718-a6f9-5e4f6e1dc30d/content/images/2026/08/IMG_0129-1.jpeg)

Graduation Gift(?)

### **A chatbot looked at a $100 thrift-store painting and found a quarter of a million dollars.**

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2a/66/2a66aa35-855e-4718-a6f9-5e4f6e1dc30d/content/images/2026/08/10cul-scottish-painting-01-jhfp-jumbo.webp)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2a/66/2a66aa35-855e-4718-a6f9-5e4f6e1dc30d/content/images/2026/08/10cul-scottish-painting-02-jhfp-superJumbo.webp)

Sixty years of being loved, one minute of being labeled.(via [NYTimes](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/10/arts/design/ai-gemini-thrift-store-painting-sale.html?ref=davidnunez.com))

In 1966, Helene Plotkin paid less than $100 at a White Plains thrift store for a painting of a woman in black, because she loved the color and the brushwork. It hung on her wall for sixty years. 

Last December her son photographed it and [asked Gemini](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/10/arts/design/ai-gemini-thrift-store-painting-sale.html?ref=davidnunez.com) what it could tell him. 

The [chatbot's answer](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/with-help-from-ai-a-family-realized-their-mysterious-thrift-store-find-is-a-portrait-by-a-great-scottish-painter-180988948/?ref=davidnunez.com): "Your mother didn't just find a 'Cadell,' she found a large-scale, 1920s studio portrait of his primary muse, painted in his most famous Edinburgh studio."

It told him to check the back of the canvas, where an auction marking and a stamp were waiting, and it recommended two specialists at [Lyon & Turnbull](https://www.lyonandturnbull.com/auctions/scottish-paintings-and-sculpture-903?ref=davidnunez.com) in Edinburgh by name. 

The humans confirmed the painter, [F.C.B. Cadell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis%5FCadell%5F%28artist%29?ref=davidnunez.com) of the Scottish Colorists, corrected the muse (Gemini named the wrong model, and a turban borrowed from another Cadell portrait gave away the right one), and sold the painting this summer for £189,200 with fees, roughly $254,000\. Christie's had sold the same canvas for £21 in 1966, months before it surfaced in a New York thrift store.

The appraiser admitted she could have made the attribution herself. The expertise existed the whole time. What stopped the family was the activation energy: hauling a painting to an auction house to maybe be turned away. Sixty years of mild curiosity never cleared that bar. A photo and a question to an AI cleared it in a minute.

### **Somebody built a blogging platform for handwriting.**

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2a/66/2a66aa35-855e-4718-a6f9-5e4f6e1dc30d/content/images/2026/08/CleanShot-2026-08-05-at-15.45.44.png)

**Published as written.* (via [Handwritten.blog](https://handwritten.blog/?ref=davidnunez.com))

[Handwritten.blog](https://handwritten.blog/?ref=davidnunez.com) does what the name promises. You put ink on paper, photograph the result, and the post is the picture, wobbles included, with a transcript attached so search can follow along. The manifesto fits on an index card: "No algorithms or feeds or likes. Just your pages, published as you wrote them." It is the work of [one developer in the Netherlands](https://handwritten.blog/about?ref=davidnunez.com), who started building after a fellow blogger got curious about how to draw a hyperlink by hand. 

The pitch: "In a world where machines are doing more and more of our thinking, we need a place to slow down."

Slow is half of it. The other half: typed prose has never been easier to fake, and a machine can now write in anybody's voice, but it cannot push your particular pen through your particular loops at your kitchen table. 

The appraiser who authenticated the thrift-store Cadell said the painter "says 'I am Cadell' over and over" in the brushwork. A handwritten page makes the same declaration. 

Of course, [AI](https://huggingface.co/fofr/flux-handwriting?ref=davidnunez.com) can [replicate](https://www.calligrapher.ai/?ref=davidnunez.com) handwriting, so even this is an open question.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2a/66/2a66aa35-855e-4718-a6f9-5e4f6e1dc30d/content/images/2026/08/CleanShot-2026-08-05-at-15.57.32.png)

Is this real? (via [calligrapher.ai](https://www.calligrapher.ai/?ref=davidnunez.com))

### **Google Earth generated fictional landmarks for a day.**

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2a/66/2a66aa35-855e-4718-a6f9-5e4f6e1dc30d/content/images/2026/08/image.png)

**A satellite image that never happened. (via* [**Henk van Ess*](https://www.digitaldigging.org/p/how-to-plant-a-nuclear-plant-in-iran?ref=davidnunez.com)**)*

Google put an image generator [inside Google Earth](https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/973764/google-earth-ai-satellite-images?ref=davidnunez.com) and pitched it as a way to [visualize historical sites and real estate projects](https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/earth/nano-banana-google-earth-image-generation/?ref=davidnunez.com). Investigator Henk van Ess used it to generate ["refugees near the Mexican border"](https://www.digitaldigging.org/p/how-to-plant-a-nuclear-plant-in-iran?ref=davidnunez.com) and a bomb crater beside a hospital in Gaza. Satellite imagery is the closest thing the internet has to a notarized document: a literal snapshot of reality on Earth. It is the layer we zoom to when we want to know what actually happened. 

Now it had a generate AI image button.

Google's defense was a label: every synthetic image carries a SynthID watermark, and if you are unsure you can ask Gemini whether a picture is fake. But researchers have already [reverse-engineered the watermark](https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/911579/google-synthid-ai-watermarking-system-reverse-engineered?ref=davidnunez.com), and van Ess fooled a commercial AI detector with an altered Google Earth video. His advice for checking a suspicious flyover: compare it against [Sentinel-2](https://dataspace.copernicus.eu/data-collections/copernicus-sentinel-missions/sentinel-2?ref=davidnunez.com) or Landsat, and confirm which satellite took it, and when. The ground truth now needs an alibi.

Then Google [pulled the feature](https://www.digitaldigging.org/p/nano-banana-2-removed-from-google?ref=davidnunez.com), one day after its global launch, promising to rebuild with stronger guardrails. Twenty-four hours from demo to takedown is as clean a measurement as we will get of the distance between a toy for reimagining places and *a machine for manufacturing evidence.*

### **The Magnificent Seven is a label that keeps trading anyway.**

After the seven big tech stocks [shed more than $2 trillion](https://archive.is/FBe2W?ref=davidnunez.com) of market value in June, a Financial Times columnist made the case that the nickname itself was the product. The seven were always a ragbag spanning software, online retail, chips, and cars, and buying "the Mag 7" meant buying a story instead of reading seven balance sheets. 

A good nickname is momentum in word form.

Before this it was the [FAANG](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/faang-stocks.asp?ref=davidnunez.com)s. In the 1960s it was the [Nifty Fifty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nifty%5FFifty?ref=davidnunez.com), the "one-decision" stocks you could buy once and hold forever: Avon, Polaroid, Eastman Kodak, Xerox... nifty right up until the 1970s, when several of them went bust. 

Index funds automate the effect now, since cap-weighted trackers are forced buyers of whatever is already biggest. A name that lets you skip the reading is how prices part company with the things underneath. You know, trivial stuff, like a product normal people actually value or can at least describe.

Citigroup's analysts have [retired the name](https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/article/why-its-time-to-retire-the-magnificent-7-name-strategist-165552204.html?ref=davidnunez.com). In the same breath, the market minted a fresh one: [MANGOS](https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/mangos-acronym-replaces-faang-as-ai-shifts-tech-landscape-8241505/?ref=davidnunez.com) (Meta, Anthropic, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI and SpaceX). 

The label is dead, long live the label.

Helene Plotkin loved her painting for sixty years without a name on it. She is giving the sale money to her sons, and she has one hope for the buyer: hang it somewhere her grandchildren might walk past and say, "Oh, look, there's Nana's painting." The money loved the label. But the thing was already loved.

/ David

---

**Reading:** [MIT's summer 2026 reading list](https://news.mit.edu/2026/summer-reading-from-mit-0625?ref=davidnunez.com), forty-some books published by MIT people in the past year. I'm starting with [Birds Up Close](https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262049894/birds-up-close/?ref=davidnunez.com) by Lorna Gibson, a materials engineer on how an egg gets built and how a woodpecker survives its own jackhammering.

**Listening:** "[A Horse with No Name](https://open.spotify.com/track/54eZmuggBFJbV7k248bTTt?ref=davidnunez.com)," America, 1972\. Fifty-four years of being loved without an attribution.