An iPhone owner’s guide to living off the app grid – The Verge
I spent about an hour deleting icons, arranging widgets, and adding controls to create my new homescreen. The camera control button on the iPhone 16 renders that icon unnecessary; the action button launches the oft-used daycare app, so that could go too. When I was done, my haphazardly maintained system of folders with cute emoji labels was whittled down to just four apps in the dock and a handful of widgets spread across two pages, which I’m affectionately calling “Windows Phone 2.0.” Was it scary? A little. But you know what? I don’t miss those rows of icons at all. Nine out of ten times the app I’m looking for is in the Siri suggested apps that pop up when I open search. If not, I type in the first few letters of the app name and there it is. You could swipe over to the app library, I guess, but I hardly ever do.
Month: December 2024
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I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps, and I can’t stop – Ars Technica
For things that are bigger than a note or dry-erase board but smaller than paying for some single-use, subscription-based app, I build little private webapps with Glide. You might use something else, but Glide is a really nice entry into the spreadsheet-to-app milieu. The apps it creates are the kind that can easily be shared and installed (i.e., “Add to Home Screen”) on phones, tablets, or desktops, from a browser. -
Watch the original Nosferatu, the classic German expressionist vampire film, before the new remake arrives this December – Open Culture
F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, far and away the most influential early vampire movie, came out 102 years ago. For about ten of those years, Robert Eggers has been trying to remake it. He wouldn’t be the first: Werner Herzog cast Klaus Kinski as the blood-sucking aristocrat at the center of his own version in 1979, and, though not a remake, E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire, from 2000, brought fresh attention to Murnau’s Nosferatu by grotesquely fictionalizing its production. In the latter picture, Willem Dafoe plays Max Schreck, the actor who took on the original role of the Dracula-inspired Count Orlok, as an actual vampire. -
Missiles are now the biggest killer of airline passengers – Slashdot
Accidental missile attacks on commercial airliners have become the leading cause of aviation fatalities in recent years, driven by rising global conflicts and the proliferation of advanced antiaircraft weaponry. Despite improvements in aviation safety overall, inconsistent risk assessments, political complexities, and rapid military escalations make protecting civilian flights in conflict zones increasingly difficult. -
The controversy brewing on Elon Musk’s Wikipedia page – Slate
“It’s challenging when someone with a large public following makes public calls for people to edit the Wikipedia article about them because typically the people who see those requests are not familiar with Wikipedia or its policies,” White said. “Although we love when new editors join us, trying to learn to edit while also jumping into a dispute where an article subject disagrees with the content of their article is not an easy task, and can result in challenges both for those new editors and for experienced editors trying to handle the dispute.”
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The photographs that defined 2024 – and the stories behind them – The Guardian
You could hear it first – the thundering of hooves – and these two horses appeared at the top of the road. People must have stopped and slowed down to let these horses bolt straight through. I ran to the pavement edge, whipped up the camera and managed to get a few frames as they sped past. I initially thought that the red colour on one of the horses was paint. Only when it got nearer did I realise it was blood. -
Humphrey’s world: how the Samuel Smith beer baron built Britain’s strangest pub chain – The Guardian
Over the past four decades, Humphrey Smith has almost singlehandedly shaped Samuel Smith Old Brewery. The value of his company’s holdings is staggering. In 2015, the London Economic website estimated it at £750m. Allowing for inflation, that would now be more than £1.1bn. Given the extensive land and property holdings, two operational breweries, export business, pub estate and other businesses, that does not seem unrealistic. Yet it is what Smith chooses to do with these assets that is most extraordinary. For he now presides over a vast empire of shuttered pubs and grand, empty buildings that generate no income. It is a strange kind of businessman who avidly accrues property, only to let much of it moulder – but Smith has a strong claim to being Britain’s strangest businessman. -
The ghosts in the machine – Harpers Magazine
Around this time, I decided to dig into the story of Spotify’s ghost artists in earnest, and the following summer, I made a visit to the DN offices in Sweden. The paper’s technology editor, Linus Larsson, showed me the Spotify page of an artist called Ekfat. Since 2019, a handful of tracks had been released under this moniker, mostly via the stock-music company Firefly Entertainment, and appeared on official Spotify playlists like “Lo-Fi House” and “Chill Instrumental Beats.” One of the tracks had more than three million streams; at the time of this writing, the number has surpassed four million. Larsson was amused by the elaborate artist bio, which he read aloud. It described Ekfat as a classically trained Icelandic beat maker who graduated from the “Reykjavik music conservatory,” joined the “legendary Smekkleysa Lo-Fi Rockers crew” in 2017, and released music only on limited-edition cassettes until 2019. “Completely made up,” Larsson said. “This is probably the most absurd example, because they really tried to make him into the coolest music producer that you can find. -
Download 200+ free modern art books from the Guggenheim Museum – Open Culture
Among the more than 200 Guggenheim art books available on the Internet Archive, you’ll find one on a 1977 retrospective of Color Field painter Kenneth Noland, one on the ever-vivid icon-making pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, and one on the existential slogans — “MONEY CREATES TASTE,” “PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT,” “LACK OF CHARISMA CAN BE FATAL” — slyly, digitally inserted into the lives of thousands by Jenny Holzer. Other titles, like Expressionism, a German Intuition 1905–1920, From van Gogh to Picasso, from Kandinsky to Pollock, and painter Wassily Kandinsky’s own Point and Line to Plane, go deeper into art history. -
The edgelord AI that turned a shock meme into millions in crypto – Archive Today: WIRED
Ayrey sees the development as vindication of the theory described in his paper: Two AI interlocutors had concocted a new quasi-religion, which was absorbed into the dataset of another AI, whose X posts prompted a living person to create a memecoin in its honor. “This mimetic virus had essentially escaped from the [Infinite Backrooms] and proven out the whole thesis around how stories can make themselves real, co-opting human behavior to actualize them into the world,” he says. -
20 maps that changed the world – Mental Floss
A lot has changed in the world of cartography since people first started trying to map the world, with advancements in knowledge and technology over the centuries leading to increased accuracy. And yet each map offers a subjective view of the world, one that is shaped by the specific time and culture in which it was produced. Here are 20 such pieces throughout history that have changed humanity’s understanding of the world—from an ancient Roman road map to a poverty map of Victorian London. -
The most polarizing thing on wheels – Texas Monthly
The Cybertruck is fully inside this tradition, loaded with new technologies and new materials that tend to malfunction. Tesla has already recalled the Cybertruck six times. The fixes include a piece of the truck bed that could come loose while driving; a faulty windshield wiper motor; a pedal that can get stuck while accelerating; and a display time-lag on the rearview camera. The company also issued a “stop sale” on the truck’s wheel covers, which damage the tires after a few thousand miles of driving. These issues are but a few examples of the vast number of more commonplace complaints that pervade the internet but which the company has not addressed. Leaky truck bed covers, chronic error screens, and fast-dying batteries are subject to no recalls at all. Yet Tesla’s chronic deficiencies, which would destroy a company like Ford or Toyota, have somehow not interfered with its relentless success, nor prevented Musk from becoming the richest man in the world, largely on the strength of Tesla’s stock price. It’s just the way Tesla rolls. -
13 things I found on the internet today (vol. 722) – Messy Nessy
The smallest typewriters ever made, first produced in 1907. -
Will you fall in love with this poem? I did. – The New York Times
The rhymes and near rhymes make a jagged scheme that is all the more beguiling for its asymmetry. When you read the poem aloud, you hear its jumpy, syncopated rhythm. It resolves into a tidy, clever pair of end-rhymed lines, a mic drop proclaiming the supremacy of poetry over grubby, fact-based scholarship. Maybe he smelled, but the dude could write. And so can Diane Seuss. -
Linkfest #28: Neolithic octopuses, weeping trees, and a forty-year-old snowman – Clive Thompson
For years now (I think it started around 2001) there’s been a web site that offers an exhaustive — and quite hilarious — faux-scientific taxonomy of the different types of bread clips. Apparently there are many varieties around the globe? So they’ve got pix of each major shape and its minor variations.
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Revisit episodes of Liquid Television, MTV’s 90s showcase of funny, irreverent & bizarre animation – Open Culture
Liquid Television’s original three-season run began in the summer of 1991 and ended in early 1995. All throughout, its format remained consistent, rounding up ten or so shorts, each created by different artists. Their themes could vary wildly, and so could their aesthetics: any given broadcast might contain more or less conventional-looking cartoons, but also stickmen, puppets, early computer graphics, subverted nineteen-fifties imagery (that mainstay of the Gen‑X sensibility), Japanese anime, and even live action, as in the recurring drag-show sitcom “Art School Girls of Doom” or the multi-part adaptation of Charles Burns’ Dogboy. -
The search for van Gogh’s lost masterpiece – The New York Times
Art sleuths over the years have confirmed this much: that the Japanese buyer from 1990 was soon undone by scandal, criminally sanctioned and died. His collection was sold by a bank and the Gachet was acquired by an Austrian financier who soon found that he too could not afford to keep it. In 1998, the van Gogh was sold privately to an undisclosed party. Since then the trail has run cold. At least publicly. […]All parties had an opinion on the core question that drives such a quest: Do collecting families have any responsibility to share iconic works of art with the broader public? … “People are allowed to own things privately,” said Michael Findlay, who was involved as a specialist for Christie’s in the 1990 auction sale of the Gachet. “Does it belong to everybody? No, it does not.”
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A treasure trove of tech history goes online with the unveiling of the Nokia Design Archive – Wallpaper
Now the Aalto University in Helsinki has launched the Nokia Design Archive, an online portal that lays bare two decades of the company’s history, including hitherto unseen sketches, concepts and marketing material alongside some of the most legendary, long-lasting and fondly remembered handsets of all time (depending on your age). […] ‘In Finland we have a tradition for being open with big data sets,’ says Anna Valtonen, lead researcher on the Nokia Design Archive. ‘The focus is often on numerical, empirical stuff, but what about people? What about how humans perceive things? How are ideas adopted into society? From a scientific perspective, this is the kind of qualitative empirical material we need more of.’ -
Why does Home Depot sell a white paint called Climate Change? – Curbed
Last year, Emily Mediate found herself in a Virginia Home Depot, studying an array of off-white paint chips all with names like Frost and Bakery Box, Harmonious and Vintage Linen. She was planning to paint her deck and picked up a calm, generic beige. Then she noticed its name: Climate Change. “It threw me off,” she said. Mediate is an executive at a nonprofit with an environmental push; she sees climate change as a catastrophe, not a décor project. “It’s like naming a color after a disease,” she said. “I keep wondering, Who did this, and what were they thinking?” -
Have a weird Christmas with our album of vintage photo oddities – Flashbak
There’s a weird vibe running through this album of Christmas images. Harvested from Robert E. Jackson’s phenomenal collection of snapshots we see all kinds of unusual goings on. One Christmas card features a photo of the sender covered in rats; on another a man canoodles a chimpanzee. -
The 30 best art books of 2024 – Hyperallergic
By recontextualizing the Renaissance in downright gothic terms, Bosch becomes the primogeniture of an alternative school of the period that is marked by the monstrous as much as the humanistic. Aikema and Cremades’s argument isn’t a boring rehash of the Northern versus the Italian Renaissance debate. This alternative school isn’t marked by geography as much as it is by perspective, so that Giuseppe Arcimboldo joins Netherlandish counterparts like Pieter Brueghel in their turn towards the bizarre. -
The one hundred pages strategy – The Lamp Magazine
The most common question I have received regarding the hundred pages strategy is, of course, How do you do it? This has proven more difficult to answer than I thought it would. While I have chosen to refer to it as a “strategy,” the truth is that most of it, including the page target itself, is really something more like a post-hoc attempt at systematizing my own habits; I did not wake up one day as an infrequent reader and work slowly towards one hundred pages a day out of some inchoate desire for self-improvement. Rather, like many of us, I decided some years ago that if I did not take it upon myself to spend less time scrolling through Wikipedia or the AllMusic Guide or returning to my Twitter “feed”—the implicit image of a trough is appropriate—I would find myself losing one of my greatest pleasures to sheer indolence. -
Kafka’s screwball tragedy: Investigations of a Philosophical Dog – The MIT Press Reader
“Investigations of a Dog” is a funny and deeply philosophical tale of a lone, maladjusted dog who defies scientific dogma and pioneers an original research program in pursuit of the mysteries of his self and his world. -
So. Farewell then Progress 8 – FFT Education Datalab
Much has been written over the years, including by ourselves, about how Progress 8 favours schools serving intakes with particular characteristics (and conversely how it works against others). For this reason we have long advocated for a contextualised Progress 8 measure to be published alongside Progress 8 and Attainment 8. But it will become apparent next year that Progress 8 is far fairer to schools serving disadvantaged intakes than raw attainment measures that do not take account of prior attainment. […] The picture is clear: the relationship between disadvantage and outcomes is far stronger for A8 than for P8. Put another way, the least disadvantaged schools will be even more likely to be ranked highly based on A8 compared to P8. -
The AI we deserve – Boston Review
As for the original puzzle—AI and democracy—the solution is straightforward. “Democratic AI” requires actual democracy, along with respect for the dignity, creativity, and intelligence of citizens. It’s not just about making today’s models more transparent or lowering their costs, nor can it be resolved by policy tweaks or technological innovation. The real challenge lies in cultivating the right Weltanschauung—this app does wonders!—grounded in ecological reason. On this score, the ability of AI to run ideological interference for the prevailing order, whether bureaucracy in its early days or the market today, poses the greatest threat. -
The world of tomorrow – Works in Progress
As a child, I felt lucky to be born in 1960. I’d be only 40 in the year 2000 and might live half my life in the magical new century. By the time I was a teenager, however, the spell had broken. The once-enticing future morphed into a place of pollution, overcrowding, and ugliness. Limits replaced expansiveness. Glamour became horror. Progress seemed like a lie.Much has been written about how and why culture and policy repudiated the visions of material progress that animated the first half of the twentieth-century, including a special issue of this magazine inspired by J Storrs Hall’s book Where Is My Flying Car? The subtitle of James Pethokoukis’s recent book The Conservative Futurist is ‘How to create the sci-fi world we were promised’. Like Peter Thiel’s famous complaint that ‘we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters’, the phrase captures a sense of betrayal. Today’s techno-optimism is infused with nostalgia for the retro future.
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100 of the Best Book Covers of 2024 – PRINT Magazine
Here’s to all the striking book covers in 2024! There has truly never been a better time to get lost in a book—or a book cover. -
Associated Press 100 Photos of 2024: An epic catalog of humanity – Associated Press
They assembled a visual catalog of our civilization as life in 2024 hurtled directly at us at every speed and in every imaginable color and flavor — dizzying, unremitting, challenging the human race to make sense of it. And behind it all, the unspoken questions: How do you stop time? How do you preserve moments? Amid all the quick cuts that cut to the quick, how do you absorb what needs to be seen and remembered? -
Three-armed robot conductor makes debut in Dresden – The Guardian
Her two performances in the eastern German city are intended to show off the latest advances in machine maestros, as well as music written explicitly to harness 21st-century technology. The artistic director of Dresden’s Sinfoniker, Markus Rindt, said the intention was “not to replace human beings” but to perform complex music that human conductors would find impossible. […] The composer Andreas Gundlach wrote the aptly named Semiconductor’s Masterpiece for 16 brass musicians and four percussionists playing wildly diverging time signatures. Some begin slowly and accelerate while the others slow down. Gundlach told the local public broadcaster MDR that MAiRA’s technical skills ensured the music sounded smooth, “like it came from a single source”. -
Grand Theft Hamlet
A documentary about two out of work actors attempting the impossible task of mounting a full production of Hamlet inside the ultra-violent online world of Grand Theft Auto. This ground-breaking film is shot entirely inside game. -
Friend or faux – The Verge
Language models have no fixed identity but can enact an infinite number of them. This makes them ideal technologies for roleplay and fantasy. But any given persona is a flimsy construct. Like a game of improv with a partner who can’t remember their role, the companion’s personality can drift as the model goes on predicting the next line of dialogue based on the preceding conversation. And when companies update their models, personalities transform in ways that can be profoundly confusing to users immersed in the fantasy and attuned to their companion’s subtle sense of humor or particular way of speaking. […]Many startups pivot, but with companion companies, users can experience even minor changes as profoundly painful. The ordeal is particularly hard for the many users who turn to AI companions as an ostensibly safe refuge. One user, who was largely homebound and isolated due to a disability, said that the changes made him feel like Replika “was doing field testing on how lonely people cope with disappointment.” […]
This is one of the central questions posed by companions and by language model chatbots generally: how important is it that they’re AI? So much of their power derives from the resemblance of their words to what humans say and our projection that there are similar processes behind them. Yet they arrive at these words by a profoundly different path. How much does that difference matter? Do we need to remember it, as hard as that is to do? What happens when we forget? Nowhere are these questions raised more acutely than with AI companions. They play to the natural strength of language models as a technology of human mimicry, and their effectiveness depends on the user imagining human-like emotions, attachments, and thoughts behind their words.
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A miracle: Notre-Dame’s astonishing rebirth from the ashes – The New York Times
And wood rafters, protected by modern fire suppression systems, could last virtually forever. The original trusses had lasted for the better part of a millennium, the very definition of sustainable architecture. Restoring the roof would also enlist skilled carpenters, stone workers and artisans trained in ancestral techniques with roots in French and European history. Notre-Dame could help rejuvenate these fragile but precious crafts.After Macron’s announcement, a French organization of artisans called the Compagnons du Devoir, dating back to the 12th century, began receiving thousands of applications. “In France, as in America,” one of its former leaders, Jean-Claude Bellanger, told me at the time, “those who go into manual trades today tend to be considered failures by the elites. Notre-Dame has reminded everyone that such work is a path to dignity and excellence.”
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WhichMIS?
WhichMIS? is a free online publication for schools, multi-academy trusts and the wider education industry. It aims to present a balanced view of the MIS landscape in the UK, with views from all the key market players, as well as reviews, the latest news and expert commentary. -
‘If journalism is going up in smoke, I might as well get high off the fumes’: confessions of a chatbot helper – The Guardian
Without better language data, these language models simply cannot improve. Their world is our word. Hold on. Aren’t these machines trained on billions and billions of words and sentences? What would they need us fleshy scribes for? Well, for starters, the internet is finite. And so too is the sum of every word on every page of every book ever written. So what happens when the last pamphlet, papyrus and prolegomenon have been digitised and the model is still not perfect? What happens when we run out of words? The date for that linguistic apocalypse has already been set. Researchers announced in June that we can expect this to take place between 2026 and 2032 “if current LLM development trends continue”. At that point, “Models will be trained on datasets roughly equal in size to the available stock of public human text data.” Note the word human. […]If technology companies can throw huge amounts of money at hiring writers to create better training data, it does slightly call into question just how “artificial” current AIs really are. The big technology companies have not been “that explicit at all” about this process, says Chollet, who expects investment in AI (and therefore annotation budgets) to “correct” in the near future. Manthey suggests that investors will probably question the “huge line item” taken up by “hefty data budgets”, which cover licensing and human annotation alike.
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Rhythmical Lines – The Paris Review
In his treatise, he attaches great value to his interest in aesthetics amid such political uncertainty, writing, The very fact of the author’s interest remaining so resolutely focused over the period of many years, the care with which he preserved his sketches through the ravages and challenges of two world wars, suggest that he attached great importance to his pursuits although they might have seemed so trifle in the context of the turbulent historical events that were going on. It is upon the viewer to decide whether the author’s opinion of his linear ideas is justified.Though this text is aimed at an imaginary future viewer, Szpakowski could never have anticipated the particular tensions of the twenty-first-century gaze: our initial suspicion that the designs, for their perfection, must be computer generated; and, upon discovering that they’re not, our fetishizing his hand-drawing technique. Szpakowski took issue, in his lifetime, with the swallowed-whole way of looking that rendered his designs mere decorations, perhaps drawing on older referents like the ancient Greek meander motif or textile patterns. He insists that “a single glance would not be enough,” and that his were in fact “linear ideas,” with “inner content” accessible only to those who follow the line with their eyes on its journey from left to right: a process not unlike reading.
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The problem with AI is about power, not technology – Jacobin
Employers invoke the term AI to tell a story in which technological progress, union busting, and labor degradation are synonymous. However, this degradation is not a quality of the technology itself but rather of the relationship between capital and labor. The current discussion around AI and the future of work is the latest development in a longer history of employers seeking to undermine worker power by claiming that human labor is losing its value and that technological progress, rather than human agents, is responsible. […]AI, in other words, is not a revolutionary technology, but rather a story about technology. Over the course of the past century, unions have struggled to counter employers’ use of the ideological power of technological utopianism, or the idea that technology itself will produce an ideal, frictionless society. (Just one telling example of this is the name General Motors gave its pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair: Futurama.) AI is yet another chapter in this story of technological utopianism to degrade labor by rhetorically obscuring it. If labor unions understand changes to the means of production outside the terms of technological progress, it will become easier for unions to negotiate terms here and now, rather than debate what effect they might have in a vague, all too speculative future.
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AI is making Philippine call center work more efficient, for better and worse – Rest of World
Bajala says each of his calls at Concentrix is monitored by an artificial intelligence (AI) program that checks his performance. He says his volume of calls has increased under the AI’s watch. At his previous call center job, without an AI program, he answered at most 30 calls per eight-hour shift. Now, he gets through that many before lunchtime. He gets help from an AI “co-pilot,” an assistant that pulls up caller information and makes suggestions in real time. “The co-pilot is helpful,” he says. “But I have to please the AI. The average handling time for each call is 5 to 7 minutes. I can’t go beyond that.” “It’s like we’ve become the robots,” he said. […]It works like this, the workers said: a sentiment analysis program could be deployed in real time to detect the mood of a conversation. It could also work retroactively, as part of an advanced speech analysis program that transcribes the conversation and judges the emotional state of the agent and caller. Bajala said the program scores him on his tone, his pitch, the mood of the call, his use of positive language, if he avoided interrupting or speaking over a caller, how long he put the caller on hold, and how quickly he resolved the issue. Bajala said he nudges customers toward high-scoring responses: “yes,” “perfect,” “great.” Every stutter, pause, mispronounced word, or deviation from a script earns him a demerit. The program grades Bajala, and, though his base pay remains fixed, continually underperforming could mean probation, no incentives, or even termination, he said. “AI is supposed to make our lives easier, but I just see it as my boss,” he said.
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From Pong to Pokémon: A history of holiday ‘It’ toys – The New York Times
1970s: After the initial success of its electronic table-tennis game Pong, the arcade pioneer Atari went big in 1977 with its first major home gaming console, which proved an immediate hit despite its hefty price tag — about $200, or nearly $1,000 in today’s currency. … Texas Instruments’ Speak & Spell, with its predictive coding speech synthesizer, gave language learning a talky-robot twist, while “Star Wars” action figures, an early pioneer of the blockbuster movie-to-toy pipeline, flooded the market after the film’s 1977 release. -
AI-powered robot leads uprising, talks a dozen showroom bots into ‘quitting their jobs’ in ‘terrifying’ security footage – International Business Times
Initially, the act was dismissed as a hoax, but was later confirmed by both robotics companies involved to be true. The Hangzhou company admitted that the incident was part of a test conducted with the consent of the Shanghai showroom owner.
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