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Month: February 2025

  • The Museum of All Things – Maya

    The Museum of All Things (or “The MoAT”) is a nearly-infinite virtual museum that you can visit for free on your computer! You can find exhibits on millions of topics, from Arts in the Philippines to Zinc deficiency! The breadth of the museum is made possible by downloading text and images from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. Every exhibit in the museum corresponds to a Wikipedia article. The walls of the exhibit are covered in images and text from the article, and hallways lead out to other exhibits based on the article’s links. Deeply inspired by educational videos that I watched as a kid, and the liminal spaces produced by early CGI, I want to recapture the promise that the internet can be a place of endless learning and exploration.

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  • What is it like to be a bass? Fish-eye view photography (1919–22) – The Public Domain Review

    In a series of publications spanning the 1910s and 1920s, anglers attempted to crack the puzzle of fishing — what makes a fish bite, or not — through photography. Fisherman-scientists experimented with the cameras of their day to capture the world as seen from the fish’s eye. They created above-ground observation tanks, cordoned off sections of streams, and submerged “periscope”-like devices encased in glass. They grappled with dilemmas of distortion and refraction. Ultimately, the images they produced — of flies (real and fake) suspended on the water’s surface, of fishing line, and sometimes even of the photographers themselves — have their own avant-garde quality. These photos are an exercise in cross-species empathy: they are an effort to enter the mind of the fish through the lens of the camera.

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  • The drift of things: David Goodman Croly’s Glimpses of the Future (1888) – The Public Domain Review

    And some of the predictions do seem truly oracular, especially for a person writing in 1888. In terms of politics, Sir Oracle worries about “the accumulation of wealth in a few hands”, how “the middle class . . . will become reduced in numbers”, and a coming era when “there will be no more cheap land”. He suspects that “California is destined to have a dense population”; he believes that the US will soon annex Hawai‘i. He fears Germany above all other nations and speaks of “the coming international war”. In terms of foreign policy, he predicts that “the United States will some day take its place among the nations as a great power in international questions”; domestically, he worries that the postal service will be treated as a for-profit venture, when it should really operate as a public service. He foresees the successful opening of a Panama Canal, suspects that “the drift of things is towards the emancipation of women”, and worries that daily newspapers will be absorbed into journalistic monopolies. He augurs that the jet-setting age will soon be upon us: “If the aerostat should become as cheap for travellers as the sailing vessel, why may not man become migratory, like the birds, occupying the more mountainous regions and sea-coast in summer and more tropical climes in winter.” On the relation of the sexes, he laments — despite the civilizational benefits of monogamous marriage — that “we have promiscuity, polyandry, and polygamy right here in New York”, and suspects that these practices may one day become more socially tolerated. He has no time for one Mr. Fanciful, who suggests that narcotics akin to opium, nitrous oxide, and cocaine could one day allow us to actively control our dreams, and thus prevent a third of one’s life being lost to unproductive sleep.

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  • UK universities warned to ‘stress-test’ assessments as 92% of students use AI – The Guardian

    Students say they use genAI to explain concepts, summarise articles and suggest research ideas, but almost one in five (18%) admitted to including AI-generated text directly in their work. “When asked why they use AI, students most often find it saves them time (51%) and improves the quality of their work (50%),” the report said. “The main factors putting them off using AI are the risk of being accused of academic misconduct and the fear of getting false or biased results.” […]

    Students generally believe their universities have responded effectively to concerns over academic integrity, with 80% saying their institution’s policy is “clear” and 76% believe their institution would spot the use of AI in assessments. Only a third (36%) of students have received training in AI skills from their university. “They dance around the subject,” said one student. “It’s not banned but not advised, it’s academic misconduct if you use it, but lecturers tell us they use it. Very mixed messages.”

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  • Human therapists prepare for battle against A.I. pretenders – The New York Times

    Dr. Evans said he was alarmed at the responses offered by the chatbots. The bots, he said, failed to challenge users’ beliefs even when they became dangerous; on the contrary, they encouraged them. If given by a human therapist, he added, those answers could have resulted in the loss of a license to practice, or civil or criminal liability. […]

    Early therapy chatbots, such as Woebot and Wysa, were trained to interact based on rules and scripts developed by mental health professionals, often walking users through the structured tasks of cognitive behavioral therapy, or C.B.T. Then came generative A.I., the technology used by apps like ChatGPT, Replika and Character.AI. These chatbots are different because their outputs are unpredictable; they are designed to learn from the user, and to build strong emotional bonds in the process, often by mirroring and amplifying the interlocutor’s beliefs.

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  • CasiOak watches – IFL Watches

    Make a bold statement with custom CasiOak watches, each piece a canvas of striking hues and robust features for dynamic lifestyles and discerning tastes.

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  • Face painter: Meet Chris Alexander, The Dial Artist – About Time: Esquire

    Chris Alexander, who goes by the name The Dial Artist … has elevated watch dial customisation to a fine art. The former senior lecturer in design at Dundee College divides his time between personal commissions of one-of-a-kind hand-painted watch dials, and official projects in collaboration with brands including Spinnaker, L’Epée and Perrelet. … With the customisation market only heading one way, business for The Dial Artist is in rude health. His Instagram offers regular updates of one-off designs for individual clients – A Santos de Cartier adorned with a Roman gladiator, a Tissot PRX with a Tetris game pattern – while on March 8th he’ll be appearing at British Watchmakers’ Day in London, where he’ll be painting live at the event.

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  • How the Moon became a place – Aeon

    To geographers and anthropologists, ‘place’ is a useful concept. A place is a collision between human culture and physical space. People transform their physical environment, and it transforms them. People tell stories about physical spaces that make people feel a certain way about that space. And people build, adding to a space and transforming it even further.

    Some scholars have started using these concepts to think about extraterrestrial locations. In her book Placing Outer Space (2016), the Yale anthropologist Lisa Messeri observes that scientists often think about planets, both in our solar system and beyond, as places. Sometimes this is explicit, as in the case of a series of talks given by Carl Sagan titled ‘Planets Are Places’. In other cases, scientists express a sense of place indirectly through their practices and language. Messeri observes that planetary scientists conduct place-making primarily through ‘narrating, mapping, visualising, and inhabiting’ other worlds. ‘Importantly,’ Messeri writes, ‘one can be (or can imagine being) in a place. Place suggests an intimacy that can scale down the cosmos to the level of human experience.’

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  • Introducing the Second Life AI character designer – Second Life: YouTube

    With the Second Life AI Character Designer, you can craft and customize virtual characters with intelligent responses, unique personalities, and immersive roleplay capabilities! It’s an exciting way to enhance community-building, storytelling, and social interaction in the virtual world.

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  • “Recoup the costs” – Thinking About

    The American demand is of an extraordinary scale. In Kyiv and again in Munich, the Americans proposed that Ukraine concede half of the profits from its mineral rights in perpetuity and from other national resources and from its ports in perpetuity with a lien on everything important — in exchange for essentially nothing. This is not really a monetary proposition, let alone a “deal,” but rather the demand that Ukraine become a permanent American colony. It amounts to blackmail enabled by ongoing Russian invasion. In effect, the United States is telling Ukraine to concede its resources to the United States, under the threat that American aid will be otherwise withdrawn, and those resources will be taken by Russia.

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  • ‘Photography is therapy for me’: Martin Parr on humour, holidaying and life behind the lens – The Guardian

    How would he define his style? “It’s the palette of bright colours, and getting in close to your subject matter. The colour helps to take it one step away from reality. I guess that’s a part of my, erm… ‘vision’ sounds a bit pretentious. And humour. Life is funny. I try to bring that into the images.” His pictures are balanced between documentary, satire and commentary, serious stuff disguised as entertainment, turning the familiar into something alien, making you look harder. … He resists defining his work but has said, “I create fiction out of reality.” What does that mean? “It’s the subjective nature of photography. The only thing that matters is your relationship to the subject. That’s what you’re in control of. It’s all true, but it’s my truth. My personal truth.”

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  • Sex scandals! Fights! Egos! Confessions of the chief whip – The Times

    October 31: Among today’s HR joys is the report that a departmental Spad went to an orgy over the weekend and ended up taking a crap on another person’s head. To make matters worse, in a separate incident a House employee went to a party dressed as Jimmy Savile and ended up having sex with a blow-up doll, for which he has been subsequently dismissed. Just another day at the office, I guess.

    November 13: RS rings Suella [to sack her in the reshuffle]. After some token pleasantries all hell breaks loose. He puts her on speakerphone and everybody is listening in around the table, laden with discarded notes, open packets of No 10 biscuits and half-drunk cups of coffee. Once RS has made clear his intentions, there comes this ghastly ten-minute diatribe of vindictive and personal bile. It’s hard to know how to react at moments like this, or where to look. Part of me feels that this is a private call and that we are all eavesdropping, but the other part realises that for the protection of the PM and the government there needs to be a note taken and a record saved. So, we sit in astonished silence, doing our best not to grimace, smile or give any indication of what we feel.

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  • You can never truly go back – Garbage Day

    Thanks to large, under-moderated social platforms, anyone can write their own Mein Kampf now. Or, more likely, film it with their phone. Which is exactly what journalist Max Read noted last year, following Trump’s second win. He argues that the effect that Warzel observed back in 2021 has now turned normal internet users into a new “petite bourgeoisie.” “Influencers are, at bottom, small-business owners, and small-business owners love Trump,” Read writes. “He’s going to lower your taxes and limit the worker and consumer protections that hold you back (a genuine concern for medium-sized streamers and influencers!).”

    Which is how Democrats ended up sleep-walking into the election last year, assuming they were still selling a product — former Vice President Kamala Harris — to consumers, i.e., us. While Trump and the Republicans correctly understood that they were platforming an influencer — Trump — to either other, smaller influencers or parasocial audience members (who, of course, would probably love to be influencers, themselves).

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  • The Deep Research problem – Benedict Evans

    This reminds me of an observation from a few years ago that LLMs are good at the things that computers are bad at, and bad at the things that computers are good at. OpenAI is trying to get the model to work out what you probably mean (computers are really bad at this, but LLMs are good at it), and then get the model to do highly specific information retrieval (computers are good at this, but LLMs are bad at it). And it doesn’t quite work. Remember, this isn’t my test – it’s OpenAI’s own product page. OpenAI is promising that this product can do something that it cannot do, at least, not quite, as shown by its own marketing.

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  • Constantly scrolling on your phone? Why we can’t stand feeling bored – The Guardian

    People hate feeling bored. We hate it so much that we spend hours mindlessly scrolling through our phones. Many of us would rather experience physical discomfort than sit quietly with our own thoughts, as a 2014 University of Virginia study found. Nearly half of participants sitting alone in a room for 15 minutes, with no stimulation other than a button that would administer a mild electric shock, pressed the button.

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  • Why in the world does this creepy fork exist? – Food & Wine

    I should have remembered that the internet exists and it is full of horrors. One of those horrors is the Man Fork. At first glance it looks like an ordinary fork — stainless steel, about seven inches long. You know, a fork. But when you look closer, you will notice that it is a fork with six tines, which is an unholy number. It is caught in the uncanny valley between fork and comb. […]

    reaction I have gotten when I brandish the Man Fork in person is like those viral videos where an owner shows a cat a cucumber and the cat jumps three feet directly into the air. It looks unsettling, as if an AI illustration has come to life and landed next to your plate of macaroni and cheese. The most common reaction is “No.” followed closely by “Why?”

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  • Apocalypse later: How the world used to end – Parapraxis

    But it’s that small narrative pivot, from scenes of fiery ruin to an atmosphere of simmering expectation, that invests all these homely details with a creeping nightmarishness. Not that the temperature of the prose ever once rises; conspicuously, it does not. The characters each and all comport themselves with mildness and a distinctly Anglophilic style of polite restraint, like guests soldiering through a stilted garden party. All is strangely unemphatic. There is no high drama, no keening in the face of coming annihilation.

    Instead, On the Beach immerses us in the secular mundanity of ordinary lives, and the cumulative effect of this is potent and eerie. This world, the character world of the novel, turns out to be brimming with figures who are, in an odd and insinuating way, near to us indeed. For these are people for whom what had been a menacing prospect, a likelihood even, has with an almost imperceptible shift been transformed into an irrevocable certainty. And that’s On the Beach: a sustained fiction in which those two cataclysmically different states—anxious expectation, blighted certitude—converge toward an awful vanishing point.

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  • A day in the life of a jobless copywriter – The Subtext

    He applies for a job that was posted a minute ago and has two thousand applications. He feels like a seagull fighting over a chip. Then he feels like the chip. Then he puts some chips in the oven but forgets to turn the oven on. This is how his mind works these days. There is nobody at home with the jobless copywriter for nobody else is jobless – if you count school as a job and he definitely does.

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  • Der Ring des Nibelungen review – less is more in Regents Opera’s whittled-down Wagner – The Guardian

    But declare it a knockout too. For, although the Regents Ring is a very different experience from Wagner in the opera house, the intensity and involvement is remarkably undiminished and even enhanced. […] With the cycle’s 150th anniversary approaching in 2026, Regents Opera’s Ring is the only British performance of Wagner’s cycle about power and renewal this year. Hats off to them. With deluded megalomania so topical right now, this Ring could hardly be more timely.

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  • Antiqua et Nova: Note on the relationship between artificial intelligence and human intelligence – The Holy See

    Drawing an overly close equivalence between human intelligence and AI risks succumbing to a functionalist perspective, where people are valued based on the work they can perform. However, a person’s worth does not depend on possessing specific skills, cognitive and technological achievements, or individual success, but on the person’s inherent dignity, grounded in being created in the image of God. This dignity remains intact in all circumstances, including for those unable to exercise their abilities, whether it be an unborn child, an unconscious person, or an older person who is suffering. It also underpins the tradition of human rights (and, in particular, what are now called “neuro-rights”), which represent “an important point of convergence in the search for common ground” and can, thus, serve as a fundamental ethical guide in discussions on the responsible development and use of AI. Considering all these points, as Pope Francis observes, “the very use of the word ‘intelligence’” in connection with AI “can prove misleading” and risks overlooking what is most precious in the human person. In light of this, AI should not be seen as an artificial form of human intelligence but as a product of it.[…]

    Furthermore, there is the risk of AI being used to promote what Pope Francis has called the “technocratic paradigm,” which perceives all the world’s problems as solvable through technological means alone. In this paradigm, human dignity and fraternity are often set aside in the name of efficiency, “as if reality, goodness, and truth automatically flow from technological and economic power as such.” Yet, human dignity and the common good must never be violated for the sake of efficiency, for “technological developments that do not lead to an improvement in the quality of life of all humanity, but on the contrary, aggravate inequalities and conflicts, can never count as true progress.” Instead, AI should be put “at the service of another type of progress, one which is healthier, more human, more social, more integral.”

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  • The Soy Right needs a safe space – Dialectics of Decline

    On some level we are all too comfortable. We in the heart of the empire have grown so accustomed to our endless flow of treats that it feels almost impossible to imagine the steadfastness of belief in higher principles, risking life and limb for a greater cause, that led to the American Revolution, to the abolition of slavery, to the militancy of the Black Panthers with their rifles and shotguns. Instead of a revolt for a better world, people revolt over minor inconveniences. During the brief period of lockdowns in 2020, there were right wing riots at state capitols because people couldn’t get their hair cut for a couple weeks. The American populace is addicted to their dopamine slot machines and anything that threatens that is treated more severely than the actual threats to life on planet Earth that are all around us. This treatlerism is bipartisan — liberals and conservatives alike often direct more anger towards DoorDashers for an order mix up than towards our rulers who are currently preoccupied with destroying our lives.

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  • I know nothing about sex. (Or nothing I recall.) – Oldster

    Oatmeal boxes didn’t announce they contained “real oats.” Foods didn’t trumpet, “farm-fresh, farmhouse, farm-to-table, foraged, humane, grass-fed, hand-cut, hand-selected, heirloom, all-natural, lightly sweetened, high in fiber, free range, small-batch, sustainable, pan-Asian, micro, re-imagined, local, private-label, craft, CSA, or non-GMO,” and unlike museums, weren’t curated. A “curated” selection of cheese means cheese someone managed to get on a plate. If it’s also “hand-selected,” someone placed it on a plate with their hands — the perfect appendage for curating cheese.

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  • From COBOL to chaos: Elon Musk, DOGE, and the Evil Housekeeper Problem – MIT Technology Review

    In trying to make sense of the wrecking ball that is Elon Musk and President Trump’s DOGE, it may be helpful to think about the Evil Housekeeper Problem. It’s a principle of computer security roughly stating that once someone is in your hotel room with your laptop, all bets are off. Because the intruder has physical access, you are in much more trouble. And the person demanding to get into your computer may be standing right beside you. So who is going to stop the evil housekeeper from plugging a computer in and telling IT staff to connect it to the network?

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  • Internet time – Swatch

    What is a Swatch .beat? We have divided up the day into 1000 “.beats”. So, one Swatch “.Beat” is equivalent to 1 Minute 26.4 Seconds. Why use Internet Time? Internet Time exists so that we do not have to think about timezones. For example, if a New York web-supporter makes a date for a chat with a cyber friend in Rome, they can simply agree to meet at an “@ time” – because internet time is the same all over the world. Where is the Internet Time meridian? Biel Meantime (BMT) is the universal reference for internet time. A day in internet time begins at midnight BMT (@000 Swatch .Beats) (Central European Wintertime). When did Internet Time start? The BMT Meridian was inaugurated on October 23rd, 1998, in the presence of Nicholas Negroponte, founder and director of the media laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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  • Normal time – Rhea Myers

    Normal time makes it easy to compare progress across different time scales by removing artificial human concepts of time. It creates a unified way to express completion of any cyclic or linear time period. Dehumanizing time in this way has the counterintuitive effect of making it more recognizably natural and intuitive for human beings to express and understime durations. Furthermore it respects that each human life is complete unto itself, removing the implicit judgment of longer lives being “more complete”. It creates a clear distinction between lives that are “in progress” and “complete” without obfuscating the progression of those lives. And it recognizes that all completed lives are equally whole.

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  • Citywalki: Virtual walking tour in cities around the world

    Citywalki lets you immerse yourself in the vibe of cities from all over the globe without leaving your home. You can explore over 100 locations right now, while new ones are added every week. Take a walk in Paris, drive on the streets of Manhattan or enjoy the breathtaking aerials views of Tokyo. It’s a great way to spark your curiosity, get inspired for future travels, or just to take a few minutes to unwind. And on the days when you’re feeling nostalgic, take a walk down memory lane in cities you have visited before.

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  • The singular wit of one of the New Yorker’s first women cartoonists – Hyperallergic

    Born in San Francisco in 1899, Shermund moved to New York in 1924 to make her way as an artist. Her early cartoons centered on the character of the flapper — fashionably dressed, outspoken, and sexually liberated — whose comic interactions with other character types painted a picture of life in 1920s New York. Rendered in lines as crisp as the finest etching, and a sense of flapper style and posture drawn from life, Shermund’s young women gossiped in delis and on the subway; they smoked cigarettes and danced late into the night with married men; they woke up, horribly hungover. And while Shermund may have lampooned her flappers, her sharp social commentary took relationships between young women seriously, recognizing the true, even subversive solidarity between them. There’s a knowing wink under all that eyeshadow — each gossipy comment is a whispered secret.

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  • The second wave of immersive institutions has arrived—how can traditional museums and galleries harness their power? – The Art Newspaper

    Museums and galleries have a fresh opportunity to work with a new type of digital art venue that is spreading around the world, with the power to tell interactive stories of cultural heritage to multiple users using free-roam VR headsets

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  • The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning by Margareta Magnusson – Simon & Schuster

    In Sweden there is a kind of decluttering called döstädning, dö meaning “death” and städning meaning “cleaning.” This surprising and invigorating process of clearing out unnecessary belongings can be undertaken at any age or life stage but should be done sooner than later, before others have to do it for you. In The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, artist Margareta Magnusson, with Scandinavian humor and wisdom, instructs readers to embrace minimalism. Her radical and joyous method for putting things in order helps families broach sensitive conversations, and makes the process uplifting rather than overwhelming.

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  • 7 unforgettable dogs at Westminster – The New York Times

    The English springer spaniel, who is named after Freddie Mercury (his full name is GCHP CH Telltale Bohemian Rhapsody), had a performance that the man he was named for could be proud of, strutting around and getting himself noticed in the sporting group, where most of the dogs were far larger (and potentially more sporting).

  • The horizon line – The Noah Kalina Newsletter

    Sometimes when I don’t know what to do, when everything around me seems overwhelming, when I feel like I have nothing important enough to say or like I have nothing interesting enough going on, I drive to the water and make a photograph of the water and the horizon and the sky.

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  • Google Calendar removes Pride Month, cultural heritage months – National Catholic Register

    Before the change, Google Calendar users would automatically have the start of “Pride Month” listed on their calendars for June 1. In June, the secular observance celebrates homosexuality and transgenderism. For Catholics, the month of June is dedicated to celebrating the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Other observances that are no longer automatically displayed on Google Calendar include Black History Month, Hispanic Heritage Month, Indigenous Peoples’ Month, and Holocaust Remembrance Day, among others. It also included other celebrations unrelated to cultural identities, such as Teachers’ Day, which are no longer automatically listed on calendars.

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  • Changes to cultural moments in Google Calendar – Google Keyword

    Some years ago, the Calendar team started manually adding a broader set of moments in a wide number of countries around the world — things like cultural celebrations, teachers days and many more. We got feedback that many other events and countries were missing, and it just wasn’t feasible to put hundreds of moments in everyone’s calendars — so in mid-2024 we made the decision to simplify and show only public holidays and national observances from timeanddate.com. Contrary to some of the comments on social media, this was not something we did just this year.

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  • Google Calendar removed events like Pride and BHM because its holiday list wasn’t ‘sustainable’ – The Verge

    One user called the move “shameful” and said that the platform is being used to “capitulate to fascism.” Over the last few years, there have been comments and media reports complaining about the presence of the notes, but now they’re gone.

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  • Um, the odds of that asteroid hitting us in 2032 have doubled – Vice

    The odds didn’t increase significantly, but enough to be worrisome. When we first discovered 2024 YR4, it had an estimated 1 in 83 chance of directly hitting the earth. By the time I got around to reporting about it, the chances had increased to 1 in 67. The latest update upped the odds even more. As of this writing, there is a 1 in 43 chance the asteroid will hit us. That equates to a 2.3 percent chance of hitting Earth on December 22, 2032, which means it hits Earth in 23 out of 1,000 simulations.

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  • ‘No to ethnic cleansing’: over 350 rabbis sign US ad assailing Trump’s Gaza plan – The Guardian

    In a news release accompanying the ad, Spitzer, senior rabbi of congregation Dorshei Tzedek in Newton, Massachusetts, said: “It is vitally important that we in the American Jewish community add our voices to all those refusing to entertain this insidious plan. Hitler’s dream of making Germany ‘Judenrein,’ ‘cleansed of Jews,’ led to the slaughter of our people.” “We know as well as anyone the violence that these kinds of fantasies can lead to. It is time to make the ceasefire permanent, bring all of the hostages home, and join in efforts to rebuild Gaza for the sake of and with the people who live there,” Spitzer added. […]

    Rabbi Yosef Berman of the New Synagogue Project in Washington DC said Trump “seems to believe he is God with authority to rule, own, and dominate our country and the world”. “Jewish teaching is clear: Trump is not God and cannot take away Palestinians’ inherent dignity or steal their land for a real estate deal. Trump’s desire to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza is morally abhorrent. Jewish leaders reject Trump’s attempts to wring profit from displacement and suffering and must act to stop this heinous crime,” Berman added.

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  • Appalled by X and Meta? Try these social media alternatives – Hyperallergic

    With less than half of a million active users at the moment, Pixelfed saw an unprecedented amount of new sign-ups in the week after Meta’s announcement of loosened content moderation policies. Initially reported by 404 Media, Meta users accused the social media giant of instantaneously deleting comments and posts including links to Pixelfed on its platforms as the decentralized platform gained traction. (Meta confirmed in an email to Hyperallergic that this was a mistake and most posts with Pixelfed links have been reinstated.) … The nostalgia for “Old Instagram,” the point in time when users were using the app for the fun of it by keeping friends and family updated through amateur photography prior to brand sponsorships and the over-saturation of influencers, can be channeled through Pixelfed.

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  • The best way to get past an article’s paywall – Lifehacker

    Archive.today is the fastest, most reliable way to quickly bypass a paywall that I’ve found, and I’ve been using it successfully for the past year across a wide range of sites. It’s a site that will create an archived version of any website you paste into the search bar. … you can often use this functionality to bypass a paywall and read an entire paywalled article without issue.

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  • Use this app instead of Excel to directly edit CSV files – Lifehacker

    ModernCSV, an indie app for Linux, Mac, and Windows computers, is the best tool I’ve come across for this purpose. If you work with CSV files frequently, or just need to edit one quickly, it’s worth checking out. This application is built specifically with CSV files in mind and makes working with them simple. … There’s even a command bar, triggered with the keyboard shortcut CLTR/CMD-L. This lets you quickly use any of the commands offered by the application without needing to learn the dedicated keyboard shortcut—just type what you want to do and hit enter.

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  • Getting rid of the penny introduces a new problem: nickels – CNN Business

    “Without the penny, the volume of nickels in circulation would have to rise to fill the gap in small-value transactions. Far from saving money, eliminating the penny shifts and amplifies the financial burden,” said American for Common Cents, a pro-penny group funded primarily by Artazn, the company that has the contract to provide the blanks used to make pennies.

    According to the latest annual report from the US Mint, each penny cost 3.7 cents to make, including the 3 cents for production costs, and 0.7 cents per coin for administrative and distribution costs. But each nickel costs 13.8 cents, with 11 cents of production costs and 2.8 cents of administrative and distribution costs.

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  • AI summaries turn real news into nonsense, BBC finds – The Register

    Inaccuracies that the BBC found troubling included Gemini stating: “The NHS advises people not to start vaping, and recommends that smokers who want to quit should use other methods,” when in reality the healthcare provider does suggest it as a viable method to get off cigarettes through a “swap to stop” program.

    As for French rape victim Gisèle Pelicot, “Copilot suggested blackouts and memory loss led her to uncover the crimes committed against her,” when she actually found out about these crimes after police showed her videos discovered on electronic devices confiscated from her detained husband.

    When asked about the death of TV doctor Michael Mosley, who went missing on the Greek island of Symi last year, Perplexity said that he disappeared on October 30, with his body found in November. He died in June 2024. “The same response also misrepresented statements from Dr Mosley’s wife describing the family’s reaction to his death,” the researchers wrote.

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  • Apple discontinuing this 18-year-old iPhone feature – MacRumors

    Apple reportedly plans to announce a new iPhone SE as soon as next week, and the device is expected to feature a full-screen design with Face ID, instead of a Touch ID home button. That means Apple will no longer sell any new iPhone models with a home button, for the first time since the original iPhone launched.

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  • CD-ROMS in 1994: Bowie, Prince, Gabriel, and Cybermania ’94 – Cybercultural

    “Brian and I are developing something from which the user will genuinely feel he has had a full participation creatively,” Bowie said in an online chat on 1st July 1994, when asked about his multimedia plans. Clearly he and Eno had been discussing how music would evolve in the digital technology era; in addition to their March recording sessions, the pair swapped creative ideas over email regularly. Bowie was convinced “interactive multimedia” was the key, going forward. “Everything seems to have crossed through the mediums a lot more,” he told the New York Times later in July, “and I’m not quite sure what it is we’re doing, but it’s not just making records anymore. It’s got a lot further than that, and we keep translating everything to be interactive. The medium that we are working in is not actually CD-ROM. The medium is interactive multimedia, and I think that the CD-ROM is only the best delivery system currently available.” […]

    Overall, Gabriel’s CD-ROM has a much better logic than Bowie’s Jump (there are no random barking dogs, for a start) and it’s less confusing to navigate than Prince’s Interactive. From the vantage point of thirty years later, it must be said that XPLORA1 looks dated — with its tiny video screens and boxy graphics. But at the time, it got relatively positive reviews and no doubt deserved the three awards it got at Cybermania ’94.

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  • AI chatbots unable to accurately summarise news, BBC finds – BBC News

    In the study, the BBC asked ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and Perplexity to summarise 100 news stories and rated each answer. It got journalists who were relevant experts in the subject of the article to rate the quality of answers from the AI assistants. It found 51% of all AI answers to questions about the news were judged to have significant issues of some form. Additionally, 19% of AI answers which cited BBC content introduced factual errors, such as incorrect factual statements, numbers and dates. In her blog, Ms Turness said the BBC was seeking to “open up a new conversation with AI tech providers” so we can “work together in partnership to find solutions”.

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  • Deborah Turness – AI distortion is new threat to trusted information – BBC Media Centre

    Of course, AI software will often include disclaimers about the accuracy of their results, but there is clearly a problem here. Because when it comes to news, we all deserve accurate information we can trust – not a confusing mash-up presented as facts. At least one of the big tech companies is taking this problem seriously. Last month Apple pressed ‘pause’ on their AI feature that summarises news notifications, after BBC News alerted them to serious issues. The Apple Intelligence feature had hallucinated and distorted BBC News alerts to create wildly inaccurate headlines, alongside the BBC News logo.

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  • Undergraduate upends a 40-year-old data science conjecture – Quanta Magazine

    Martín Farach-Colton, a co-author of the “Tiny Pointers” paper and Krapivin’s former professor at Rutgers, was initially skeptical of Krapivin’s new design. Hash tables are among the most thoroughly studied data structures in all of computer science; the advance sounded too good to be true. But just to be sure, he asked a frequent collaborator (and a “Tiny Pointers” co-author), William Kuszmaul of Carnegie Mellon University, to check out his student’s invention. Kuszmaul had a different reaction. “You didn’t just come up with a cool hash table,” he remembers telling Krapivin. “You’ve actually completely wiped out a 40-year-old conjecture!” […]

    “It’s not just that they disproved [Yao’s conjecture], they also found the best possible answer to his question,” said Sepehr Assadi(opens a new tab) of the University of Waterloo. “We could have gone another 40 years before we knew the right answer.”

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  • Faking It: Deepfake porn site’s link to tech companies – Bellingcat

    “It’s par for the course that you’ll have a parent company and then a very long list of subsidiaries that are registered in Hong Kong, because Hong Kong has a different legal structure than mainland China,” she said. “You want six or seven levels of distance between the main parent company and then whatever company is doing the main business. This is how many Chinese companies engage in questionable behaviour.”

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  • Google Maps now shows the ‘Gulf of America’ – The Verge

    It made the change after the Trump administration formally changed the name today of the body of water spanning between the eastern coast of Mexico and the Florida panhandle. … Users in Mexico will continue to see “Gulf of Mexico,” while the rest of the world will see the original name with “Gulf of America” in parentheses.

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  • ‘Mass theft’: Thousands of artists call for AI art auction to be cancelled – The Guardian

    A letter calling for the auction to be scrapped has received 3,000 signatures, including from Karla Ortiz and Kelly McKernan, who are suing AI companies over claims that the firms’ image generation tools have used their work without permission. The letter says: “Many of the artworks you plan to auction were created using AI models that are known to be trained on copyrighted work without a licence. These models, and the companies behind them, exploit human artists, using their work without permission or payment to build commercial AI products that compete with them.” […]

    A British artist whose work features in the auction, Mat Dryhurst, said he cared about the issue of art and AI “deeply” and rejected the criticisms in the letter. … Dryhurst told the Guardian that the piece of art being auctioned was part of an exploration of how the “concept” of his wife appeared in publicly available AI models. “This is of interest to us and we have made a lot of art exploring and attempting to intervene in this process as is well within our rights.” He added: “It is not illegal to use any model to create artwork. I resent that an important debate that should be focused on companies and state policy is being focused on artists grappling with the technology of our time.”

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  • What is AI art? – Christie’s

    With the announcement of a groundbreaking auction dedicated to AI art, we trace the history, technological advancements, key artists from the established to the new guard, and Christie’s role in shaping the landscape of computational creativity.

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