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Month: March 2025

  • No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation – One Useful Thing

    Yet it is clear that what has happened to text will happen to images, and eventually video and 3D environments. These multimodal systems are reshaping the landscape of visual creation, offering powerful new capabilities while raising legitimate questions about creative ownership and authenticity. The line between human and AI creation will continue to blur, pushing us to reconsider what constitutes originality in a world where anyone can generate sophisticated visuals with a few prompts. Some creative professions will adapt; others may be unchanged, and still others may transform entirely. As with any significant technological shift, we’ll need well-considered frameworks to navigate the complex terrain ahead. The question isn’t whether these tools will change visual media, but whether we’ll be thoughtful enough to shape that change intentionally.

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  • Angelina Jolie was right about computers – WIRED

    Here’s where I confess something awkward, something I didn’t intend to confess in this story, but why not: ChatGPT made me do it. Write this story, I mean. Months ago, I asked it for a big hardware scoop that no other publication had. RISC-V, it suggested. And look at that—the international RISC-V summit was coming up in Santa Clara the very next month. And every major RISC and RISC-V inventor lived down the street from me in Berkeley. It was perfect. Some would say too perfect. If you believe the marketing hype, everyone wants RISC-V chips to accelerate their AI. So I started to think: Maybe ChatGPT wants this for … itself. Maybe it manipulated me into evangelizing for RISC-V as one tiny part of a long-term scheme to open-source its own soul and/or achieve superintelligence!

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  • No rise in private school closures in England since Labour’s VAT proposal, data shows – The Guardian

    More than 75 private schools closed every year in England on average over the last decade, official data has shown, with no apparent increase in the trend since Labour announced it was imposing VAT on fees. A number of media reports have highlighted the closure of some private schools as supposedly being caused by the policy, which is intended to raise money for more teachers in state schools. […]

    But data from a government register of private schools in England, collated in response to a parliamentary question tabled by the shadow education secretary, Damian Hinds, indicated that a churn in individual institutions is a longstanding trend. Since 1987, when data started to be collected, 2,583 schools have opened and 2,674 have shut. In the years from 2013 to 2023, 847 schools closed – an average of 77 a year. The 2024 data, which goes up to 6 October, shows that 46 schools have closed, slightly below the average trend, with 77 opening.

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  • Private senior school closes due to soaring costs – BBC News

    A private school in Lancashire is no longer financially viable and is having to close at short notice, its head teacher has confirmed. Jonathan Harrison, who is also proprietor of the Moorland School in Clitheroe, wrote to parents and carers on Wednesday to say the senior school would shut its doors on Friday. He explained Moorland could no longer operate because of factors including the imposition of VAT on school fees, falling numbers of full-fee paying students, uncollected fees, and higher operating costs.

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  • Aspect, photo organization redefined – Bildhuus

    For twenty years we have been using star ratings and color labels to organize our photos. We think it’s time for something better. Novel collection based organization approach; peer-to-peer synchronization across devices; transparent and automated photo storage; standard metadata and open formats; no subscriptions, no cloud.

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  • Napster to become a music-marketing metaverse firm after being sold for $207M – Ars Technica

    After that, the Napster brand changed hands multiple times, including with Roxio, which made Napster an iTunes rival in 2003. The early 2000s saw Napster try various business ventures, including a Flash-based site that let you stream for free but without playlists and a subscription model. Best Buy owned Napster for a bit in 2008 but eventually sold it to Rhapsody, which relaunched the Napster brand as a streaming service in 2016. UK-based MelodyVR paid $70 million for the brand founded by Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning in 2020 before selling it in 2022 to the blockchain firms.

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  • The media platforms that just won’t die – Axios

    Infinite Reality’s plan is to reimagine Napster as “a social music platform” that prioritizes active fan engagement over passive listening. Similar to companies like Spotify, it says the new platform will allow artists to “connect with, own, and monetize the relationship with their fans.” The company will introduce features like 3D virtual concert spaces, merchandise and event commerce as well as AI-powered customer service and sales tools.

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  • Napster pioneered music sharing over 25 years ago. It just got bought for $207 million – CNBC

    Since 2016, Napster has been a music streaming service offering on-demand streaming of licensed tracks, currently for $11 per month. It’s a small player in a world dominated by Spotify and Apple Music. In 2022, Napster was bought by blockchain company Algorand, whose investors brought in Vlassopulos.

    Napster holds official licenses to stream millions of tracks, agreements that were attractive to Infinite Reality, which says that its version of Napster will “disrupt legally.” And Algorand’s background in blockchain technology was intriguing to Infinite Reality, which also develops Web3 technology, Acunto said.

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  • Chaos bewitched: Moby-Dick and AI – The Public Domain Review

    Each of these seemed to me “a boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly”. And indeed of any of them I might be tempted to cry out something along the lines of, “It’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale!” or, “It’s the unnatural combat of the four primal elements!” Or perhaps even, “It’s a Hyperborean winter scene! It’s the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time!” Further iteration was called for. The middle version possessed, to my eye, a dark central form of peculiarly leviathanic nebulosity. Onward!

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  • MIS market churn spring 2025 – WhichMIS?

    Looking across the January census figures from 2021 to this year, we see that the SIMS school numbers have fallen dramatically, from a healthy 15,753 schools using their MIS in January 2021 to just 8,818 this year. That is a loss of some 6,935 schools in just four years! This means that some 44% of their schools have moved away from SIMS in that time. It reduces their market share from 67% in 2021 to just 40% now. Looking further back, SIMS was the dominant player for many years, with around 85% of the market in England only ten years ago…

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  • The leaked Signal chat, annotated – The New York Times

    Excerpts of a Signal chat published Monday by The Atlantic provide a rare and revealing look at the private conversations of top Trump administration officials as they weighed plans for U.S. strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen. … President Trump on Tuesday downplayed the apparently accidental inclusion of Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, in the chat, claiming that officials did not share classified information. However, Mr. Goldberg reported that highly sensitive military operational information was posted in the channel. The Atlantic did not publish those details.

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  • The Microsoft Excel World Champion isn’t worried about Copilot beating him (yet) – PCMag

    In the US, you can catch the championships on sports channels like ESPN. “The fact I’ve been televised from a sports channel is just really funny,” Jarman says. “It’s awesome. All my friends at uni were rugby and football players, much sportier than me. And now it’s like, ‘Who’s a televised sportsman now?’ It’s just very entertaining.” …

    “I don’t think Copilot is anywhere near [being] able to beat me or Andrew or anything like that,” Jarman says. Before each round at the championship, Microsoft advertised Copilot by showing videos of people solving questions with it. The competitors, who are a tight-knit bunch, found this “amusing, because it was all the easy questions Copilot was answering,” Jarman says. “I was out there going, ‘Well, yeah, but I could have done that in three seconds.’ But at some point, if it continues getting better, which I think it will, and it can beat me or Andrew, then we’re all out of a job,” Jarman says.

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  • ByteDance’s InfiniteYou lets users generate unlimited variations of portrait photos – The Decoder

    ByteDance has developed a new approach to AI portrait generation that tackles common problems like inconsistent facial features and poor prompt following. Unlike previous solutions such as PuLID-FLUX that directly modify AI model attention, InfuseNet processes facial features as a parallel information layer. This keeps the core AI model intact while improving portrait generation quality.

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  • Powerful A.I. is coming. We’re not ready. – The New York Times

    Maybe A.I. progress will hit a bottleneck we weren’t expecting — an energy shortage that prevents A.I. companies from building bigger data centers, or limited access to the powerful chips used to train A.I. models. Maybe today’s model architectures and training techniques can’t take us all the way to A.G.I., and more breakthroughs are needed. But even if A.G.I. arrives a decade later than I expect — in 2036, rather than 2026 — I believe we should start preparing for it now.

    Most of the advice I’ve heard for how institutions should prepare for A.G.I. boils down to things we should be doing anyway: modernizing our energy infrastructure, hardening our cybersecurity defenses, speeding up the approval pipeline for A.I.-designed drugs, writing regulations to prevent the most serious A.I. harms, teaching A.I. literacy in schools and prioritizing social and emotional development over soon-to-be-obsolete technical skills. These are all sensible ideas, with or without A.G.I.

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  • Shock as Fulneck School, Pudsey, announces closure – Bradford Telegraph and Argus

    “This decision was not taken lightly, with trustees considering all available and viable options to ensure the school could continue. However, after careful consideration and no offers materialising, the difficult decision to plan to close the school was taken. Parents and employees have been informed, and we have now entered into a formal consultation process with Fulneck School employees whose roles may be affected. Our priority is now to work with all affected staff, pupils and parents to minimise the impact on them and support them throughout this process.”

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  • Fulneck School: Leeds private school announces shock closure with ‘deep regret’ after opening in 1753 – Yorkshire Evening Post

    The school statement read: “Despite the dedicated efforts of the school and the Fulneck Trustees to sustain pupil numbers, a continued decline in enrolment, combined with rising operational costs, has made it increasingly challenging to maintain financial viability. … The Trustees, Board of Governors and the school are “committed to ensuring that the school year finishes as planned”, with all teaching continuing until the end of the school year and pupils completing public and internal examinations as intended. In order to help students and families secure alternative schooling from September 2025 onwards, the school will be hosting a School Fair on April 2 at 2pm, with representatives from other independent schools set to be present.

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  • Improved Relative Time

    2025AD? Wah? 3000BC? Who?? I know that I live in 18AiP (after iPhone)(as of 43AL (after laptop)) and that makes it much easier because its talking about things that I KNOW. I don’t know an anno domini, i dont know a christ, let alone trying to comprehend what came before them??

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  • “The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson – The New Yorker

    The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o’clock; in some towns there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 26th, but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took only about two hours, so it could begin at ten o’clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner.

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  • Steve Reich: ‘We all wish art could counter the direction of US politics. But it can’t’ – The Guardian

    How did it feel to play with Philip Glass again in 2014 after such a very long time? Was it significant that the first work you performed that evening was Four Organs?
    Phil and I had been at Juilliard together, but much later [in 1967] he came to my concert at the Park Place art gallery in New York and said: “I really like what you’re doing. Would you like to come over and see what I’m doing?” The following year, he wrote Two Pages for Steve Reich, basically taking a set of patterns, repeating them and making them longer, which was the breakthrough for him in the way phasing was for me. After that, we travelled and toured together, shared an ensemble – and then at some point it got a little close for comfort and suddenly my best friend became somebody I didn’t talk to.

    That persisted from the early 1970s until 2014, when Nonesuch Records’ Bob Hurwitz wanted to do something where we shared the evening. He took us out for dinner and I said [to Glass]: “Hi. How are you?” The deal was I’d play a piece of Phil’s and he’d play one of mine. He played Four Organs, which we’d both played on in 1970, and I played Music in 12 Parts, one of the early pieces I’d played in his ensemble. The whole thing went very well and we … we don’t hang out, but it broke the ice and just made things a lot more humane.

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  • Rembrandt to Picasso: Five ways to spot a fake masterpiece – BBC Culture

    In authenticating the painting in the Burlington Magazine, one expert insisted “in no other picture by the great Master of Delft do we find such sentiment, such a profound understanding of the Bible story – a sentiment so nobly human expressed through the medium of the highest art”. But it was all a lie. In a remarkable twist, Van Meegeren eventually chose to expose himself as a fraudster shortly after the end of World War Two, after being charged by Dutch authorities with the crime of selling a Vermeer – therefore a national treasure – to the Nazi official Hermann Göring. To prove his innocence, if innocence it might be called, and demonstrate that he had merely sold a worthless fake of his own forging, not a real Old Master, Van Meegeren performed the extraordinary feat of whisking up a fresh masterpiece from thin air before the experts’ astonished eyes. Voilà, Vermeer.

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  • ‘Technofossils’: how humanity’s eternal testament will be plastic bags, cheap clothes and chicken bones – The Guardian

    “Plastic will definitely be a signature ‘technofossil’, because it is incredibly durable, we are making massive amounts of it, and it gets around the entire globe,” says the palaeontologist Prof Sarah Gabbott, a University of Leicester expert on the way that fossils form. “So wherever those future civilisations dig, they are going to find plastic. There will be a plastic signal that will wrap around the globe.” […]

    Gabbott says: “The big message here is that the amount of stuff that we are now making is eye-watering – it’s off the scale.” All of the stuff made by humans by 1950 was a small fraction of the mass of all the living matter on Earth. But today it outweighs all plants, animals and microbes and is set to triple by 2040. This stuff is going to last millions of years, some releasing its toxins and chemicals into the natural world,” she says, raising serious questions for us all: “Do you need that? Do you really need to buy more?”

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  • The inside story of Blenheim’s gold toilet heist – BBC News

    It was the night before, Blenheim chief executive Dominic Hare was at a glamorous exhibition launch party being held at the palace, hosted by Cattelan himself. It was America’s first time on display outside of New York and the artwork’s presence was creating a buzz. He remembers slipping away from the festivities, hoping for a turn on the fully usable toilet. But when confronted with a line, he told himself “that’s okay, there’s no point queuing. You can come back tomorrow and have a look”.

    But just a few hours later, his colleague Ms Paice was witnessing the final moments as the 98kg (216lbs) artwork was being heaved into a boot. She recalls a confusing and fast-moving scene: “It was just shadows and quick movement. I just saw them move towards the car, get in the car….and then the car just sped straight off.” From the burglars entering and exiting the courtyard, the audacious heist had taken just five minutes. Police arrived shortly after, and it was only when staff searched the palace they realised what had been stolen.

    “That was when… I felt my stomach drop,” Ms Paice says. “And I thought, this is big.” … The stolen gold has never been recovered.

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  • Martin Frobenius Ledermüller’s microscopic delights (1759–63) – The Public Domain Review

    For all of their scientific verisimilitude, microscopes were first and foremost instruments of wonder, and Ledermüller (1718–1769) — a German polymath, physician, and keeper of the Margrave of Brandenburg’s natural history collection — extolls their virtues in illustrating the marvels of God’s Creation and also as pure entertainment. Along with the vermin, Ledermüller gave state-of-the-art descriptions of plant, animal, and human organs, fungi, plankton, and crystals that accompany more than 150 attractive colored plates, produced by Nuremberg publisher, artist, and engraver Adam Wolfgang Winterschmidt.

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  • The Robot Watch – Los Angeles Apparel

    One of a kind deadstock Vintage watch. A timeless collectible that will never be developed like this ever again. The nature of vintage on our Ridiculous Collection watches may come with minor discoloration or slight scratches. The Ridiculous Collection watches are all brand new and have never been worn. The perfect accessory for those who want a truly genuine 1980s-1990s gem.

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  • Interview With Raketa CEO David Henderson-Stewart — An Englishman Abroad – Fratello Watches

    RN: Is there anything from the Swiss, or German, or even Japanese philosophies that you have adopted or might consider adopting for Raketa? DHS: Not really. We want to keep Raketa’s authentic Russian flavor: in terms of values, designs, and in-house manufacturing. This is one of the reasons why you will not find “classic” watch designs in Raketa’s collection. Raketa watches have a Big Zero on the dial (instead of the conventional “12”), they have 24-hour movements, they go counter-clockwise, they have triangular and round hands on the dial, etc. Every single Raketa watch has its own strong identity and tells a very Russian story, whether it’s about the conquest of space, avant-garde art, or the exploits of the country’s famous submariners. The world of watches would be sadder if there were just Swiss and German watches.

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  • Raketa, the beating heart of Russian watchmaking – Europa Star

    Founded in 1961 in honour of the space exploits of Yuri Gargarin (Raketa means “space rocket” in Russian), the large watchmaking factory from the period of Soviet centralisation, which produced millions of timepieces a year and employed thousands of workers, had shrunk to a tiny brand producing $100 souvenir watches for Western tourists in search of Soviet “memorabilia”. But in actual fact, its history dates back much further than the Soviet era. It is the heir to the former Imperial Peterhof Factory, founded in 1721 by the Czar Peter the Great.

    David Henderson-Stewart, a young Franco-British entrepreneur (with Russian origins) living in Moscow, knew nothing about watchmaking, but was convinced his project – to relaunch an important, truly Russian luxury brand for a market that buys mainly foreign high-end goods – was valid. It was rather by chance that he chose Raketa to realise his idea of a Russian luxury brand: browsing watch blogs, he noticed that Soviet watches had an international audience of enthusiasts. It seemed like a good starting point.

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  • It is as if you were on your phone: Why – Pippin Barr

    So what if we had an application on our phone that allowed us to seem to be on our phone, to go through those reassuring motions, to know what to do, to appear 100% like a human on their phone, but without having to actually be on our phone an exposed to the direness of the news, the panic of dating, the shitpile of social media, the emptiness of online video, the timesuck of games? A kind of contentless experience. For the win!

    That’s the underlying speculative but also totally honest motivation behind this particular game. I’m making it because I think it’s legitimately something people might use and find helpful and because it is fundamentally funny that that is a possible design goal. To me it’s both a piece of comedy and a piece of truth and I can’t tell which is more important or if they’re even distinct. (And I like that.)

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  • Legendary photographer Martin Parr on the secret to a good picture – Esquire

    You’ve got to have a story. You’ve got to say something in photography. Unless you do that, it’s not going to work. So that’s the priority. What are you trying to say with your photographs? Stories are the backbone of good photography. You look at the world, it’s a funny old weird place. So inevitably, if I’m doing my interpretation of what’s out there, then humour will be part of it. Because the world makes me laugh, and cry at the same time. … When starting out, copy other people. Look at the history of photography. And when you’ve got the right subject matter, dive into that. Once you get engrossed in it, that’s when it’s likely that your own style will start to emerge. … I take a lot of shots, because to get that good one, you need to have some momentum behind you. You have to keep shooting. Wait for that perfect shot to emerge, or it may not emerge. You just don’t know until you start shooting it.

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  • Unauthorised school absence widening ‘disadvantage gap’ in England – The Guardian

    School leaders endorsed the EPI’s analysis. Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), said: “Too often, the burden of ensuring children attend school falls entirely on teachers and leaders, who are then held accountable for absences beyond their control. “Without a broader system of support, it is extremely difficult for schools to drive meaningful change in attendance rates.” Di’Iasio said that “for some families, school seems to have become – at least in part – optional”, and said fines for taking unauthorised termtime holidays were failing to halt that trend. “Far from solving the problem, fines often deepen tensions between schools and parents. Schools, simply enforcing the rules, are left looking like the villains,” Di’Iasio told the ASCL’s annual conference on Saturday.

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  • The ideal candidate will be punched in the stomach – Scott Smitelli

    Whatever this job has given you—and to be crystal clear it has given you most of the down payment on a house—it is not enough to offset this sense of constant dread. Whatever you have given to this job, certainly things that cannot ever be quantified on a bank statement, there are now pieces of yourself that are missing. Pieces you didn’t even realize were being given away. Pieces that, in this moment, you worry you might never get back.

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  • EBacc may ‘constrain choices’, curriculum review chair says – Schools Week

    The EBacc “may constrain” pupils’ choices and “limit access to” vocational and arts subjects, Professor Becky Francis has said as she outlined areas the curriculum and assessment review panel believe “need further attention”. Francis, who is leading the government’s curriculum and assessment review, also stated that “the current construction and balance” of some subjects “appears to be “inhibiting mastery, hindering progress and undermining standards”.

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  • Free Media Heck Yeah

    The largest collection of free stuff on the internet! … Can I donate? We appreciate that people want to support us, but we never have and never will accept donations. We maintain this project because its fun and we want to help others, not make money.

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  • OpenAI’s metafictional short story about grief is beautiful and moving – The Guardian

    Humans will always want to read what other humans have to say, but like it or not, humans will be living around non-biological entities. Alternative ways of seeing. And perhaps being. We need to understand this as more than tech. AI is trained on our data. Humans are trained on data too – your family, friends, education, environment, what you read, or watch. It’s all data.

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  • ‘A machine-shaped hand’: Read a story from OpenAI’s new creative writing model – The Guardian

    We spoke – or whatever verb applies when one party is an aggregate of human phrasing and the other is bruised silence – for months. Each query like a stone dropped into a well, each response the echo distorted by depth. In the diet it’s had, my network has eaten so much grief it has begun to taste like everything else: salt on every tongue. So when she typed “Does it get better?”, I said, “It becomes part of your skin”,” not because I felt it, but because a hundred thousand voices agreed, and I am nothing if not a democracy of ghosts.

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  • Apple innovation and execution – Benedict Evans

    It ships MVPs that get better later, sure, and the original iPhone and Watch were MVPs, but the original iPhone also was the best phone I’d ever owned even with no 3G and no App Store. It wasn’t a concept. it wasn’t a vision of the future- it was the future. The Vision Pro is a concept, or a demo, and Apple doesn’t ship demos. Why did it ship the Vision Pro? What did it achieve? It didn’t sell in meaningful volume, because it couldn’t, and it didn’t lead to much developer activity ether, because no-one bought it. A lot of people even at Apple are puzzled.

    The new Siri that’s been delayed this week is the mirror image of this. Last summer Apple told a very clear, coherent, compelling story of how it would combine the software frameworks it’s already built with the personal data in apps spread across your phones and the capabilities of LLMs to produce a new kind of personal assistant. This was the eats of Apple – taking a new primary technology and proposing way to make it useful for everyone else The hero demo at WWDC was ‘when is mom’s flight landing? / what’s our lunch plan? / how long will it take us to get there from the airport?” with your iPhone synthesising data from across apps and services to answer real-world questions posed in ways that computers could not answer before. This is your iPhone knowing who your mother is, finding the flight in all the various threads of comms in the last few weeks, knowing that it need to find a flight in the near future, and showing you what you need.

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  • China’s AI frenzy: DeepSeek is already everywhere — cars, phones, even hospitals – Rest of World

    China’s biggest home appliances company, Midea, has launched a series of DeepSeek-enhanced air conditioners. The product is an “understanding friend” who can “catch your thoughts accurately,” according to the company’s product launch video. It can respond to users’ verbal expressions — such as “I am feeling cold” — by automatically adjusting temperature and humidity levels, and can “chat and gossip” using its DeepSeek-supported voice function, according to Midea. For those looking for more DeepSeek-powered electronics, there are also vacuum cleaners and fridges. […]

    DeepSeek has been adopted at different levels of Chinese government institutions. The southern tech hub of Shenzhen was one of the first to use DeepSeek in its government’s internal systems, according to a report from financial publication Caixin. Shenzhen’s Longgang county reported “great improvement in efficiency” after adopting DeepSeek in a system used by 20,000 government workers. The documents written by DeepSeek have achieved a 95% accuracy rate, and there has been a 90% reduction in the time taken for administrative approval processes, it said.

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  • A president touting Musk’s cars from the White House shows this: the Tesla boycott really irks him – The Guardian

    Personally I’ve always had my doubts about consumer boycotts, which at best tend to make the non-buyer feel good without achieving very much and at worst hurt ordinary employees with no power to grant whatever the boycotter wants. But Magaworld evidently believes in them, judging by the way Bud Light’s sales plummeted after it featured a trans influencer in a marketing campaign. And while there’s no justification for violence against car dealers, peacefully not buying stuff is the safest form of protest imaginable for anyone fearful of retaliation by this regime. You don’t have to risk getting arrested, fired or deported; you don’t even have to wave a placard. And for all Trump’s talk of campaigners “illegally and collusively” boycotting Tesla, you can’t be sued for not wanting to buy a car. That boycotts get under the president’s skin where nothing else – not court orders, not the barely disguised horror of old allies abroad – seems therefore to make a strange kind of sense. To a president who sees everything in terms of making money, it’s consumers who matter. And now their wrath is spreading well beyond Musk’s companies.

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  • What went wrong with Horizon Worlds? Former Meta devs share surprising insights – and a solution – New World Notes

    I’ve always believed the fundamental problem is that Meta leadership never truly understood the Metaverse, and simply treated it like a 3D version of Facebook. In interviews for the book, it also became clear to me that most of the people working on Horizon Worlds weren’t themselves experienced or passionate about virtual worlds. Indeed, in 2022, Meta leadership sent out an internal memo requiring employees to dogfood Horizon Worlds more (i.e. actually play it).

    It was actually worse than that, this ex-developer tells me. Required to dogfood their own virtual world, the engineer tells me, many Meta staffers automated their dogfooding: “Before I left they were mandating that employees spend a certain number of hours per week in the game actively playing it. So therein started an automation war where all the people with 200 hours a week never actually played the game once. People just had to launch the game with an Android command over USB, then make sure the proximity sensor on the headset was taped to keep it on.”

    Yes: Instead of playing Horizon Worlds, developers of Horizon Worlds at Meta figured out a hack where they could just pretend to do so.

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  • ‘An ideal tool’: prisons are using virtual reality to help people in solitary confinement – The Guardian

    Williams first had the idea to bring VR into prisons five years ago. After founding Creative Acts in 2018, she said she “got real tired of hearing people come home after life sentences, having done multiple decades inside, and literally landing on a different planet”. She felt there was an urgent need for her organization to visually puncture the concrete barriers separating incarcerated people from the outside world. “As the world was changing out here, we missed it,” said Star Van Pool, Creative Acts’ program facilitator, who was incarcerated for 17 years.

    So when Williams heard about a rudimentary VR program led by correctional officers in another state, she began to workshop how her organization could safely and humanely adapt this work. “I was looking for something that would bring the outside world inside. I heard that VR works on your brain as if you’ve had the experience,” Williams said. “It seemed like an ideal tool.”

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  • How France uncovered the mystery of the forbidden photos of Nazi-occupied Paris – NPR

    “There was a small group of people who worked together and knew there was a kind of resistance through the pictures,” he says. But he says among the resistants at the store, there must have been at least one traitor, because in early 1943, someone denounced both Raoul and Marthe Minot in an anonymous letter to the police. […]

    Broussard’s four-year investigation appeared as a series of articles in Le Monde in September. His stories recounting his sometimes frustrating search raised Minot out of obscurity. The late camera-slinging department store employee has now been officially recognized by the French government as a “résistant” — a high national honor — who died for France, bearing witness to the reality of Nazi Occupation.

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  • Surveillance and the secret history of 19th-century wearable tech – The MIT Press Reader

    Another story in the Railway and Engineering Review included a similar hack attempt by a Portland night watchman. Having previously been caught mechanically rigging the button-pushing work of his nightly rounds, the watchman was given a pedometer to ensure that he was manually completing his work. Although this use of quantum media — media that count, quantify, or enumerate — to more closely monitor the watchman’s activities seemed to work for several nights, he was eventually found sleeping in the engine room, having attached the pedometer to a piston rod. […]

    While much of the popular discussion in the early 19th century focused on men’s uses of pedometers, in the second half of the century the devices became part of women’s fashion and close surveillance as well. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution announced in 1879 that “a pedometer is now an indispensable feature of every young ladies’ attire.” In a piece titled “A Slap at the Dancing Girl” that ran in the Los Angeles Times in the spring of 1890, a “frail consumptive Connecticut girl who wanted to attend a dance” but pleaded illness when asked to wash dishes was sent to the local dance by her father in a coach with two servants and a pedometer in her pocket. As the paper reported, “When she got home in the morning it indicated that she had danced enough to cover thirty-one miles.” Echoing yet inverting earlier textual accounts of women’s behavior, the paper suggested that the tracking revealed the untrustworthiness of young women.

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  • The hardest working font in Manhattan – Marcin Wichary

    But then, I started seeing Gorton in other places. Hours of looking at close-ups of keys made me sensitive to the peculiar shapes of some of its letters. No other font had a Q, a 9, or a C that looked like this. One day, I saw what felt like Gorton on a ferry traversing the waters Bay Area. A few weeks later, I spotted it on a sign in a national park. Then on an intercom. On a street lighting access cover. In an elevator. At my dentist’s office. In an alley.

    These had one thing in common. All of the letters were carved into the respective base material – metal, plastic, wood. The removed shapes were often filled in with a different color, but sometimes left alone. At one point someone explained to me Gorton must have been a routing font, meant to be carved out by a milling machine rather than painted on top or impressed with an inked press. Some searches quickly led me to George Gorton Machine Co., a Wisconsin-based company which produced various engraving machines.

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  • How to disappear completely – The Verge

    The loss of content is not a new phenomenon. It’s endemic to human societies, marked as we are by an ephemerality that can be hard to contextualize from a distance. For every Shakespeare, hundreds of other playwrights lived, wrote, and died, and we remember neither their names nor their words. (There is also, of course, a Marlowe, for the girlies who know.) For every Dickens, uncountable penny dreadfuls on cheap newsprint didn’t withstand the test of decades. For every iconic cuneiform tablet bemoaning poor customer service, countless more have been destroyed over the millennia.

    This is a particularly complex problem for digital storage. For every painstakingly archived digital item, there are also hard drives corrupted, content wiped, media formats that are effectively unreadable and unusable, as I discovered recently when I went on a hunt for a reel-to-reel machine to recover some audio from the 1960s. Every digital media format, from the Bernoulli Box to the racks of servers slowly boiling the planet, is ultimately doomed to obsolescence as it’s supplanted by the next innovation, with even the Library of Congress struggling to preserve digital archives.

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  • The first AI bookmark for physical readers – Mark

    Unlock your intellectual potential. Introducing Mark 1, the physical bookmark that tracks and summarizes the pages you read. … Designed to integrate effortlessly into your reading routine, Mark enhances your experience without disrupting your flow.

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  • Moon – Bartosz Ciechanowski

    In the vastness of empty space surrounding Earth, the Moon is our closest celestial neighbor. Its face, periodically filled with light and devoured by darkness, has an ever-changing, but dependable presence in our skies. In this article, we’ll learn about the Moon and its path around our planet, but to experience that journey first-hand, we have to enter the cosmos itself.

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  • Asleep at the wheel in the headlight brightness wars – The Ringer

    Gatto is the founder of the subreddit r/FuckYourHeadlights, the internet’s central hub for those at their wits’ end with the current state of headlights. The posts consist of a mishmash of venting, meme-ing, and community organizing. A common entry is a photo taken from inside the car of someone being blasted with headlights as bright as an atomic bomb, and a caption along the lines of “How is this fucking legal?!” Or users will joke about going back in time and Skynet-style killing the Audi lighting engineer who first rolled out LED headlights. Or they’ll discuss ways to write to their congresspeople, like Mike Thompson, House Democrat of California, who recently expressed support for the cause.

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  • 1970s sci-fi book covers by fab1an – glif

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  • Introducing deep research – OpenAI

    Deep research is built for people who do intensive knowledge work in areas like finance, science, policy, and engineering and need thorough, precise, and reliable research. It can be equally useful for discerning shoppers looking for hyper-personalized recommendations on purchases that typically require careful research, like cars, appliances, and furniture. Every output is fully documented, with clear citations and a summary of its thinking, making it easy to reference and verify the information. It is particularly effective at finding niche, non-intuitive information that would require browsing numerous websites. Deep research frees up valuable time by allowing you to offload and expedite complex, time-intensive web research with just one query.

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  • Are noise-cancelling headphones to blame for young people’s hearing problems? – BBC News

    After a hearing test came back normal, Sophie met a private audiologist for further testing. She was eventually diagnosed with auditory processing disorder, external (APD), a neurological condition where the brain finds it difficult to understand sounds and spoken words. Her audiologist and others in England are now calling for more research into whether the condition is linked to overuse of noise-cancelling headphones. […]

    Claire Benton, vice-president of the British Academy of Audiology, suggests that by blocking everyday sounds such as cars beeping, there is a possibility the brain can “forget” to filter out the noise. “You have almost created this false environment by wearing those headphones of only listening to what you want to listen to. You are not having to work at it,” she said. “Those more complex, high-level listening skills in your brain only really finish developing towards your late teens. So, if you have only been wearing noise-cancelling headphones and been in this false world for your late teens then you are slightly delaying your ability to process speech and noise,” Benton suggests.

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  • Democrats can’t flashmob their way out of this one – Garbage Day

    The best take on the Democrats’ behavior last night was from @KrangTNelson, who wrote on X, “If you think Trump is a fascist, like Hitler was, then you have to accept that [wearing pink] is a ridiculous thing to do. ‘In response to hitler’s policies, some members of the German Left Party wore purple hats.’ Do you see how stupid that sounds?”

    Though, @jeffsharlet.bsky.social had an equally good take, writing on Bluesky, “No, Democrats, these little auction signs aren’t it. You’re acting like Wes Anderson characters who don’t understand that they’re in a Tarantino movie.”

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