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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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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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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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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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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Give it a Polish! Classic film posters with a twist – The Guardian
This exhibition unveils how Polish artists interpreted US and UK films such as The Shining and Return of the Jedi while navigating the harsh realities of communist and post-Soviet Poland, at a time when censorship, propaganda and surveillance were omnipresent. … Blending raw intensity with haunting beauty, these posters reflect the psychological landscape of a society shaped by repression.
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Microsoft is finally shutting down Skype in May – XDA
Skype was first launched back in 2003, and Microsoft acquired it in 2011. A couple of years after that, it discontinued some of its in-house communication products like Windows Live Messenger, and then in 2015, the Redmond firm tried to integrate Skype into Windows 10. … In 2017, Microsoft launched Teams, a collaboration platform built on the backbone of Skype, designed to compete with the likes of Slack. It’s been pushing Teams pretty hard ever since, so you’d be forgiven if you were expecting Skype to be killed off, say, six years years ago when Skype for Business was retired. But just as you’d expect it to happen, some update would ship, and you’d say to yourself, “People are still working on this thing?”
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America the evil mastermind? Not so fast, Russians are told – The New York Times
As President Trump turns decades of U.S. foreign policy upside down, another dizzying swing is taking place in Russia, both in the Kremlin and on state-controlled television: The United States, the new message goes, is not that bad after all. Almost overnight, it’s Europe — not the United States — that has become the source of instability in the Russian narrative. On his marquee weekly show on the Rossiya-1 channel Sunday night, the anchor Dmitri Kiselyov described the “party of war” in Europe as outmatched by the “great troika” of the United States, Russia and China that will form “the new structure of the world.” […]
The whiplash in ties with Washington was so stark that Russian state television on Sunday showed a reporter asking the Kremlin’s spokesman how it was possible that “a couple of months ago we were publicly saying that we were almost enemies.” “This, indeed, couldn’t have been imagined,” the spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, replied, marveling at the shift. American foreign policy, he added, now “coincides with our vision in many ways.” […]
But for Mr. Putin himself, there may be a wisp of internal consistency in the swing toward Washington. He has generally avoided labeling the United States as a whole as Russia’s enemy. Rather, Mr. Putin has said it is the Western “neoliberal elite” that tries to impose its “strange” values on the world and seeks Russia’s destruction, while depicting American conservatives as Russia’s friends. It’s a mirror image of the propaganda tropes of the Soviet Union, when American progressives were cast as Moscow’s allies.
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Scientists aiming to bring back woolly mammoth create woolly mice – The Guardian
In the research, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, the team used a number of genome editing techniques to either genetically modify fertilised mouse eggs or modify embryonic mouse stem cells and inject them into mouse embryos, before implanting them into surrogates. The team focused on disrupting nine genes associated with hair colour, texture, length or pattern or hair follicles. Most of these genes were selected because they were already known to influence the coats of mice, with the induced disruptions expected to produce physical traits similar to those seen in mammoths, such as golden hair. However, two of the genes targeted in the mice were also found in mammoths, where they are thought to have contributed to a woolly coat, with the changes introduced by the researchers designed to make the mouse genes more mammoth-like.
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Serbian parliament erupts into chaos as opposition hurl smoke bombs and flares – Politico
“We believe that an exiting government cannot propose laws,” Radomir Lazović from the Green-Left Front said in an address before lawmakers released the gas bombs, leading to thick plumes of red smoke and smoke grenade clouds filling the national assembly. Fights broke out between MPs and two were injured after the speaker of parliament, Ana Brnabić, refused to interrupt the session and called the opposition “thugs and terrorist bandits who want to block the work of the institutions.”
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Citigroup erroneously credited client account with $81tn in ‘near miss’ – Financial Times
Citigroup credited a client’s account with $81tn when it meant to send only $280, an error that could hinder the bank’s attempt to persuade regulators that it has fixed long-standing operational issues. … A total of 10 near misses — incidents when a bank processes the wrong amount but ultimately is able to recover the funds — of $1bn or greater occurred at Citi last year, according to an internal report seen by the FT. The figure was down slightly from 13 the previous year. Citi declined to comment on this broader set of events.
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New York Times goes all-in on internal AI tools – Semafor
In messages to newsroom staff, the company announced that it’s opening up AI training to the newsroom, and debuting a new internal AI tool called Echo to staff, Semafor has learned. The Times also shared documents and videos laying out editorial do’s and don’t for using AI, and shared a suite of AI products that staff could now use to develop web products and editorial ideas.
“Generative AI can assist our journalists in uncovering the truth and helping more people understand the world. Machine learning already helps us report stories we couldn’t otherwise, and generative AI has the potential to bolster our journalistic capabilities even more,” the company’s editorial guidelines said.
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Exclusive: These universities have the most retracted scientific articles – Nature
This surge can now be seen in a first-of-its-kind analysis of institutional retraction rates around the globe over the past decade, for which Nature’s news team used figures supplied by three private research-integrity and analytics firms. Jining First People’s Hospital tops the charts, with more than 5% of its total output from 2014 to 2024 retracted — more than 100 papers (see ‘Highest retraction rates’). That proportion is an order of magnitude higher than China’s retraction rate, and 50 times the global average. Depending on how one counts, the hospital could be the institution with the world’s highest retraction rate. Many other Chinese hospitals are retraction hotspots. But universities and institutes in China, Saudi Arabia, India, Pakistan and Ethiopia feature in the data as well. Retractions can be for honest mistakes and administrative errors, but evidence suggests the majority of cases in these data are related to misconduct. […]
Data on retractions show that they are rare events. Out of 50 million or more articles published over the past decade, for instance, a mere 40,000 or so (fewer than 0.1%) have been retracted, according to the firms’ data sets. But the rise in retraction notices (by which journals announce that a paper is being retracted) is outstripping the growth of published papers — partly because of the rise of paper mills and the growing number of sleuths who spot problems with published articles.
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We are dedicated to the American public. And we aren’t done yet. – 18F Group
For over 11 years, 18F has been proudly serving you to make government technology work better. We are non-partisan civil servants. 18F has worked on hundreds of projects, all designed to make government technology not just efficient but effective, and to save money for American taxpayers. However, all employees at 18F – a group that the Trump Administration GSA Technology Transformation Services Director called “the gold standard” of civic tech – were terminated today at midnight ET. 18F was doing exactly the type of work that DOGE claims to want – yet we were eliminated.
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Brooks and Capehart on the implications of Trump’s altercation with Zelenskyy – PBS News
What we saw in the Oval Office was a travesty, horrendous, despicable. I — there aren’t any words to describe what we watched, where we saw a vice president who’s never been to Ukraine lecture a wartime president who was clearly summoned to the White House to humiliate him on the world stage either on behalf of or for the benefit of Vladimir Putin in Russia. […]
What I have seen over the last six weeks is the United States behaving vilely, vilely to our friends in Canada and Mexico, vilely to our friends in Europe. And today was the bottom of the barrel, vilely to a man who is defending Western values, at great personal risk to him and his countrymen. … And I have — I first started thinking, is it — am I feeling grief? Am I feeling shock, like I’m in a hallucination? But I just think shame, moral shame. It’s a moral injury to see the country you love behave in this way.
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Desperate for work, translators train the AI that’s putting them out of work – Rest of World
As a teenager, Pelin Türkmen dreamed of becoming an interpreter, translating English into Turkish, and vice versa, in real time. She imagined jet-setting around the world with diplomats and scholars, and participating in history-making events. Her tasks one recent January morning didn’t figure in her dreams. […]
The new roles require much less skill and effort than translation, Türkmen said. For instance, she spent a year on her master’s thesis studying Samuel Beckett’s self-translation of his play Endgame from French to English. More recently, for her Ph.D. in translation studies, she studied for more than two years about the anti-feminist discourse in the Turkish translation of French author Pierre Loti’s 1906 novel, Les Désenchantées. In contrast, working on an AI prompt takes about 20 minutes.
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Antiscientific vandalism – Quillette
To understand how biomedical scientists feel as they watch Donald Trump and Elon Musk aim their bazookas at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), recall how you felt when the Taliban aimed their bazookas at the 1,500-year-old Bamiyan Buddhas of Afghanistan. “Senseless” may be one word that springs to mind. “Permanent” might be another.
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AI firms follow DeepSeek’s lead, create cheaper models with “distillation” – Ars Technica
Through distillation, companies take a large language model—dubbed a “teacher” model—which generates the next likely word in a sentence. The teacher model generates data which then trains a smaller “student” model, helping to quickly transfer knowledge and predictions of the bigger model to the smaller one. While distillation has been widely used for years, recent advances have led industry experts to believe the process will increasingly be a boon for start-ups seeking cost-effective ways to build applications based on the technology. […]
Thanks to distillation, developers and businesses can access these models’ capabilities at a fraction of the price, allowing app developers to run AI models quickly on devices such as laptops and smartphones.
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Finally, an Agatha Christie adaptation that gets it right – The i Paper
Based on Christie’s lesser-known (to me at least) 1944 whodunit, the three-part adaptation boasts an impressive cast that includes Anjelica Huston, Clarke Peters from The Wire and The Americans’ Matthew Rhys. Set in the 1930s, it looks fabulous, from the shimmering Devon seascapes and cocktail dresses to the Art Deco interiors. The propulsive score is more characteristic of a Hitchcock movie.
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I went to Homebase’s final day closing down sale and I was not ready for what I saw – Express
As I walked into Homebase for the final time on Saturday afternoon, it was like seeing an old friend’s house being cleared after they’d passed away in hospital. The place is unrecognisable, what was once a store that’s been in the backdrop for several key moments of my life now reduced to a desperate fire sale … Staff were looking on forlornly as displays were ripped down, shelves were dismantled and the aisles themselves were taken apart. It was just a giant empty warehouse, bereft of any branding, with a miserable selection of a few last items on a table near the front, like a sad jumble sale. It was so desperate in there, people were buying the shelves themselves. Nothing was spared a price sticker. I saw one person buying what I can only assume was the microwave from the staff kitchen, since it was used and had no packaging. Others were loading up on wooden boards from the displays, shelving units, and you could buy a set of staff lockers for just £20.
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Can we still recover the right to be left alone? – The Nation
“Surely we are correct to think that we have, or ought to have, moral and legal rights to exercise control over such information and to protect us from the harms that can ensue when it falls in the wrong hands,” Pressly writes. But to treat that as the end of the debate is to accept the terms set by the state and capital. Rather, he maintains, “privacy is valuable not because it empowers us to exercise control over our information, but because it protects against the creation of such information.” We now assume that Mayer’s experiment in data-gathering has been perfected, that all of human life has become information hoovered up by our own devices. Pressly argues that this assumption is incorrect—and that to the extent that it is true, such a state of affairs must be resisted in order for our debates about privacy to have any meaning at all.
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Reference board final bosses and the irony epidemic – Vik’s Busy Corner
That’s not to say that every piece of art and creative that references something that came before it is automatically unremarkable or unoriginal. Dropped in the right place at the right time, a good reference, both widely known and obscure, can be a powerful storytelling tool that adds depth to the message or winks at a certain demo while flying over everyone else’s heads. The problem is that more often than not, what the public discourse refers to as a reference is actually just a blatant copy of something ripped out of its original context for the sake of visual aesthetics. […]
“I give it two more years of red carpets before the girlies completely run out of looks to reference,” writer, editor, and the host of The New Garde podcast Alyssa Vingan tweeted out in response to a side-by-side of Tate McRae’s and Britney Spears’s identical lacy mini dresses that they wore to the VMAs — decades apart from each other. She can’t take full credit for it, but Alyssa’s best theory for why Hollywood starlets keep replicating iconic 90s looks is a deadly mix of fearing criticism and craving public attention at the same time. “I think because there is so much content and so many red carpets and so many step-and-repeat moments that if you are a celebrity, an influencer, or whatever, and you want to guarantee that press moment for yourself, going the reference route — because you know that ‘your outfit and then the reference outfit’ post will go viral — is an easy way to get talked about,” she explained to me.
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AI ‘inspo’ is everywhere. It’s driving your hair stylist crazy. – Archive Today: The Washington Post
When a potential client approached event planner Deanna Evans with an AI-generated vision for her upcoming wedding, Evans couldn’t believe her eyes, she said. The imaginary venue was a lush wonderland, with green satin tablecloths under sprawling floral arrangements, soft professional lighting and trees growing out of the floor. “It looked like the Met Gala,” Evans said. The idea would have run the client around $300,000, she guessed, which was four times her budget. Evans delicately explained the problem — and never heard from the woman again.
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I spent 24 hours watching The Clock – MoMA
The meta-study “Severe Sleep Deprivation Causes Hallucinations and a Gradual Progression Toward Psychosis with Increasing Time Awake” (Frontiers of Psychiatry, 2018) found that subjects’ “perceptual distortions, anxiety, irritability, depersonalization, and temporal disorientation started within 24–48 h of sleep loss.” I can offer anecdotal confirmation. It is after 2:00 p.m. and I have been awake for 28 hours. I’m not hallucinating (yet) but I definitely hate everyone and, although I’m literally sitting in a clock, time is meaningless. One hour flies by and the next is like spending an afternoon at the DMV. Paul Hogan pretends to tell the time by looking at the sun (Crocodile Dundee, 1986) and I laugh for the first time in hours.
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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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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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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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