More miscellaneous details

  • 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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  • Augmented Intelligence – Christie’s

    Augmented Intelligence is a groundbreaking auction highlighting the breadth and quality of AI Art. … The auction redefines the evolution of art and technology, exploring human agency in the age of AI within fine art. From robotics to GANs to interactive experiences, artists incorporate and collaborate with artificial intelligence in a variety of mediums including paintings, sculptures, prints, digital art and more.

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  • An exhibition of non-existent books – Hyperallergic

    Created by a team of artists, printers, bookbinders, and calligraphers, these books don’t belong to the real world, at least not in the traditional sense. They can be “lost” or “unfinished,” both of which apply to Sylvia Plath’s Double Exposure (1964/2024?), a semi-autobiographical novel about a wife with an awful husband, the manuscript of which was possibly destroyed by her awful real-life husband, Ted Hughes. The existence of this book here, with its cover of a doubled Plath beneath a serifed title and published by the actual Heinemann company, suggests an alternate and more kind reality in which Plath did not die by suicide, and her manuscript had not vanished. Or they are books that never existed at all, except in the worlds conjured in other works of fiction, such as “The Garden of Forking Paths,” mentioned in a Jorge Luis Borges collection fittingly entitled Fictions (1944).

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  • Parkrun veteran, 82, runs final race in Leeds – BBC News

    Hilary Wharam, 82, has more than 200 marathons and 171 Parkruns to her name since she took up the sport aged 55. However, as Ms Wharam is moving to Scotland to live with her daughter, Saturday was her last time running at Woodhouse Moor, which she has finished 112 times. Woodhouse Moor Parkrun director Anne Akers described Hilary as “a running machine”, adding: “We are going to miss her so much.” Ms Wharam was given a standing ovation by volunteers and fellow members of her running club, Horsforth Harriers, as she crossed the finish line on Saturday.

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  • Man who lost bitcoin fortune in Welsh tip explores purchase of entire landfill – The Guardian

    “If Newport city council would be willing, I would potentially be interested in purchasing the landfill site ‘as is’ and have discussed this option with investment partners and it is something that is very much on the table.” … The council has resisted Howells’ attempts to allow him to search, insisting that the hard drive had become its property when it entered the landfill site.

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  • Being a person with deadly, incurable cancer who is nonetheless still alive – Mishell Baker: Bluesky

    Being a person with deadly, incurable cancer who is nonetheless still alive for an indefinite timeframe gives me an interesting metaphor that helps me deal with things like large-scale corruption in government or commerce. … You have opportunity after opportunity to create something lovely for yourself or others. Every moment you choose to sit and think about horrors beyond your control, every time you make the choice to look for more and more details about just HOW bad… you are turning away from those opportunities.

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  • You can’t post your way out of fascism – 404 Media

    If there’s one thing I’d hoped people had learned going into the next four years of Donald Trump as president, it’s that spending lots of time online posting about what people in power are saying and doing is not going to accomplish anything. If anything, it’s exactly what they want. […]

    But perhaps the greatest of these sins is convincing ourselves that posting is a form of political activism, when it is at best a coping mechanism—an individualist solution to problems that can only be solved by collective action. This, says Cross, is the primary way tech platforms atomize and alienate us, creating “a solipsism that says you are the main protagonist in a sea of NPCs. Everything on social media is designed to make you think like that,” said Cross. “It’s all about you—your feed, your network, your friends.”

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  • This Pixar-style dancing lamp hints at Apple’s future home robot – The Verge

    When the researcher in the video plays music, the “Expressive” robot lamp dances with her; when she asks about the weather, it looks outside first; when she’s working on an intricate project, it follows her movements to shed light more helpfully; when it reminds her to drink water, it pushes the glass toward her. When she tells it it can’t come out on a hike with her, it hangs its head in faux sadness.

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  • A life nearly wrecked — and then rescued — by books – The Washington Post

    What could such an enviously exacting stylist find so horrifying about the written word? The bibliophobia of the title, Chihaya assures us, only “occasionally manifests as an acute, literal fear of books.” More often, it “develops as a generalized anxiety about reading in patients who have previously experienced profound — perhaps too profound — attachments to books and literature.”

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  • Radical doodles – how ‘exquisite corpse’ games embodied the Surrealist movement – Aeon Videos

    Commemorating [André Breton’s Surrealist] manifesto’s centennial, this short documentary from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (MoMA) explores the surrealist exercise known as ‘exquisite corpse’, in which each participant creates one portion of a body, unaware of how the other participants’ contributions will look. Taking viewers through a history of the exquisite corpse up to today, the piece explores how these projects embody the surrealist emphasis on freedom, community and radical creativity.

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  • Even though it’s breaking: On barbarism and barbers; The Great Dictator (1940) – Bright Wall/Dark Room

    This is a still from Charles Chaplin’s 1940 film, The Great Dictator. It occurs at approximately the 1:59:32 mark. If our home releases and prints are different, the most important context for this essay is that we discuss the split second before Charles Chaplin speaks the film’s final speech. […]

    To be bold, to dare to be stupid: this single frame in The Great Dictator is the most essential frame occurring in Charles Chaplin’s filmography. It is the most elegant and achy navigation out of comedy, straight through tragedy, and into something like the human struggle ever captured by camera. It is something like the writing of resolution.

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  • Newport landfill site in £620m Bitcoin saga set to close – BBC News

    A council spokesman said: “The landfill has been in exploitation since the early 2000s and is coming to the end of its life, therefore the council is working on a planned closure and capping of the site over the next two years.” … The council has secured planning permission for a solar farm on part of the land. That was approved last August and is expected to power new bin lorries.

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  • If Jeff Bezos doesn’t eat the Mona Lisa, who else will? – Diggit Magazine

    What would it mean if Jeff Bezos would buy and eat the Mona Lisa? This article demonstrates how a seemingly meaningless petition on change.org conjures various connections between contemporary manifestations of technologically driven nihilism and an upcoming battle between technocapitalism and intangible sociocultural values.

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