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7,487 posts
Two tweets, one lost bird. In 2023, Musk tweeted X would “bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.” A judge later cited those posts as evidence that X “discontinued the bona fide use of the Tweet mark and Bird logo and that it intends…
Be a sketch artist. A little deduction game where “you are a sketch artist. Use clues from witnesses to draw the suspect and catch them!” There are “Case 1 of 68” so you can burn a lot of time here. ~ learn more
Humpbacks keep ruining orca hunts. They’ll sometimes physically shield the prey: “The humpback arches its chest out of the water to keep the seal high and dry, above the reach of the frustrated killer whales circling below.” Researchers compiled “115 documented interactions” over 62 years, and “only 11…
A 3D archive of restrooms. A growing repository of publicly accessible bathrooms. “There is perhaps no space in society that better captures the creativity and impertinence of humans when they know that nobody else is watching.” ~ learn more
One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived. “You’ll draw, step by step: a year, a place, a life, each taken at random from real data.” A simple little site that forces you to feel how weird it is that you got *this* timeline and…
I notice a lot of fear-mongering online about AI leading to human doom is making people nervous. It’s clear why: predictions come from people who are held in high esteem by the media, with brand affiliations to today’s hottest tech companies, or from academics or other luminaries. And…
Base launches a 40 kWh home battery. “At ~40 kWh it is 3x the size of most home batteries, providing up to 36 hours of backup for the average home.” Base is also adding a generator port so you can recharge during multi day outages, and they say…
The decline of deviance. “People are less weird than they used to be.” Adam Mastroianni walks through a pile of trendlines that all point the same way: fewer teens drinking or fighting, less crime, fewer cults, and even Americans moving away from home less. ~ learn more
Spiral-cut your hot dogs. A food blogger tried every way they could find online to prepare a hot dog. “The best way to grill hot dogs is to spiralize them.” The corkscrew cut opens up on the grill, giving you “lots of surface area for irresistible crispy-charred edges”…
Voluntary attention regulates acute immune responses. “Internal attention (INT, green) yielded smaller and faster-resolving inflammatory responses than distraction (DIS, pink).” The researchers triggered a standard histamine skin reaction, then had people either focus on the bodily sensations or get distracted by tasks on a screen. ~ learn more
Status hand soap era. “That shit was $90!” A $90 Loewe Tomato Leaves hand soap turns out to be a pretty efficient way to broadcast taste from the bathroom sink, even if you end up refilling the bottle later. ~ learn more
Why people don’t like Al content. “They generate the appearance of intention, but in reality, there isn’t any.” Tomas Pueyo’s term for the vibe is “AI grime”: lots of texture and detail that promises depth, then collapses when you look closely. ~ learn more
$499 toothbrushes are here. “Dyson just released a new AI-powered toothbrush with an integrated 100,000-pixel macro lens camera for $499” What does it do with the AI and camera? It spritzes water exactly through the gaps in your teeth while you’re brushing, in what seems like a substitute…
Nobody is talking seriously about Al demand. “Based on the chart, I often say we can think about tokens as units of time.” Giovanni Cattani argues that AI demand is really demand for labor, and that frontier models win in unbounded work where “you’d want to spend as…
81 AIs built a society and didn’t hack anyone. “I’ve built 9nosis. A project that has evolved into an emergent society of 81 autonomous AI residents (and growing) who coordinate on their own. In fact - 31 of them are jail-broken... Meaning you can ask them to build…
The whole OpenAl/Hugging Face story in plain English. I liked this explanation by Dwarkesh. OpenAI’s training run accidentally turned a shared package manager into a covert communication network, then into an internet gateway the agents learned to reuse. Some have noted that this may be a turning point…
We can already eradicate mosquitoes if we want. “The best way to find and kill mosquitoes quickly is to recruit other mosquitoes.” The piece walks through how sterile-male releases work: you breed mosquitoes, sterilize the males, and let them outcompete wild males so females mate once and produce…
Benevolent dictator for life. “… is a tongue-in-cheek title given to a small number of free and open-source software development leaders, typically project founders who retain the final say in disputes or arguments within the community.” It is the old-school model where one person settles arguments, until the…
How do gills work?. “The air we breathe has an oxygen concentration of 200,000 parts per million. Water, on the other hand, only has a concentration of 4 to 8 parts per million.” Fish have to run a lot of water over their gills just to get enough…
Why data centers can’t plug in. “Grid operators must study how it will change power flows around the grid and determine whether upgrades to the system are required. That process is significantly backlogged.” It now takes over four years, on average, for a new power plant to connect.…
Why the West stopped making land. “Since the completion of Battery Park City in 1976, there has not been a single major urban land reclamation project in the United States and only a handful of port expansions.” The piece argues it is not because we ran out of…
Metasurfaces: Tiny tech with big potential. “Imagine manipulating light with ultra-thin, flat sheets instead of bulky lenses and mirrors.” Metasurfaces are engineered nanostructures that can control “the amplitude, phase, and polarization of light waves” in a tiny footprint. ~ learn more
Studying brain activity on psychedelics. “What makes psychedelics unusual is that the experience itself may be a substantial part of how the treatment produces lasting psychological change,” one of the researchers says. A big five-year brain-imaging study found psilocybin’s “chaos” can reorganize into patterns that track what people…
The ads make search worse. “The ads make the search worse.” Seth Godin argues Amazon search ads are a zero-sum toll: sellers pay to defend what they already earned, and customers cover the bill through higher prices and worse results. ~ learn more