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Elon Musk and the right’s war on Wikipedia 0:00/1950.902857 Listen to me read this post here (not an AI-generated voice!), subscribe to the feed in your podcast app, or download the recording for later. When Elon Musk launched his latest crusade against Wikipedia this Christmas Eve, it wasn’t just…
During COVID, I walked a lot. As a consequence, I started listening to more podcasts. Since then the walking has dropped off dramatically, as my wife would tell you. The habit of listening to history podcasts has stuck. I’ve been binge-listening to two of my favorites recently, The Rest is History…
October 2024 I'm usually reluctant to make predictions about technology, but I feel fairly confident about this one: in a couple decades there won't be many people who can write. One of the strangest things you learn if you're a writer is how many people have trouble writing. Doctors know how many…
My name’s José, and I (49m) have been married to Kelly (42f) for 6 years. We met at Mexico City International Airport in 2014 — both of us were waiting in a restaurant for a late-night long-haul to London. The pretty stranger quickly clocked my black epaulettes, each bearing four yellow stripes,…
ℹ️ This is a revised version of a video I made on my Patreon. Our most recent Incredible Doom story Eternal September hasn't been going as planned, but maybe that’s for the best. We set out to release the new series as a traditional webcomic—new pages every week, eventually collecting them into a…
source: Wikimedia Accelerating map technology The map technology industry is accelerating toward a more advanced future, but it is not often obvious how. The reason this is not obvious is not because you nor I are not clever enough to see it, but because it is hidden by a sort of false progress on…
The email arrived out of the blue: it was the university code of conduct team. Albert, a 19-year-old undergraduate English student, scanned the content, stunned. He had been accused of using artificial intelligence to complete a piece of assessed work. If he did not attend a hearing to address the…
Every few days, I open my inbox to an email from someone asking after an old article of mine that they can’t find. They’re graduate students, activists, teachers setting up their syllabus, researchers, fellow journalists, or simply people with a frequently revisited bookmark, not understanding why a…
When faced with a bit of downtime, many of my friends will turn to the same party game. It’s based on the Surrealists’ Exquisite Corpse, and involves translating brief written descriptions into rapidly made drawings and back again. One group calls it Telephone Pictionary; another refers to it as…
There was a time where fixing a map was akin to updating a book. Once published, the material cannot be updated retroactively, but instead would have to be replaced with a new version. Using old paper maps, it is important to know the year it was printed. In the geospatial industry, this has rapidly…
31.07.2024 know thyself There is a new lifestyle imposed on almost the entire world, willingly or unwillingly, perhaps by powerful people or by many small people that want to be powerful, which somehow affects all ordinary people: a consumption-oriented life. Fast consumption, constant consumption,…
In 1957, a B-36 nuclear bomber accidentally dropped a Mark 17 hydrogen bomb while landing at Kirtland Air Force Base just outside of Albuquerque NM. Mark 17 hydrogen bomb, on display at the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History, Albuquerque In January 1950, President Harry Truman announced…
If you’ve read me for a while you know that – when it comes to tech reporting/talking about tech – I have been around the block a few times. Talked about some hypes, cut some supposedly magic technologies down to size. Sometimes even defending or advocating for certain tech. After a while the…
Press enter or click to view image in full size Source: South Jersey Radiology Associates Mikhail Iljin 18 min read· Dec 10, 2024 -- I remember my first encounter with radiology. We drove out in the middle of the night because I seemed to have fractured a bone. I recall a large plastic film with an…
Cryptography engineers have been tearing their hair out over PGP’s deficiencies for (literally) decades. When other kinds of engineers get wind of this, they’re shocked. PGP is bad? Why do people keep telling me to use PGP? The answer is that they shouldn’t be telling you that, because PGP is bad…
As a dangerous and evil man drives people away from Xitter, many stories are talking up Bluesky as the destination for the diaspora. This piece explains why I kind of like Bluesky but, for the moment, have no intention of moving my online social life away from the Fediverse. (By “Fediverse” I mean…
Vogt am Freitag: Hausbau ohne Grundbesitz 29. November 2024 Die Post hofft nach wie vor auf den Erfolg des elektronischen Patientendossiers. Jetzt schiebt sie die Plattform in die Cloud und versucht damit, politischen Prozessen vorzugreifen. Kolumnist Reto Vogt gefällt das nicht. Das elektronische…
On May 21, 1946, the Canadian physicist Louis Slotin was demonstrating to several other Los Alamos scientists how to do a criticality experiment. Slotin wasn’t really doing an experiment at the time, in the sense of taking careful scientific measurements — he was simply showing how one would do…
Recently due to various events (namely a lot of people getting off of X-Twitter), Bluesky has become a lot more popular, and excitement for its underlying protocol, ATProto, is growing. Since I worked on ActivityPub which connects together Mastodon, Sharkey, Peertube, GotoSocial, etc, etc, etc in…
Im Internet und auf der Straße äußern einzelne linke Gruppen Sympathien für die Terrorwelle der Hamas. Hier erklärt Autor Nicholas Potter von der Amadeu Antonio Stiftung, weshalb Antisemitismus in der Linken gern übersehen wird, welche Gruppen besonders problematisch sind und wie sich „Fridays for…
Would it be possible for two teams in a tug-o-war to overcome the ultimate tensile strength of an iron rod and pull it apart? How big would the teams have to be? —Markus Andersen A couple dozen people could pull a half-inch iron rod apart. Tug-of-war, a simple game in which two teams try to pull a…
Essay: «Wer die Selbstbestimmung als höchste Errungenschaft der Gegenwart feiert, dürfte gegen die Suizidkapsel Sarco nichts einzuwenden haben» Nr. 44 – 31. Oktober 2024 Gibt es das wirklich, ein selbstbestimmtes Sterben? Eine Spurensuche auf dem Balkon einer Sterbenden, bei Exit, in Kanada und im…
Anil Dash, “Don’t Call It a Substack”: We constrain our imaginations when we subordinate our creations to names owned by fascist tycoons. Imagine the author of a book telling people to “read my Amazon”. A great director trying to promote their film by saying “click on my Max”. That’s how much…
Google Scholar, a tool used by researchers around the world, was founded by two researchers. We started Scholar in 2004, physically delivering hard drives to the office (see fact number 2), and two decades later adding new AI features (see fact number 6). To celebrate 20 years of Google Scholar,…
by Ploum on 2023-03-03 Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder, is trying to launch Bluesky, a "decentralised Twitter" and people are wondering how it compares to Mastodon. I remember when Jack started to speak about "project bluesky" on Twitter, years ago. ActivityPub was a lot more niche and he ignored…
John Graham-Cumming doesn’t ping me often, but when he does I pay attention. His day job is the CTO of the security giant Cloudflare, but he is also a lay historian of technology, guided by a righteous compass. He might be best known for successfully leading a campaign to force the UK government to…
Introduction Dobble (also called Spot It!), is a card game that uses special circular cards, each with a number (8 in the standard pack, 6 in the kids pack) of symbols or image. There are various ways to play, but they all the games involve finding which symbol is common to two cards. The cards are…
BLENDER.ORG Download Get the latest Blender, older versions, or experimental builds. What's New Stay up-to-date with the new features in the latest Blender releases. LEARNING & RESOURCES Blender Studio Access production assets and knowledge from the open movies. Manual Documentation on the usage and…
Getting a grip For the strongest disc golf throws, it’s all in the thumbs Amateur players got the best results by placing thumbs about 3 centimeters from the outer edge. Jennifer Ouellette – Oct 23, 2024 5:15 pm | 34 Undergraduate student Calvin Teague demonstrates an optimal thumb grip on a…
This August, I’ll be in academia for three years. I’ve reflected on education and collaboration, and how to minimize friction by writing papers using just Markdown. Of course, many’s the time I’ve spent the last three years hunched behind a glowing screen, fingers cramped and ready to press the…
Using two ReMarkables I'm a PhD student currently, which means that I spend most of my work life reading, or thinking about what I should read next. The timelines for my reading schedules range from what I need to read before a class or meeting next week, to what I ought to read for a paper or…
Recently the Barbican museum in London held an exhibition called the Rain Room. It was an installation in which water poured from the ceiling, but sensors detected where people were standing and would turn off the taps above their heads so they didn’t get wet. It was a clever and engaging piece of…
You were going to get one-click access to the full text of nearly every book that’s ever been published. Books still in print you’d have to pay for, but everything else—a collection slated to grow larger than the holdings at the Library of Congress, Harvard, the University of Michigan, at any of the…
Published: September 27, 2024 Updated: January 11, 2025 Note This post is a little more hasty than some of my others, in the interest of keeping up with unfolding events. I hope you’ll bear with the jumble of thoughts. It’s being actively edited; use the table of contents below to jump to any…
Teeth are our meeting place with the outside world, the point of attack. Crystalline and mineral in nature, teeth show us at our most mollusc-like. The fact that we can grow them, lose them and grow them again (if only once) seems to ally us with reptiles and the largest of the cartilaginous fish.…
In the Swiss Alps, I Explore an Automobile-Free Paradise // When you think about it, there are very few inhabited places in the world that haven't been touched by automobile traffic. The empire of internal combustion and asphalt has stretched its tendrils into virtually every hamlet and outpost, no…
The womb is a remarkable organ — a muscular, pear-shaped chamber that supports the transformation of a tiny cluster of dividing cells into an entirely new person. All humans begin their lives in this sturdy chamber. At least for now. Several research groups are busily developing artificial wombs to…
2023-07-29 Remember Free Public WiFi? Once, many years ago, I stayed on the 62nd floor of the Westin Peachtree Plaza in Atlanta, Georgia. This was in the age when the price of a hotel room was directly correlated with the price of the WiFi service, and as a high school student I was not prepared to…
The shift When I set out to improve my tainted reputation with chatbots, I discovered a new world of A.I. manipulation. Listen to this article · 14:53 min Learn more Credit...Illustration by Aaron Fernandez By Reporting from San Francisco Published Aug. 30, 2024Updated Sept. 5, 2024 I have a…
“By some estimates, more than 80 percent of AI projects fail—twice the rate of failure for information technology projects that do not involve AI.” – The Root Causes of Failure for Artificial Intelligence Projects and How They Can Succeed A study by the RAND Corporation (found via David Gerard’s…
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