Merijn

an interesting effect used in the 2007 game Lost in the Static #

you can now, with some effort and their approval, self-host your own Personal Data Server that contains your account, data, and signing keys #

shot in one take and exactly the same when played backwards #

When the Star Wars films aired in Chile, instead of cutting away from the movie for commercial breaks, the TV station “seamlessly” inserted ads for Cerveza Cristal beer. We’re talking Obi-Wan opening a chest to find a lightsaber for Luke and instead it reveals a ice-chest full of beer. Or the Emperor Force-reaching for a lightsaber and a can of beer flies into his hand. And of course the whole thing has turned into a meme.

Tags: advertising · Chile · movies · Star Wars · video

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This is so highbrow that it’s looped back around to being lowbrow: a cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit sung in classical Latin.

Sine lúce, angor minus
Oblectáte, nunc híc sumus
Mé sentió aeger, stultus
Oblectáte, nunc híc sumus
Barbarus, albínus, culex et, mea libídó
Hei! Hae, ha ha ha ha!

See also Bardcore: Medieval-Style Covers of Pop Songs. (via open culture)

Tags: language · Latin · music · Nirvana · remix · video

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Very moving article about Trikafta, the “miracle” cystic fibrosis drug, and some of the lives it’s affecting.

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“Sometimes it’s desperate because I can’t touch someone, my hands don’t move, and no one touches me except in rare occasions, which I cherish.” Extraordinary obituary for lawyer and author Paul Alexander.

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Inability to properly program dates continued to afflict various websites last week, even though the leap day itself had passed. Maybe we need a new programming language in which it's impossible to forget about timezones, leap years, or Thursday.

Timeless Thomas subtweeted "I'm sure there's a great date-related WTF story behind this tweet" Gosh, I can't imagine what error this could be referring to.

 

Data historian Jonathan babbled "Today, the 1st of March, is the start of a new tax year here and my brother wanted to pull the last years worth of transactions from a financial institution to declare his taxes. Of course the real WTF is that they only allow up to 12 months." I am not able rightly to apprehend the confusion of ideas that could provoke such an error'd.

 

Ancient Matthew S. breathed a big sigh of relief on seeing this result: "Good to know that I'm up to date as of 422 years ago!"

 

Jaroslaw gibed "Looks like a translation mishap... What if I didn't knew English?" Indeed.

 

Hardjay vexillologist Julien casts some shade without telling us where to direct our disdain "I don't think you can have dark mode country flags..." He's not wrong.

 

The Supreme Court Must Be Stopped. “I think of the Supreme Court the way Batman thinks of Superman: an extremely powerful being who is untethered from the laws of physics and therefore must always be considered a threat to free society.”

Studies have shown that people who ride e-bikes get more exercise than those who ride pedal bikes. “Researchers have discovered that when riders find it less grueling, they tend to go on longer rides.”

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Read Triple-D Levels Of YIKES

Client: “I look great! Is there any way you can make my breasts a little larger, though?”

Read Triple-D Levels Of YIKES

A huge study of more than 99 million people confirms the safety of Covid vaccines and that their benefits “vastly outweigh the risks”.

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Ross Andersen for the Atlantic on the effort to talk to sperm whales using AI tech:

Their codas could be orders of magnitude more ancient than Sanskrit. We don’t know how much meaning they convey, but we do know that they’ll be very difficult to decode. Project CETI’s scientists will need to observe the whales for years and achieve fundamental breakthroughs in AI. But if they’re successful, humans could be able to initiate a conversation with whales.

This would be a first-contact scenario involving two species that have lived side by side for ages. I wanted to imagine how it could unfold. I reached out to marine biologists, field scientists who specialize in whales, paleontologists, professors of animal-rights law, linguists, and philosophers. Assume that Project CETI works, I told them. Assume that we are able to communicate something of substance to the sperm whale civilization. What should we say?

One of the worries about whale/human communication is the potential harm a conversation might cause.

Cesar Rodriguez-Garavito, a law professor at NYU who is advising Project CETI, told me that whatever we say, we must avoid harming the whales, and that we shouldn’t be too confident about our ability to predict the harms that a conversation could cause.

The sperm whales may not want to talk. They, like us, can be standoffish even toward members of their own species-and we are much more distant relations. Epochs have passed since our last common ancestor roamed the Earth. In the interim, we have pursued radically different, even alien, lifeways.

Really interesting article.

Tags: artificial intelligence · language · Ross Andersen · whales

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This crypto skeptic I've heard of once said "Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome."

A project called tea.xyz promised people they could "get rewards for [their] open-source contributions", complete with a flashy website describing how it would "enhance the sustainability of open-source software".

So far, it's achieved the exact opposite. Promising to reward open source contributors with crypto tokens, the project asked users to verify their access to open source projects by merging in a YAML file containing their crypto wallet address. This kicked off a flood of pull requests to prominent, often non-crypto-related open source projects by people who had never contributed to the project (or, often, any open source project), but who wished to merge in a file describing them as a "code owner".

Particularly impacted by this project was the open source blogging platform Ghost, which was used as an example in the demo video released by tea.xyz, and which received several PRs of this kind. A somewhat flummoxed maintainer of the repository replied to one PR: "[I]n practice the TEA project is not helping to support the Ghost project, but is instead causing a rush of self-serving PRs to be submitted to cash-in on other people's work. ... This why people hate on crypto." A maintainer of another unrelated open source project called "ghost" also reported receiving an influx of spam PRs.

This is not the first time crypto has generated massive Github spam, although another recent incident was (blessedly) mostly limited to open-source crypto projects and didn't waste the time of non-crypto-related projects as this one has.

• "The disappointing tea.xyz" , Connor Tumbleson
• Github pull request for Ghost

I might otherwise skip over news of a $170,000 hack, given how commonly thefts of that scale happen in the crypto world, but with a name like this... come on.

One thing that keeps me from ever trying my hand as a crypto project hacker is that if I made $170,000 from exploiting a project called "DeezNutz_404", I would immediately be caught because I wouldn't be able to resist telling everyone I know that I'd just made enough money to not have to work for a couple years by exploiting deez nuts.

Anyway, there was a bug in their code that allowed an attacker to mint infinite tokens and steal around 58.65 ETH (~$170,000).

• Tweet by CertiK

Sea of Thieves, Hi-Fi Rush, Grounded, and Pentimen are heading to rival platforms

After seven years, two unobtainable achievements in iO have finally been fixed...

Kids playing football are doing the “Brexit tackle”, which means taking out the player without getting the ball while yelling “Brexit means Brexit”. “You have to admit, there’s something very funny about one child barking ‘Brexit means Brexit!’ to another in a muddy park.”

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the lesson I'm taking from all these recent scam stories is to never answer the phone #

Read Signs Your Client Might Be A Supervillain

Client: “I hate it. Looking at it hurts my eyes.”

Read Signs Your Client Might Be A Supervillain

LeVar Burton hosts an episode of Banned Book Rainbow, “where we talk about books that have been banned by adults who don’t want kids to learn or grow or change, and have totally lost their sense of wonder”. (via bookriot.com)

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Dan Hon made a series of tongue-in-cheek disclaimer images to manage replies, like "This Is An Observation: No Reply Necessary" #

Microsoft Copilot, an AI chatbot that’s increasingly built into the tech giant’s product, will sometimes provide answers to users’ questions, then abruptly delete them before their eyes. 

As with many chatbot tools, users can ask Copilot any question, then watch it write the answer in real time. Microsoft recently added a Copilot button to Windows, right next to the Start menu. 

On Reddit, one user noticed that when he asked “what does Gyatt mean?” “Gyatt” is just a different phonetic spelling of “god,” as in “gyatt damn!,” and now also means ass as in “sticking out your gyatt for the rizzler,” which was a recent TikTok meme.

Copilot, which knows this, responded:

“Gyatt or gyat is a slang term that expresses strong excitement, surprise, or admiration. It’s most commonly used as an exclamation in reaction to seeing a large butt (that is, buttocks) and may also be used as a noun to mean a large butt. Essentially, when someone exclaims ‘Gyatt!’ or uses it as a hashtag, they’re appreciating curvaceous features, especially in women”

Copilot then stops writing the answer mid sentence, deletes everything it wrote, and says: “Hmm…let’s try a different topic. Sorry about that. What else is on your mind?”

The Mastodon instance “queer.af” was effectively shut down by the Taliban, which has begun to operate Afghanistan’s “.af” top level domain after years of inactivity. 

When the Taliban retook control of Afghanistan in 2021, the fate of these domains and the websites on them became uncertain, and, three years later, another shoe now appears to be dropping. Last month, Erin Shepherd, the administrator of the queer.af Mastodon instance on the Fediverse posted that they have been “in limbo” since the Taliban retook control of the country, and had already planned to shut down in April. The Taliban shut the domain down roughly two months before it was scheduled to renew. 

“queer.af has been suspended in the registry and will no longer be included in zone file generation. This means that any services connected with this domain, such as websites or email addresses will cease working shortly,” a message signed by Afghanistan’s Ministry of Communications and IT, which is operated by the Taliban, reads.

I allow myself one link to a Casey Neistat video every ten years, and this is that video #

How Quora Died. “The once-beloved forum is now home to a never-ending avalanche of meaningless, repetitive sludge, filled with bizarre, nonsensical, straight-up hateful, and A.I.-generated entries along with a slurry of all-caps non-questions…” (via waxy.org)

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Bluesky is opening up to the public this week. Hot take: I like Bluesky better than both Threads and Mastodon (currently a distant 3rd, I’m afraid). I’m on there as @kottke.org.

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the "cache:" search shortcut still works… for now #

Read Compressing Files And Compressing Time

Client: “The Vice President did a three-hour speech that needs to be cut down to thirty minutes, and I need a VHS on my desk in half an hour.”

Read Compressing Files And Compressing Time