Merijn

Satisfactory has sold over 5 million copies on Steam, and now it's coming to Xbox

Spread democracy and unlock 38 Helldivers 2 achievements along the way

California’s raised the minimum wage for fast-food workers and contrary to some bad press & much industry outcry, it’s been a success. “California’s fast-food sector gained jobs in all but one month since September 2023.”

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Read Sooo Not Ready For The Internet, Part 16

Client: "I just saw this thing where someone used AI to make a photo from scratch."
Me: "Well, technically it's not a photo, but yes some people are using AI to do that now.
Client: "Well if I can make images using AI for free why do I need to pay you to make art for my site?"

Read Sooo Not Ready For The Internet, Part 16

Larian Studios' fantastic Baldur's Gate 3 is a year old

a seven-segment clock made from its own source code, only 321 bytes of JS #

using the serial port might have been easier, but OCRing six pages of faxed hexadecimal gets points for creativity #

Howtown is immediately great out of the gate #

“Donald Trump has been found guilty of all 34 counts of falsifying business records in a criminal hush-money scheme to influence the outcome of the 2016 election.” First former president to become a felon. Congrats.

only discovered 28 years later, most of the interpreter's source code could be found in "unused" sectors of the disk #

single-serving site with instructions for switching your browser to Google's AI/clutter-free search results #

After launching a feature that adds more AI junk than ever to search results, Google is experimenting with a radical new feature that lets users see only the results they were looking for, in the form of normal text links. As in, what most people actually use Google for.

“We’ve launched a new ‘Web’ filter that shows only text-based links, just like you might filter to show other types of results, such as images or videos,” the official Google Search Liaison Twitter account, run by Danny Sullivan, posted on Tuesday. The option will appear at the top of search results, under the “More” option.

“We’ve added this after hearing from some that there are times when they’d prefer to just see links to web pages in their search results, such as if they’re looking for longer-form text documents, using a device with limited internet access, or those who just prefer text-based results shown separately from search features,” Sullivan wrote. “If you’re in that group, enjoy!” 

We’ve launched a new “Web” filter that shows only text-based links, just like you might filter to show other types of results, such as images or videos. The filter appears on the top of the results page alongside other filters or as part of the “More” option, rolling out today… pic.twitter.com/tIUy9LNCy5

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) May 14, 2024

Searching Google has become a bloated, confusing experience for users in the last few years, as it’s gradually started prioritizing advertisements and sponsored results, spammy affiliate content, and AI-generated web pages over authentic, human-created websites. 

There was a big solar storm this weekend and photos of the aurora borealis took over social media; it was delightful. For round-ups, check out the NY Times, the Guardian, @itsjackcohen, PBS NewsHour, Spaceweather.com, Forbes, and MSN.

The photos above are by Albert Dros and Sean O’ Riordan (prints here). O’ Riordan took his shot in Tasmania and actually had to tone it down for publication:

When the clouds are glowing red you know something is off the charts, I tried my best to desaturate this and make it look some bit like a photo and not a science fiction scene!

Tags: astronomy · photography

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Is the periodic table yummy? Well, it depends on the element. But if you’ve ever wondered if a little taste of xenon or iridium would do you any harm, this periodic table is for you.

See also What If You Swallowed All Elements of the Periodic Table?. (via @anewplacetohide)

Tags: food · periodic table · science

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Steve Mould’s videos are always entertaining and informative but this one is also a little bit mind-blowing. If you build a circular trough with just the right dimensions and fill it with lighter fluid, a flame will travel around it. And other shapes will do other things — the effect created by the star/octopus shape is especially cool. The effect is an example of an excitable medium:

An excitable medium is a nonlinear dynamical system which has the capacity to propagate a wave of some description, and which cannot support the passing of another wave until a certain amount of time has passed (known as the refractory time).

A forest is an example of an excitable medium: if a wildfire burns through the forest, no fire can return to a burnt spot until the vegetation has gone through its refractory period and regrown.

Other examples:

Normal and pathological activities in the heart and brain can be modelled as excitable media. A group of spectators at a sporting event are an excitable medium, as can be observed in a Mexican wave (so-called from its initial appearance in the 1986 World Cup in Mexico).

(via waxy)

Tags: science · Steve Mould · video

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A North Yorkshire county authority banned apostrophes on street signs because they cause problems with poorly designed computer systems. “I walk past the sign every day and it riles my blood to see inappropriate grammar or punctuation.”

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everyone's favorite satirical startup culture sketch comedy troupe launched a Windows 98-inspired homepage #

Nimona creator ND Stevenson uses Instagram Stories as a canvas #

a DOOM-inspired demo without JavaScript made with the CSS scroll-timeline property, supported only in Chrome for now #

“What if owls had flags?” wonders artist Alex Tomlinson.

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a 3-2 vote predictably split on party lines #

I'm late-stage Gen X and passed easily, so they may need to tune it a bit #

The first episode of the podcast featuring astrophysicist Katie Mack explaining the universe to John Green is up! It’s about the first two minutes of the universe. “We are not just made of stardust; we are also made of Big Bang stuff.”

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Discord banned a mass of accounts that were part of a service that scraped and sold user data, including messages posted across servers and what voice channels they joined, 404 Media has learned. The move comes after 404 Media reported on the service, called Spy Pet, last week and verified it was selling access to genuine user messages ripped from Discord servers.

Since then, and especially over the last several days, the number of servers that Spy Pet says it collects data from has fluctuated, dropping from around 14,000 to 12,000, before eventually on Thursday reaching zero. As of Friday, the Spy Pet website is also unavailable, and Discord says it is considering legal action against the site.

This looks promising: an RNA-based vaccine effective against any strain of a virus and works for those with weakened immune system (babies, immunocompromised). “This could be the universal vaccine that we have been looking for.”

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They fixed it: NASA is able to talk to Voyager I again. “For the first time since November, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems.”

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