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Many attempts throughout history either failed to function as intended or turned out to be carefully crafted hoaxes. Johann Bessler's rotating wheel is widely believed to fall into the latter category—yet exactly how it worked remains a mystery. What made Bessler's invention particularly remarkable was its ability to convince prominent intellectuals and political leaders of the era, including renowned mathematicians like Gottfried Leibniz, Johann...

Diabolus Ex Machina -- This Is Not An Essay Presented to you in the form of unedited screenshots, the following is a 'conversation' I had with Chat GPT upon asking whether it could help me choose several of my own essays to link in a query letter I intended to send to an agent. What ultimately transpired is the closest thing to a personal...

All progress on LLMs [for software dev] could halt today, and LLMs would remain the 2nd most important thing to happen over the course of my career. Developer Thomas Ptacek opines about AI skepticism.

Bloomberg: Builder.ai Faked Business With Indian Firm VerSe to Inflate Sales, Sources Say. Instead of an AI product, the now-bankrupt company used 700 people. Builder.ui was a 1.5 billion dollar company, with a $455M investment from Microsoft. This persisted for eight years.Notable, from the Bloomberg article: "In February, Builder.ai's founder Sachin Dev Duggal stepped down as chief executive officer, although he remained on the...

Despite it's lengthy history as a cultural center for DC's LGBTQ+ community and a focal point for peaceful Pride celebrations for decades and during DC's hosting of this year's WorldPride, the National Park Service has made the surprising and sudden decision to close DuPont Circle for the duration of Pride Weekend citing, "a history and pattern of destructive and disorderly behavior..."And yes, the NPS...

#freethread: In his 2024 collection Inventions of a Present: The Novel in its Crisis of Globalization (g/Verso Books), Jameson [wiki] turns again to the novel, a form that, molded out of experiences and fantasies within the historical present, comes to serve as "time's relief map, its furrows and spurs marking the intrusion of history into individual lives or else its tell-tale silences," as he...

The lesson we should take from functionalism is that, while there are unlimited contexts, real and imaginary, in which a building can legitimately be viewed, there is usually some functional context that should take precedence when deciding what to build. The functional context is simply the context created by the purpose of the building. It should take precedence when deciding what to build because...

Bridge to eQualia is a fourteen thousand word story about an internet sleuth by Blackle Mori that began as a Bluesky thread. You can also read it as a visual novel.

Glorious outback puppet show keeps Dreamtime stories alive. An entire community helps bring to life a giant puppet show, telling ancient stories of creation, in Western Australia's northernmost town.

The surprisingly groovy art of the CONDEC corporation annual report for the year ended July 31, 1969. (Consolidated Diesel Electric Company).

Marie du Deffand. "Biographies of the obscure -- history's "lesser lives" -- often have a fixed agenda: either they are bent on telling the other side of a story hitherto dominated by a famous protagonist (and hardly ever to the advantage of said protagonist), or they propose to right history itself by rehabilitating figures it has unjustly chosen to ignore." 'Oh, Shut up, Voltaire'...

Ukraine today pulled off one of the most audacious attacks of the war — a coordinated attack on four Russian air fields and a naval base by a special operation called Spiderweb. This one is right up there with the sinking of the Moskva and the truck bomb attack on the Kerch Bridge.Ukraine's special forces launched at least 116 of them from inside trucks...

Welcome to the first Pride Month LGBTQIA+ News Post. We're all beautiful on our own way.. Let's get things started with a list of pride festivals across the world!The Bad News The Special Rapporteur for Violence against Women and Girls for the United Nations, Reem Alsalem, has released an interim report claiming that being allowed to self-identify gender is "the biggest barrier to ending...

Conflict in South Sudan has devolved from the 2018 R-ARCSS, a peace agreement ostensibly unifying two warring sides (the reigning South Sudan People's Defence Forces and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army- in Opposition), to a state of disorganized regional and ethnic conflict, stoked by internal and external actors for their own benefit. Jousha Craze, interviewed on American Prestige (previously), provides a detailed breakdown of...

You're in a rush and you need to grab a bottle of wine for a special occasion. You've got $40 and no preference for red or white, but you like wines with animal labels. Which wine are you buying? from The pour-igin of species [The Pudding]

The Video Game History Foundation (previously) has unveiled a collection of over 100 hours of video from Cyan's history, including interviews and production footage, from the original Myst game (1993) all the way to Myst V: End of Ages (2005.) They also posted a highlight video.In the blog post announcing the collection, the VGHF notes that it was prompted by Philip Shane's work on...

Possible subspecies of endangered Leadbeater's possum found in New South Wales. Forest ecologist Professor David Lindenmayer says the shock discovery of critically endangered Leadbeater's possum is likely a new subspecies. (Australia)(Incidentally, this is my 1000th post on Metafilter.)

Corgi on a skateboard, corgi on a skateboard, corgi on a skateboard, corgi on a skateboard, corgi on a skateboard, corgi on a skateboard, corgi on a skateboard (corgi on a skateboard, corgi on a skateboard)

'The bot asked me four times a day how I was feeling': is tracking everything actually good for us? (Guardian)

Blaxell writes transness. She writes transly. And writing transly means more than writing a body. It means writing a world in which world and body are kin. This transness doesn't turn backward toward a body's past or away from the gazes of others, back into solitary orbit. When Blaxell does transness—and she's not just writing transness; she's doing transness—it turns outward. It lives. It...

Farmers already pleased with arid land rehabilitated with native seeds. Pastoralists in the far west of New South Wales are trialling new ways to manage arid landscapes by re-introducing native seeds to make the environment more rain-ready. (Australia)

AI Hallucination Cases Paris research fellow Damien Charlotin is compiling misuse of AI from legal decisions around the world. "This database tracks legal *decisions* in cases where generative AI produced hallucinated content – typically fake citations, but also other types of arguments. It does not track the (necessarily wider) universe of all fake citations or use of AI in court filings." Click the arrows...

May 31st 1985 Tornado Outbreak During the evening hours of Friday, May 31, 1985, just as people were getting ready to enjoy a late Spring weekend, one of the deadliest tornado outbreaks in United States history took place. A total of 43 tornadoes carved paths of destruction across the Northeast U.S. and Canada.These tornadoes affected eastern Ohio, western and central Pennsylvania, western New York,...