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For years, the typical story about governments, politicians, or public figures showing up on Reddit focused on the unlikeliness of that match. Reddit was rowdy, weird, or nerdy, and it was sort of interesting or fun or strange for people with big platforms to show up there. In recent years, Reddit has grown from a large cluster of online communities into a sort of...

Hint: All you'll need is a public library card or an university email. Create a Kanopy account. Check out all the movies offered. Be happy.Are there limits to the number of films I can watch per month? Yes, Kanopy does not offer unlimited streaming. After signing up, you can stream up to 10 titles per month. Your 10 play credits will renew at the...

Most of us could name a favorite book, movie, or album and talk for ages about why we love them so much. But how did you come to find these things in the first place? Is there a special person who introduced you to your favorite band, or did you happen upon your favorite TV show through pure chance? Maybe a MetaFilter thread clued...

A four-tonne machine just printed a house in the US. Texas just opened its biggest 3D-printed neighbourhood as a solution to its acute housing problem.

Records of Pompeii's survivors have been found—and archaeologists are starting to understand how they rebuilt their lives.Mount Vesuvius didn't kill everyone. Refugees from Pompeii fled to towns along the nearby coast, where the Roman government seems to have stepped in to provide support. There's evidence that survivors formed Pompeiian communities+ in their new home towns, no doubt passing on to their children and grandchildren...

"Hi. We're a group of comic book writers & artists who are furious about Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation's plan to consolidate power under authoritarian rule. So we made a bunch of comics to explain their agenda and move you to vote against it." stopproject2025comic.org (quote from Bluesky) 15 comics up now on Internet freedom, taxation, the environment, anti-trans legislation, and other issues; more...

Pokémon developer Game Freak suffered a server breach recently, leaking an enormous amount of unseen assets, including diagrams of the universe's pantheon, frightening concept art (YT 15:02) and some quite unusual lore.

Black on Both Sides is the best Rawkus Records album ever (OkayPlayer, archive.is).The indie hip-hop label, founded in 1995, would release albums by, among others, Company Flow, Reflection Eternal, and Jurassic 5. Black on Both Sides, the solo debut from Yasiin Bey (pka Mos Def), following his work with Talib Kweli as Black Star, released 25 years ago this week. The singles were 'Umi...

Tell me if you've heard this one before: a curious young bug hunter discovers a major software vulnerability, tries to report it, and is ignored and gaslit. Today's villain is Zendesk, which you've probably used if you've interacted with customer support tickets.

Visual Effects channel the Corridor Crew (previously) look at AI scams and how to identify them (25 minutes)

Apple Intelligence engineers don't think that LLM's reason, and have described their tests to see if the reasoning is reliable and predictable (and useful for an Apple-style 'it just works' product). Here's a summary rolled up from exTwitter by Threadreader, and this is the arXiv.org pre-print. More analysis at why this is a bad thing at Gary Marcus' substack: LLMs don't do formal reasoning...

I always try to live by what Thoreau said, which is that it's very important not to let your knowledge get in the way of what's more important—which is your ignorance. As long as I know that I'm ignorant, I can learn something. from SPIN DNA: William T. Vollmann on Journalism

Queensland's Houdini crocodile to remain in popular lake, but mystery remains about how it got there. An elusive freshwater crocodile that has been the talk of an outback town for months will not be targeted for removal after wildlife authorities deemed the "shy and timid" animal no threat to human life. Context: No human fatalities are known to have been caused by this species.Wildlife...

On October 13, Space X launched Starship 5 and several minutes later, caught the first stage ( called Super Heavy Booster) when it returned to the launchpad from whence it came! Scott Manley has great commentary about the feat, including the separate return of Starship itself into the ocean.

"According to my notes, Netscape went live shortly after midnight on Oct 13, 1994 . We sat in the conference room in the dark and listened to different sound effects fired for each different platform that was downloaded. — jwz (Jamie Zawinski) reminisces on his blog about releasing the first public version of Netscape.jwz previously, describing the making of the Mozilla logo, recreating Borges's...

While scanning these files I came to realise that timezones were even more complicated than I had originally understood, with the rules in a constant state of flux. I was intrigued to see what patterns might emerge if I could visualise this dataset in its entirety ... from Exploring 120 years of timezones [Scott Logic, 2021]

A paper to be presented at Siggraph 2024 examines the geometric properties of tightly curled Black hair and creates algorithms to model it for computer graphics. This is essentially the first formalized description and algorithm for rendering tightly curled hair in the decades long history of computer graphics.

ARCHiOx (Analysis and Recording of Cultural Heritage in Oxford) is a project to create detailed 3D models of a variety of books and objects from the collections of the Bodleian Library, allowing users to explore highly decorative and unusual bindings without a visit to the reading room. (Previously)

The protest anthem Glory to Hong Kong has been banned this year under Hong Kong's National Security Law, which criminalizes advocating for "secession from China" or "seditious activities. Looking back, Hong Kongers reflect on where they started, and where they are now: "I thought 2014 was shit at that time, but compared to 2019 it was just a piece of cake," she says. "I...

Marlene Weisman: "So, as you can imagine, this "think fast" boot camp was amazing training for my creative thinking up to this day. As the famous SNL adage goes: The show doesn't go on because it's ready; it goes on because it's 11:30."

When mostly men went to college? Prestigious. Aspirational. Important. Now that mostly women go to college? Unnecessary. De-valued. A bad choice. from Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping? [Matriarchal Blessing]

Elders bring home sacred Indigenous artefacts held in UK museum for 120 years. Warumungu artefacts, including a famous boomerang, are being returned to country in Central Australia in an emotional milestone for the community.

blue lagoons of water amid the palm trees and sand dunes of the Sahara Desert, nourishing some of its most drought-stricken regions with more water than many had seen in decades [aljazeera]