Stephanie Palazzolo, writing for The Information (paywalled, alas):
Researchers at OpenAI believe that some rival AI developers are
training their reasoning models by using OpenAI’s o1 reasoning
models to generate training data, according to a person who has
spoken to th...
An unidentified disease (“Disease X”) in the Democratic Republic of Congo has infected 376 people, killed 79 people (mostly children), and “appears to be airborne”. They hope to have an ID by the weekend. This seems bad?
This person posted a bunch of images of their dad’s old VHS tapes with lovingly hand-drawn labels indicating their contents. Kids, this is what people did before the internet.
Also, it’s weird/interesting that CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray, LaserDisc, cassettes, MiniDisc, and 8-tracks are all played on devices named for the media (e.g. CD player) but VHS tapes are played on VCRs. We could have easily started calling them “VCR tapes” or “VHS players” en masse, but we mostly collectively stuck to the “correct” terminology. (thx, david)
Tags: design · movies
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32 Rules for Flying Now. Like: “This should go without saying, but there’s no reason, ever, to take off your socks on a plane.” And: “Triple-check that your cat didn’t get into your carry-on bag.”
I posted the first pass of the 2024 Kottke Holiday Gift Guide yesterday and just added some new items to it this morning (this link will take you right to the new stuff). I’m gonna be updating it every day or two with new gift guides and things I run across, but I wanted t...
A playlist of the 100 most streamed songs on Spotify. The current #1 is The Weeknd’s Blinding Lights (4.59 billion streams) followed by Ed Sheeran’s Shape of You (4.12B) and Lewis Capaldi’s Someone You Love (3.7B). Never even heard of Capaldi!
Alex Heath, writing at The Verge:
“I’m actually very optimistic this time around,” Bezos said of
Trump during a rare public appearance at The New York Times
DealBook Summit on Wednesday. “He seems to have a lot of energy
around reducing regulation. If I can help him do t...
A 15th century polymath of soaring imagination and profound intellect, Leonardo da Vinci created some of the most revered works of art of all time, but his artistic endeavors often seemed peripheral to his pursuits in science and engineering. Through his paintings and thousands of pages of drawings and writings, Leonardo da Vinci explores one of humankind’s most curious and innovative minds.
The trailer for the series is above and there are several extended clips available on the website and on YouTube.
While writing the previous item regarding the FBI encouraging the use of E2EE text and call protocols, I wound up at the Play Store page for Google Messages. It’s shamefully misleading regarding Google Messages’s support for end-to-end encryption. As I wrote in the previous ...
Kevin Collier, reporting for NBC News:
Amid an unprecedented cyberattack on telecommunications companies
such as AT&T and Verizon, U.S. officials have recommended that
Americans use encrypted messaging apps to ensure their
communications stay hidden from foreign hack...
Jesus, this story about an IVF clinic mix-up… “Two couples in California discovered they were raising each other’s genetic children. Should they switch their girls?”
Gracie Abrams is a singer and songwriter from Los Angeles. She started putting out music in 2020, and in June 2024, she put out her second album, The Secret of Us. She was nominated for a Grammy for Best New Artist, and this year she’s up for another Grammy, for Best Duo Per...
