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Almost every time I share a new example of an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle a variant of this question pops up: how do you know the labs aren't training for your benchmark? The strongest argument is that they would get caught. If a model finally comes out that produces a...

Via a DF reader, here’s a 20-second clip from the 1993 classic^* Demolition Man that exemplifies how today’s overly effusive, ever-affirming AI chatbots were presented as elements of a profoundly dystopic future by sci-fi writers just a few decades ago.

^*OK, OK — cult classic.

Link: clip.cafe/demolition-man-1993/lately-i-just-dont-feel-like…

After 230 years, the US Mint has ended production of new pennies. One of the very few things that incompetent stopped clock in the White House has gotten accidentally right.

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The Northern Lights Put on a Show. “A powerful geomagnetic storm brought spectacular light displays to night skies across the Northern Hemisphere, with sightings of pink, red, and green lights as far south as Florida and Oklahoma.”

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Put wings on your car. “We call it a private jet for tax reasons really. Private jets don’t pay duty on fuel, so by adding wings to the vehicle, we should qualify for the same exemption.”

OpenAI today, “GPT-5.1: A Smarter, More Conversational ChatGPT”: GPT‑5.1 Instant, ChatGPT’s most used model, is now warmer by default and more conversational. Based on early testing, it often surprises people with its playfulness while remaining clear and useful. These...

Recently discovered 55-million-year-old crocodile eggshells perhaps belong to “drop crocs”, a species that “perhaps [hunted] like leopards — dropping out of trees on any unsuspecting thing they fancied for dinner”. Drop crocs!

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More women are riding the streets of Tehran on motorbikes, in violation of the law & social restrictions. “There is not any political manifesto or social agenda here. It’s just that since my workplace is downtown and I had to commute every day…”

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For his Yakuza project, photographer Anton Kusters spent two years documenting some members of the Japanese mafia. A limited edition of a book containing the photos is available. Steward Mag recently did an interview with Kusters: The values were almost comparable to ge...

Toggle the “Light” switch here. It’s going to do what you hope it does. (Via Jason Fried.)

Link: incommonwith.com/collections/table-lamps

A group of archaeologists has proposed “applying a model of how humans expanded to the different islands across the Pacific Ocean during their early migration to glean insights into how humanity should manage our colonization of space”.

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Sony, in a 2021 Instagram post, regarding the uniforms that so infatuated Steve Jobs that he commissioned Miyake to design prototype vests for Apple employees to wear:

The history of the relationship between the two companies dates back to the 1980s. It was Issey Miyake whom Akio Morita, chairman of the board at that time, requested for a uniform design which employees take pride in with comfort year-round.

That’s the light nylon fabric uniform, created by the first collaboration of Sony and ISSEY MIYAKE.

Featuring removable sleeves, it’s perfect for summer.

The second photo shows Akio Morita trying one on. See also: this Instagram post from SPOT Closet.

What a find it would be for someone to uncover one of Miyake’s prototype vests for Apple.

Link: instagram.com/p/CT2STaKlJbM/?hl=en&img_index=1

“The reason there are no weird blogs anymore is that it’s more fruitful to drive them out of business.” Private equity is ripping media into shreds.

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From Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, chapter 28, “CEO: Still Crazy After All These Years”, p. 361: On a trip to Japan in the early 1980s, Jobs asked Sony’s chairman, Akio Morita, why everyone in his company’s factories wore uniforms. “He looked very ashamed and told me tha...

The fact that MCP is a difference surface from your normal API allows you to ship MUCH faster to MCP. This has been unlocked by inference at runtime

Normal APIs are promises to developers, because developer commit code that relies on those APIs, and then walk away. If you break the API, you break the promise, and you break that code. This means a developer gets woken up at 2am to fix the code

But MCP servers are called by LLMs which dynamically read the spec every time, which allow us to constantly change the MCP server. It doesn't matter! We haven't made any promises. The LLM can figure it out afresh every time

— Steve Krouse

Tags: model-context-protocol, generative-ai, steve-krouse, apis, ai, llms

22 Thanksgiving Main Dishes That Are Better Than Turkey. I’ve been trying to get the fam to pivot from turkey to chicken (with all the usual sides in place), but no dice.

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Just as You Feared — Life in Zohran Mamdani’s New York. “Breakfast is sugar-free pea fibre from the state-run ZohranMart. I wish that I could give my son something better — it’s his birthday. But he doesn’t mind. School has turned him very woke.”

Fun-reliable side-channels for cross-container communication Here's a very clever hack for communicating between different processes running in different containers on the same machine. It's based on clever abuse of POSIX advisory locks which allow a process to create and de...

Operation Space Station is a two-part PBS documentary series on the International Space Station. Here’s a very short teaser trailer: A synopsis: The size of a football field, the International Space Station hurtles around Earth at 17,000 mph, shielding its astronauts fro...