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In the 1920s, Henry Ford decided to create a rubber plantation in the Amazon rainforest, and alongside it, a tidy little town for his workers: Fordlandia. With its classic American homes and yards, sidewalks and electric streetlights, Fordlandia was a Midwestern anomaly in the Brazilian jungle, one that dazzled American visitors. And it might have actually been a decent place to live – if it weren’t governed by Henry Ford’s rigid and peculiar rules for a wholesome society.

Read more in Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City by Greg Grandin.

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The Ringer’s Bill Simmons and Chris Ryan shave their heads and go on the lam after revisiting the 1985 “one-for-us” hall-of-famer ‘The Legend of Billie Jean,’ starring Helen Slater, Christian Slater, and Keith Gordon.

Producers: Craig Horlbeck, Ronak Nai, and Chia Hao Tat

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Zohran Mamdani’s social media team is operating on all cylinders: A Dramatic Reading of The New York Times: How Are the Very Rich Feeling About New York’s Next Mayor? Read by “Railroad Daddy” Morgan Spector.

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Having worked inside AWS I can tell you one big reason [that they don't document their internals] is the attitude/fear that anything we put in out public docs may end up getting relied on by customers. If customers rely on the implementation to work in a specific way, then changing that detail requires a LOT more work to prevent breaking customer's workloads. If it is even possible at that point.

— TheSoftwareGuy, comment on Hacker News

Tags: aws

How a Deaf Quarterback Changed Sports Forever By Inventing the Huddle. “Concerned that his hand signs were tipping off his plans to the opposing defense, Hubbard summoned his offense and directed them to form a circle around him…”

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Load Llama-3.2 WebGPU in your browser from a local folder Inspired by a comment on Hacker News I decided to see if it was possible to modify the transformers.js-examples/tree/main/llama-3.2-webgpu Llama 3.2 chat demo (online here, I wrote about it last November) to add an op...

The Casual Archivist’s Short History of the Business Card, From Versailles to Microsoft Word. “They’re a precursor and a stake in the ground; the cart before the horse and the name before the face.”

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Watch a man named Ozzie make rope using a very simple hand-cranked machine. The real magic happens starting at about the 12-minute mark, where the three strands of the rope come together — my mouth actually fell open at this point. It’s amazing what you can do with just a simple machine that cleverly leverages the laws of physics and the material’s own properties.

You can order one of these rope making machines from Etsy.

See also How Rope Was Made the Old Fashioned Way, i.e. how rope was made in Edwardian England. (via book of joe)

Tags: how to · video

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49 Literary Movies and TV Shows to Watch This Fall. That seems like a lot! Includes Frankenstein, The Twits (Roald Dahl), various Seuss stories, The Running Man, Train Dreams, Hamnet, etc.

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Whoa, I have not watched this documentary in a loooong time — very interesting to watch in the future this company helped to create, for good and very, very bad. Code Rush is a documentary following the lives of a group of Netscape engineers in Silicon Valley. It covers N...

USGS Unveils New National Geologic Map. “In a significant advancement for geoscience, the U.S. Geological Survey has released the most detailed national-scale geologic map of the country to date.”

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I loved watching this. My takeaway: don’t just say what it does, explain how it does what it does.

Link: m.youtube.com/watch?v=w9xTE2EuAt8

I recently spoke with the CTO of a popular AI note-taking app who told me something surprising: they spend twice as much on vector search as they do on OpenAI API calls. Think about that for a second. Running the retrieval layer costs them more than paying for the LLM itself.

— James Luan, Engineering architect of Milvus

Tags: vector-search, embeddings

This is the trailer for a documentary celebrating the life and work of actor & comedian John Candy.

I loved John Candy; how could you not? Uncle Buck was my favorite of his movies. I can’t believe he died more than 20 years ago already. (via craig mod)

Tags: John Candy · John Candy: I Like Me · movies · trailers · video

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Yesterday, Jackson Goldstone won the 2025 Downhill Mountain ike World Championship. Here’s the POV of his winning run down the *very* steep course in Champéry, Switzerland. (This is *bananas*!)

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Forthcoming book by Bernie Sanders: Fight Oligarchy. “Sanders explains how the United States today is an oligarchic society in which a small handful of multibillionaires exercise enormous economic and political power.”

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Why more and more people are tuning the news out: ‘Now I don’t have that anxiety’.

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Dylan and producers Amanda and Johanna take listener questions. If you have a question for our next mailbag episode, give us a call at 315-992-7902 and leave a message. You can also record a voice memo and email it to us at Hello@AtlasObscura.com, or simply email your question.

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My thanks to TextJam for sponsoring this past week at DF. TextJam just launched last week, it’s a remarkable “1.0” release — a multi-player text editor / word processor with a novel twist on how humans interact with AI. TextJam introduces the metaphors of “pen” mode for writ...