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The oldest story we have about technology is a cautionary tale, write Jules Polonetsky and Omer Tene.

id Software considered multiplayer Doom DLC, Perfect Dark or a title code-named Fury for its next game. But then the layoffs hit.

A former Id artist says they’re “in shock at how brutal the layoff cuts”…

More young girls sue X over Grok CSAM; X accused of shielding child predators.

Back in the primordial days of AI, Parry was an ELIZA-style chatbot created by psychiatrist Kenneth Colby to simulate the words of a paranoid schizophrenic. Someone had the genius idea to connect it to Eliza (a.k.a. “Doctor”). Vint Cerf published the transcript as an RFC in 1973, and I laughed my ass off reading it. A taste:

Do you know anything about bookies?

What makes you think I know anything about bookies?

A bookie didn’t pay me off once.

What does that suggest to you?

I beat up the bookie who did not pay off, and I thought he might use his friends in the underworld to get even with me.

What else would you like to discuss?

What do you know about racketeers?

Thanks to Bob Peterson for the link.

Vint Cerf, by the way, retired from Google last week at the spry age of 83.

For the first time, researchers have filmed the elusive goblin shark alive in the deep ocean where it naturally lives. The remarkable sightings greatly expand the shark's known range and depth, showing that this 125-million-year-old "living fossil" still has plenty of secrets left to reveal.

Effect of sunlight on Notre Dame #edouardcortes #cortes

A firm linked to Elon Musk likely engaged in voter caging. On Tuesday, The Washington Post reported, “Election officials in North Carolina and Georgia are warning about suspicious voter-registration mailers linked to Elon Musk.” I am sure it is no coincidence that Senate ra...

A sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. NES cartridge recently sold at auction for $3 million. “It bears the coveted gloss sticker seal affixed to the top lid, identifying it as a second-production example.”

Plus suing Mayo, right to repair in St. Paul, and the New York Times goes Minnesotan in today's Flyover news roundup.

Water’s odd behavior becomes even more dramatic when it is supercooled, but scientists have struggled to compare the many different ways of describing its microscopic structure. Researchers at the University of Osaka used an AI model trained on computer simulations to evaluate 16 different structural descriptors. The system identified the most effective ways to distinguish between water’s two competing liquid states, providing a clearer framework for studying one of nature’s most mysterious substances.

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. In late November in Jamnagar, India, the scions of two of the most powerful families in the world stood face-to-face. On one side was 30-year-old Anant Ambani, son of one of the richest men in Asia. On the other was Donald Trump Jr. For months, the […]

A major victory in Florida! A federal appeals court has ruled that key parts of the state’s law limiting how race and gender can be taught at public colleges violate free speech protections.

Your contributions are helping us make good progress toward our goal in this year’s Annual TPM Journalism Fund Drive. We...

This is neat: Robin Sloan is rewriting his 2009 short story, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. “The interplay between books and technology has changed since I wrote them…but also that I have become a different writer, and a better one.”

To hear the candidates tell it, the U.S. Senate Democratic primary in Massachusetts is a battle of ideas. During a debate Wednesday hosted by Springfield's WWLP, incumbent Sen. Ed Markey and challenger Rep. Seth Moulton tried to position themselves as the person bringing new perspectives and energy to Congress.

Looks like she saw a chance to build a fifth column and it blew up in her face.

AI cheating leads to "a failed society," professor says.

The holiday season is here! Christmas in July has landed at LEGOLAND New York Resort in Goshen. Continue reading…

Tyler Hall:

We all know about macOS Tahoe’s terrible app icons and how 3rd party developers have been confined to squircle jail.

If you’re lucky enough to distribute an app outside the Mac App Store, you can break free of squircle jail using NSDockTilePlugIn. It’s not strictly the intended use-case of that API. And it’s not allowed in the Mac App Store, either. But it can solve the problem.

So today’s release of Iris adds three additional app icons to choose from in the app’s Special Preferences Settings pane. And since they use the NSDockTilePlugIn API, the custom icon remains even when you quit the app.

Iris is far from the only app using this or other techniques to sort-of escape squircle jail. All the apps I’m aware of doing something like this are Mac-assed apps. It’s a good litmus test.