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Well over a decade ago I gave my first talk on the idea that we need a right to be represented by what I called a bot. At the time a lot of people simply shrugged off this idea. It seemed too outlandish. Of course now, we all see ads for Muse every day. We now call them agents and there are plenty of them, such as Instinct or Hermes. With their swift adoption we are also seeing the inevitable counter reaction. Amazon has already blocked Muse and is also interfering with other agents. If it’s ...

Citroën has unveiled a concept electric version of its classic 2CV, aiming to bring the vehicle to market in 2028 for just €15,000.

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Study for the Trivulzio monument, 1510 #highrenaissance #leonardodavinci

Automattic has created a Stewart Brand website to honor one of the most creative and respected people of my generation of the web. Chronicling his work is time well spent. "I'm envious," I wrote in response. "The tech industry is gradually disconnecting the early web, pre-htt...

To paraphrase one of the greats, it's not easy living up to the standards of Jaguars Junction. It's not just about the losing; any team can lose a game, especially in the NFL. And it's also not about the penalties. The yellow flags come for all of us. No, to feel truly welco...

Good news and a thank you to Ukraine! Bot traffic from Russian tech company Yandex’s network has plunged following Ukrainian strikes on its data centers.

In recent years, AI has made it much easier to create new websites and tools. That also applies to pirate sites, including TorrentClaw, a torrent search engine that’s largely built with AI. The site's TrueSpec feature, for example, checks what’s inside torrents. The results reveal a recurring malware trick, where a genuine VLC player is used as a decoy to load a malicious file.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

"AI" is a failed technology, in the sense that it's neither fit for purpose, nor a likely path to its stated end goal of "AGI", but a lot of people's profits currently depend on pretending it's not. I am curious to see how long the hype will last once the Nvidia ouroboros ends and money stops being pumped into marketing.

Cove with Figures, 1923 #americanart #mauriceprendergast

Trump’s Diesel Deal Sells Out Ukraine.

For the last few weeks, we’ve been running a sidebar survey about whether our Electrek believed there might be some silver lining to the record-breaking fuel prices following the start of the war in Iran. After nearly 2,000 responses, here’s what you told us.

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Last week, after Whiskey Pete announced that he would order the Ft. Hood shooter to be executed by a firing squad, his drinking buddy, Rep. Drunken Van Orden, volunteered to make room to be on the squad: A little later, he quote-tweeted another post about the execution with one word: "Vulenteer." When a reporter from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel asked about the posts, a spokesperson for DVO did not bother responding. It was a rather stupid thing to do with less than a month before the midterm election in a race in which he is trailing and against an opponent exponentially smarter and much more sober than he is. And said opponent, Rebecca Cooke, did not hesitate to jump on it: In a statement, Cooke said Van Orden's comments were "frankly disturbing." read more

Elsewhere on the Internet, a friend was was talking about various particular science fiction series and sf series in general. My reply (lightly edited for readability here): I loved the “World of Tiers” books, by Philip Jose Farmer, but I read them loooooooooong ago. There w...

Washington, September 2026.

From the video Backpacking into the heart of the North Cascades looking for the perfect photograph .

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Thad replying to a comment about Mark Zuckerberg’s past projects: I’d say the first thing he did was bring back the AOL silo paradigm. In second place, it’s MrWilson with a comment about the fifth measles-related death in Pennsylvania: My bingo card has the […]

There's no point in trying to predict how a Red River rivalry game will go. Texas and Oklahoma have aligned themselves to this eternal blood feud, some Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid shit. And it doesn't matter what the records next to their names say or what the expectations...

Portrait of Mrs Alice Brisbane Thursby, 1898 #johnsingersargent #americanart

Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the union representing 4,000 of its nurses have postponed a planned strike after the negotiating nurses agreed to bring the latest hospital offer to all their members.

The Vatican says Pope Leo XIV will undergo surgery this week for a nodular lesion in his lung, with the recovery time expected to be a week. A statement Sunday from the Vatican spokesman, Matteo Bruni, didn’t say when the pope would be hospitalized, but that it would be in the “first days” of the week.

"American mahjong is played with 152 tiles," writes Cog editor Cloe Axelson. "Along the way, there is a Charleston (or two), winds, dragons, flowers and the curious phrase, “Pause, want!,” which I now say all the time, even when I’m not playing."