- newSci-Hub and Libgen descend from a Soviet tradition of smuggled science
Today's enormous shadow libraries — Sci-Hub, Library Genesis, and the rest — trace back to Soviet samizdat, the underground practice of typing forbidden books onto carbon paper and passing the copies hand to hand. Russian scholars who grew up ins…
- 4 hours ago 19 May 26, 11:59pm -
- newOccupy Wall Street co-founder built an AI organizing mentor that runs offline
Most AI assistants send your conversations to someone else's server. Outcry, a free app from Micah Bornfree, PhD, takes the opposite tack: the model lives on your iPhone, iPad, or Apple silicon Mac, and nothing it discusses with you is ever transmitt…
- 4 hours ago 19 May 26, 11:43pm -
- newMicrosoft 365 is almost $100/year, but you can get Microsoft Office and Windows 11 Pro for life for only $135
TL;DR: Get Microsoft Office 2024 Home and Business and Windows 11 Pro for life for $134.97.Microsoft 365 costs around $100 a year, which means if you've been subscribing since it launched, you've probably spent more on it than a decent piece of f…
- 7 hours ago 19 May 26, 9:00pm -
- newIn 1997, NOAA recorded a sound louder than any known animal
In the summer of 1997, NOAA's underwater microphone network — a Cold War-era array of hydrophones originally built to track Soviet submarines and later repurposed to monitor earthquakes and whale migrations — picked up something strange off the c…
- 7 hours ago 19 May 26, 8:27pm -
- newGranta published a likely AI-written story as a prize finalist
Ethan Mollick, the Wharton professor who studies AI adoption, ran "The Serpent in the Grove" through Pangram — an AI-detection tool that claims 99% accuracy — and got 100% red flags. The story had been selected from 7,806 entries as a Caribbean r…
- 7 hours ago 19 May 26, 8:16pm -
- newTesla Cybertruck owner, intending to test "wade mode," learns about "sink mode"
"Numerous water safety violations" is a spectacular phrase when discussing a pickup truck.A Texas man reportedly looked at Tesla's "wade mode" feature, absorbed whatever meaning he wished from those two words, and drove his Cybertruck directly into…
- 8 hours ago 19 May 26, 7:27pm -
- newGreenlanders offer Trump envoy the universally understood finger gesture for "no to annexation"
In what appears to have been a pilot program for "colonialism, but make it weirdly condescending," Trump emissary Jeff Landry reportedly tried to win over Greenlanders with MAGA merch and cookie promises, receiving in return a remarkably clear statem…
- 8 hours ago 19 May 26, 7:16pm -
- newThe 1960 blob that gave all mystery blobs their name
In August 1960, something washed ashore on a remote beach in western Tasmania, about two miles north of the Interview River. It was 20 feet wide, 18 feet long, weighed somewhere between five and ten tons, and had no eyes. Instead of a mouth, it had w…
- 9 hours ago 19 May 26, 6:59pm -
- newAI's giant rural job machine mostly appears to manufacture hype
The AI boom has discovered rural America, where struggling towns are being promised salvation in the form of enormous data centers, industrial temples to machine learning that reportedly create far fewer permanent jobs and more heat than the factorie…
- 9 hours ago 19 May 26, 6:08pm -
- newThe UK has formally declared Badger Badger Badger worthy of preservation
In a move that confirms the internet is no longer a youthful experiment but a fully historicized source of collective psychic damage, the British Film Institute has officially preserved Badger Badger Badger, the hypnotic early-web earworm featuring c…
- 10 hours ago 19 May 26, 5:59pm -
