Nuclear Monster

  • Every year thousands of people across Europe watch a short British comedy on New Year’s Eve called Dinner for One or Der 90. Geburtstag (The 90th Birthday).

    The show consists of a simple dinner party, with four guests, Miss Sophie as the host, and her faithful Butler James. Unfortunately Miss Sophie is 90 years old and all of her guests have passed away years ago, but it isn’t so morbid. James does a brilliant job filling in.

    You can watch it here for free via Norddeutcher Rundfunk. Only the first few minutes are in German. Highly recommended.

  • This is Print by teadrinker based on the lovely sound of printers found on freesound.org.

    If you’re not familiar with this kind of video, it’s from the demo scene. Demo groups and people who make art and music with computers that started decades ago on computers that weren’t capable of much but the developers behind these demos would always push the computers to their limits.

  • It can be disappointing to find out that many of the people we respect or appreciate turn out to be less than we had hoped. While I was pretty disappointed at first to find that we could add Feynman to this list, the benefit to finding out is that we can use it as an opportunity to hear new perspectives and here’s Dr. Angela Collier’s thoughtful take on Richard Feynman’s legacy.

    I was given those Feynman books as a kid, and as one whose idea of reading started and ended with the fictional stories of Doctor Who, the Feynman books were so curious and almost as wild as traveling through time. But it’s been so long since I read them, I’m thankful that Dr. Collier has thoroughly investigated these books and what we can find out about Feynman now.

  • Jonathan Watts and Jillian Ambrose at The Guardian reporting on this report from Oxfam:

    Oxfam’s research found that fifty of the world’s richest billionaires produce on average more carbon emissions in under three hours than the average British person does in their entire lifetime. On average, they take 184 private jet flights in a single year, spending 425 hours in the air. This produced as much carbon as the average person in the world would in 300 years. Their luxury yachts emitted as much carbon as the average person would in 860 years.

  • Federico Viticci at MacStories:

    …it’s become clear that foundation models of different LLMs have been trained on content sourced from the open web without requesting publishers’ permission upfront. These models can then power AI interfaces that can regurgitate similar content or provide answers with hidden citations that seldom prioritize driving traffic to publishers. As far as MacStories is concerned, this is limited to text scraped from our website, but we’re seeing this play out in other industries too, from design assets to photos, music, and more. And top it all off, publishers and creators whose content was appropriated for training or crawled for generative responses (or both) can’t even ask AI companies to be transparent about which parts of their content was used. It’s a black box where original content goes in and derivative slop comes out.