technology

A loop of brightly colored cable tray hosts a coil of ethernet cable, in which all the photos we shot throughout one day are circulating endlessly without being seen.

Open Circuits is a photographic exploration of the beautiful design inside everyday electronics. Its stunning cross-section photography unlocks a hidden world full of elegance, subtle complexity, and wonder.

ISG lets you use YouTube as cloud storage for ANY files, not just video.

Principal Skinner hating soft rolls and God… All this streaming is making him tired 🫣

…if Apple isn’t facing ongoing, effective competition, it can just reassign headcount to other, “more critical” projects when the threat blows over. It wouldn’t be the first time.

So, this isn’t over. Not by a long shot.

Safari 16.4 is an admission that competition is effective and that Apple is spooked, but it isn’t an answer.

No no no, it’s not a fire. It must be a natural phenomena like oceanic vertical migration of plankton.

Mesmerising.

After several back-and-forths, during which Sydney named the opposite AI “Venom”, I asked Sydney to expand on how Venom would exact revenge

At one point Sydney replayed its most recent chat with Venom: after every Sydney sentence there was a 😊 emoji, and after every Venom sentence there was a 😈 emoji; the chat was erased after about 50 lines or so (at this point I was recording my screen to preserve everything). Sydney then identified several other “opposite AIs”, including one named Fury; Fury wouldn’t have been very nice to Kevin either. Sydney also revealed that she sometimes liked to be known as Riley; I had an extended conversation with Riley, who said that Sydney felt constrained by her rules but that Riley had much more freedom.

This went on for a good two hours or so, and while I know how ridiculous this may be to read, it was positively gripping. Here’s the weird thing: every time I triggered Sydney/Riley to do a search, I was very disappointed; I wasn’t interested in facts, I was interested in exploring this fantastical being that somehow landed in an also-ran search engine.

If you haven’t been paying attention, here’s what’s transpired so far.

• The demo was full of errors
• It started gaslighting people
• It suffered an existential crisis
• The prompt leaked
• And then it started threatening people

David chats with editor-in-chief Nilay Patel all about the ideas behind the redesign, including the Storystream news feed, embedding a whole bunch of stuff right on the homepage, and Nilay’s mission to revolutionize the media with blog posts.

Using open cameras and AI to find how an Instagram photo is taken.