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The cost of medications, testing, retrieval, and storage involved in egg freezing is just one series of numbers in a process and procedure that feels like a combination of math, alchemy, and luck.

Should you be getting Botox? Welcome to Ask Ugly, our new beauty column!

You won’t get suggestions for the best new niacinamide serum from Ask Ugly. Just eat a sandwich. I won’t recommend some celebrity-loved surgery for sucking the fat from your face – it needs fat. Instead, I want to dig into capital-B Beauty here: what it is, what it means, and how it’s been industrialized and assembly-line machine-squeezed into billions of plastic bottles.

To briefly summarize:

• On Friday, then-CEO Sam Altman was fired from OpenAI by the board that governs the non-profit; then-President Greg Brockman was removed from the board and subsequently resigned.
• Over the weekend rumors surged that Altman was negotiating his return, only for OpenAI to hire former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear as CEO.
• Finally, late Sunday night, Satya Nadella announced via tweet that Altman and Brockman, “together with colleagues”, would be joining Microsoft.

This is, quite obviously, a phenomenal outcome for Microsoft. The company already has a perpetual license to all OpenAI IP (short of artificial general intelligence), including source code and model weights; the question was whether it would have the talent to exploit that IP if OpenAI suffered the sort of talent drain that was threatened upon Altman and Brockman’s removal. Indeed they will, as a good portion of that talent seems likely to flow to Microsoft; you can make the case that Microsoft just acquired OpenAI for $0 and zero risk of an antitrust lawsuit.

A VHS copy of the Wizard of Oz and a QR code is also a fun way to store your crypto wallet key.

Think of your browser like an ongoing autobiography. Why would you ever delete it?

The digital experience has wreaked untold damage, especially upon the young. But all is not lost.

Crypto Startup Bankrupt After Losing Password to $38.9 Million Physical Crypto Wallet

Play wipEout in the browser, and read the article written about rewriting it.

Modern action and superhero films fetishize the body, even as they desexualize it.

One of the big promises of NFTs was that the artist who originally made them could get a cut every time their piece was resold. Unfortunately, that’s not the case anymore.

OpenSea, the biggest NFT marketplace still fully enforcing royalty fees, said today that it plans to stop the mandatory collection of resale fees for artists. Starting March 2024, those fees will essentially be tips — an optional percentage of a sale price that sellers can choose to give the original artist. If the seller doesn’t want to hand over any money, that’ll be their choice.

Scammers be scamming.

Pop-ups, farmed content and sponsored posts have ruined a web that once told us whatever we needed to know.

Linked for the content, and the irony of the article being behind a cookie popup and paywall. Maybe read it here instead.

Want to really understand how large language models work? Here’s a gentle primer.

“In some sense Barbie invites more of a critique because she is a role model of mass consumption, but she isn’t given that critique,” Wright said. “She is like other female archetypes, really criticized for what she represents and how she’s presenting herself in the world. It really comes back to women’s embodiment and what that symbolizes.”

Below the Earth’s surface lies over a thousand times more water than all the rivers and lakes in the world.

This groundwater accounts for almost all the freshwater on the planet.

But in many areas of the world, groundwater is being extracted faster than the rate that it naturally recharges.

A recent study found that humans are pumping so much groundwater that it’s not only increasing sea levels, it’s actually shifting the entire planet on its axis.