decay

These cafes had all adopted similar aesthetics and offered similar menus, but they hadn’t been forced to do so by a corporate parent, the way a chain like Starbucks replicated itself. Instead, despite their vast geographical separation and total independence from each other, the cafes had all drifted toward the same end point. The sheer expanse of sameness was too shocking and new to be boring.

A friend of mine manages an event place in Scotland, and they’ve banned 50ths. Hen nights, stag dos, 40ths, no problem: but some combination of the manic nihilism that sweeps over people and the middle-aged mal-coordination that crept up on them leads to a wild amount of breakage. Whatever the party anxiety is, and however overwhelming it feels, it’s useful as a displacement emotion. The proximal moment of becoming 50 is, in the end, a lot less terrifying than the point it marks in your life, a whole half-century lived, probably somewhat less than that to come.

U.K.-based startup Yepic AI claims to use “deepfakes for good” and promises to “never reenact someone without their consent.” But the company did exactly what it claimed it never would.

In an unsolicited email pitch to a TechCrunch reporter, a representative for Yepic AI shared two “deepfaked” videos of the reporter, who had not given consent to having their likeness reproduced.

Forests once deemed resilient are suffering surprising die-offs. To predict the fate of the world’s woods in the face of climate change, researchers need to understand how trees die.

One of the big promises of NFTs was that the artist who originally made them could get a cut every time their piece was resold.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.

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.

Ten years after its untimely death, the team that built the much-beloved feed reader reflects on what went wrong and what could have been.

Reddit not learning the lessons of Twitter.

It’s been over a decade since we’ve heard from the elusive White Stripes drummer. Could renewed attention over a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nomination coax her back into the spotlight?

The issue with hCaptcha’s strange AI generated prompts highlights two issues with machine learning systems. The first is that the AI systems require an enormous amount of human input to not be terrible. Typically image labeling is outsourced to foreign workers who do it for pennies on the dollar. The other is the issue of data drift. The longer these machine learning systems run, the more input they require. Inevitably, they begin to use data they’ve generated to train themselves. Systems that train on themselves long enough become AI Hapsburgs, churning out requests to identify incomprehensible objects like “Yokos.”

Sound aesthetic is important for another reason besides our pleasure. It might lead to a more ethical relationship with our environment and the people around us. Jordan says, once we deal with harmful, excessive noise that causes physical and psychological damage, we might want to reconsider how we deal with the soundscapes we live and work in. He thinks it would make us better citizens and better humans.

Have you ever wondered how much of your personal information is available online? Here’s your chance to find out.