Earnest question:
Why can’t AI companies slow progress despite the lack of regulation?
Is it as simple as “we refuse to risk falling behind if no one else acts responsibly, so we won’t do it until everyone is compelled by law?”
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This is neat:
The idea behind the Picard maneuver comes from the way a faster-than-light spaceship would outrun its own light. If the spaceship were going at a constant, faster-than-light speed, then another ship at rest would see two images, corresponding to two different times when light from the ship could reach them. […] While the details were wrong, [Brazilian physicist Níckolas] de Aguiar Alves was impressed that the episode reproduced the core textbook idea mostly accurately. “The main thing they got perfectly, and I think it is a great illustration.”
You can read the full paper on Arxiv. Time to watch The Next Generation again.
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I’m not sure who’s more gross, Netflix or Wilder’s estate:
Titled Wonka’s The Golden Ticket, the unscripted series uses the re-created voice of actor Gene Wilder, who played Willy Wonka in the 1971 movie, as a key part of the game. Netflix and Eureka Productions, which is behind The Golden Ticket, got permission from Wilder’s estate and worked with AI company ElevenLabs to re-create the late actor’s voice.
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Today my four-year-old son said, innocently but not without an unintended sting, that he is faster than me because he has less weight than me. So that’s how parenting is going. 🤪
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Of course, just as I consider going all-in on Tapo and Kasa, they abandon one of their most useful features, IFTTT support, for more AI garbage.
Movies
Ben Folds Five: The Complete Sessions at West 54th, 2001 - ★★★★★
Ben Folds spends a non-stop hour swinging wildly between being virtuosic on, and literally violent, with a capital V, to, the piano, while he and his bandmates tear through 15 absolutely unskippable 90s bangers as if they share one brain, twelve limbs, and three perfectly synchronized hearts. Top it all off with a bunch of dancing dudes showing up about halfway through the set in the back of every shot of Ben Folds, looking EXACTLY like every bully I ever had, singing every single word of every single song with a big innocent smile, and busting moves like they’re in a jazzy Gen X dance-off.
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Facebook has been caught with its hand in this cookie jar over and over again. It’s like Zuckerberg doesn’t think anyone outside the company can… read computer code:
The most recent version of Meta AI, a companion app for its line of smart glasses, strips out the unactivated software components that powered the system Meta internally called NameTag. The version published the day of WIRED’s report included several code libraries explicitly named for face recognition. Friday’s release includes none of them.
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Mike Masnick of Techdirt:
But at a time when the Supreme Court keeps telling us we shouldn’t believe that they make decisions on partisan grounds, it sure would help if they actually stopped doing things differently depending on the partisan valence of each case – something Alito seems to do quite regularly.
Absolutely right.
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Paul McCartney, in an interview by The Rest is History’s Tom Holland:
You would know certain chords. And then someone would know an extra cord. So you would go to his house and learn this extra cord, and you’d build up your knowledge through things like that.
It’s wild to find out that Paul McCartney and I learned how to play guitar in basically the same way.
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Jeremy Yurow, writing at Courthouse News Service about Hawaii’s new “anti-Citizens United” law:
The bill takes aim at the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling, which allowed corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money in elections. Lawmakers, drawing from a legal theory developed by the Center for American Progress, argued that because states create corporations and grant them their powers, Hawaii could simply decline to grant corporations the power to spend in elections.
You love to see it.
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Matthew Haughey, who has a masters degree in soil chemistry, writes about why some farms plant red clover in the spring.
Haughey jokingly swears he’s fun at parties, but people with specialized science knowledge are precisely the folks I want to talk to at parties.
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Click any linked term inside an article to load its entry. New topics are documented at the moment of first access. Use the Stumble button in the header to navigate to a random existing article.
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The fact that there is no statutory ban on the government commercially sourcing personal location data without a warrant is a mockery of the Fourth Amendment.
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This ruling seems to be shocking parts of the tech web, but all the court did was apply the plain language of Apple’s developer agreement. The company has never needed cause to expel an app from the App Store.
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🔗Jay Willis in his Balls & Strikes newsletter:
Although the force of the Republican Party’s response to Scalia’s death felt like a “shocker” to some, the reality is that the right had been quietly putting in the work–of building a judicial pipeline, of championing a particular vision for the Constitution, and of making sure the base understood the stakes of every Supreme Court vacancy–for a long time. The left had not.
The long game has been the weakest part of the liberal political playbook for at least the 42 years I’ve been alive. They’re always skating to where the puck is…
Notes
Olympic HTML flub
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At $150 per ticket, a family of four will pay $600 for the 80-minute tour of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. The money grab is going to be prohibitive for a large swath of the very people most likely to appreciate and delight in the experience. 😠
Movies
The Super Mario Bros. Movie, 2023 - ★★★★
Watched on Sunday January 18, 2026.
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Kung Fu Panda 4, 2024 - ★★★★
Watched on Saturday January 17, 2026.
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Ne Zha 2, 2025 - ★★★★★
Watched on Friday January 16, 2026.
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Anora, 2024 - ★★★★
You probably won’t believe this until you finish the movie, and maybe not even then, but it’s a romance…
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TRON: Ares, 2025
Watched on Sunday January 11, 2026.
Movies
Ne Zha, 2019 - ★★★★
Watched on Sunday January 11, 2026.
