Bookmarks
Links I've read and found interesting. Subscribe via RSS.
- Microsoft exec called AI scraping the “largest theft of labor in human history”
Microsoft, OpenAI emails reveal fear of AI “doom loop” killing news orgs.
- ‘A map is never neutral’: meet the cartographers who took on centuries of western bias
Equal Earth projection, adopted by the UN last week, provides an alternative to 16th-century Mercator display
- A Digital Fly Brain Has Taken Over the Internet
How to make a fly play Doom, Minecraft, Beat Saber, parallel park, trade bitcoin, cut doner kebab, and more.
- </> htmx ~ Code is Cheap(er)
In this essay, Carson Gross argues that as AI makes code cheap to produce, understanding code becomes the expensive and scarce resource. He warns of the complexity that LLM code can generate and proposes the subtractive, constraining engineer as the discipline needed to keep systems comprehensible & stable.
- Ten mice in your bedroom: Visualising the scale of the mouse plague
A mouse plague is invading farms and homes in southern and Western Australia. But what does that really look like?
- AI is helping choose targets in Iran war — now it's a target too
Iran struck three data centres in the Middle East, and has signalled that technology infrastructure will continue to be in the firing line.
- Quit ChatGPT: right now! Your subscription is bankrolling authoritarianism
As a historian, I’ve studied the major consumer boycotts of history. We can take down ChatGPT and send a powerful signal to Silicon Valley, says author and historian Rutger Bregman
- Windows 3.1 included a red and yellow 'Hot Dog Stand' color scheme so garish it was long assumed to be a joke, so I tracked down Microsoft's original UI designer to get the true story
Setting the record straight, 33 years later.
- A close look at the price patterns that landed Coles in court
The pricing patterns of these six products show how Coles stands accused of using its Down Down marketing campaign to dupe shoppers.
- 'I am shocked': Unpacking One Nation's spectacular rise in the polls
Pauline Hanson's One Nation has seen the fastest polling rise in modern Australian politics. What is going on?
- gradient.horse
Draw a horse, watch it run!
- What are the chances the RBA will raise interest rates?
The market thinks the RBA is likely to lift interest rates tomorrow, but the market has been wrong before.
- Code is cheap. Show me the talk.
Linus Torvalds once said, 'Talk is cheap. Show me the code'. That is no longer the case.
- Track temperatures live as heatwave sweeps across Australia
Use our tracker to keep an eye on temperatures as a heatwave moves across much of the country.
- Open Source Mapping for News: Reuters
Building an open source web mapping solution for the news service Reuters.
- Track the temperatures as southern Australian states face heatwave
Use our tracker to keep an eye on temperatures as a heatwave moves through the southern states.
- Just how big is the AI investment wave?
More money has been invested in AI than it took to land on the moon.
- Los Campesinos! Break Down All Their Payments From Streaming Services
The beloved Welsh indie-pop crew Los Campesinos! are a truly DIY institution. The band members serve as their own managers, publicists, and bookers. They have no record label. Last year, the band released All Hell, their first album in seven years, entirely on their own. A year and a half after its release, Los Campesinos!…
- How do you fire someone into the Sun?
It’s not enough to point a rocket at the Sun and ignite the engines.
- Some People Can’t See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound
Larissa MacFarquhar writes about the recent research into the neurodiverse syndromes known as aphantasia and hyperphantasia, their effects on our experience of trauma and memory, and the sense of identity that has grown up around them.
- Big map exercise gives community fresh perspectives on staying ahead of disasters
Giant satellite floor maps are helping people prepare for emergencies by showing them a bird's eye view of where threats come from, places of safety and how to navigate their neighbourhood.
- I Built the Same App 10 Times: Evaluating Frameworks for Mobile Performance | Loren Stewart
I needed to choose a framework for a mobile-first app at work. I started comparing Next.js, SolidStart, and SvelteKit, then expanded to 10 frameworks. The measurements revealed dramatic differences in bundle sizes, performance, and the real cost of framework choices.
- Paint me cool: scientists reveal roof coating that can reduce surface temperatures up to 6C on hot days
Sydney researchers commercialising a product they say can cool indoor spaces and will cost little more than standard premium paints
- They Asked ChatGPT Questions. The Answers Sent Them Spiraling.
Generative A.I. chatbots are going down conspiratorial rabbit holes and endorsing wild, mystical belief systems. For some people, conversations with the technology can deeply distort reality.
- How trans visibility became a trap
Parker Molloy talks about the trans people who have documented their lives online are discovering the dark side of digital permanence.
- Researchers say AI transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said
Whisper is a popular transcription tool powered by artificial intelligence, but it has a major flaw. It makes things up that were never said. Whisper was created by OpenAI. It's being used in many industries worldwide to translate and transcribe interviews, generate text in popular consumer technologies and create subtitles for videos. OpenAI has promoted Whisper as having near “human level robustness and accuracy." But more than a dozen computer scientists and software developers tell The Associated Press that isn’t always the case and that it's prone to making up chunks of text and even entire sentences. An OpenAI spokesperson says the company studies how to reduce that and updates its models incorporating feedback received.
- Friday essay: what can we learn about a city from its writers?
The explosion of urban writing set in the cities and towns of Australia allows us to walk amid history, subcultures and alternative visions of urban places.
- Explore an epic story 65,000 years in the making
Dive into Deep Time, an immersive story of the knowledge, art and ingenuity of Australia’s First Nations peoples — told like never before.
- Tiny Vinyl is a new pocketable record format for the Spotify age
Format is “more aligned with how artists are making and releasing music in the streaming era.”…
- 'I do not consent': Inside the world of 'sovereign citizens' and the pseudolaw that keeps their conspiracies alive
"Sovereign citizens" believe Australian laws do not apply to them. That's where pseudolaw comes in.
- Are developers falling out of love with Apple?
After very nearly four years fighting Apple’s iOS monopoly, I’ve noticed a definite shift in how many developers perceive Apple.
- Sam Altman Admits That Saying “Please” and “Thank You” to ChatGPT Is Wasting Millions of Dollars in Computing Power
If chivalry isn't already dead, it's certainly circling the drain. OpenAI CEO and tech billionaire Sam Altman recently admitted that people politely saying "please" and "thank you" to their AI chatbots is costing him bigtime.
- Can Australia still afford the pub, our coffee addiction or Friday night takeaway?
From regular coffees to Friday night takeaway or a trip to the pub, some of the things many Australians have taken for granted now feel like luxuries.
- Do you know your Art Deco from mid-century modern? Your guide to five popular design eras
Could you spot a postmodern pad from an Art Deco masterpiece? While Australia's architectural history doesn't stretch back as far as some centuries-old cultures, our design past reflects global trends and the Australian spin we put on many of them.
- Why we are still using 88x31 buttons
If you surf the modern "small web" to any extent you've encountered 88x31 buttons - a staple of late 90s and early 2000's websites1 undergoing a bit of a revival. The Neocities community especially seems to have truly embraced them.
- The Psychology Behind Why Your Child’s Hooked on Minecraft
Minecraft is the world’s best-selling computer game and soon to be a Hollywood film. This is why children can’t get enough of it.
- As a nonsense phrase of shady provenance makes the rounds, Elsevier defends its use
The phrase was so strange it would have stood out even to a non-scientist.
- A push to cool Australian cities may inadvertently increase our skin cancer risk, unless we act
Picture this: you’re working from home and it’s sweltering outside. You venture out for a coffee and move between patches of shade as you go. Good thing you wore your sunglasses, because the glare of the new footpath almost blinds you.
- The end is nigh and here's why
In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…because he thought the apocalypse was coming. Like many of his contemporaries, Columbus believed that the Earth was supposed to last for 7,000 years total, with only ~150 years remaining.
- Century-Scale Storage
If you had to store something for 100 years, how would you do it?
- Australia struggling with oversupply of solar power
Amid the growing warmth and increasingly volatile weather of an approaching summer, Australia passed a remarkable milestone this week. The number of homes and businesses with a solar installation clicked past 4 million — barely 20 years since there was practically none anywhere in the country.
- Solar panels on big Denver buildings throw shade that helps crops grow — and the plants return the favor
At first Jennifer Bousselot was furious. Her doctoral thesis on urban rooftop plant cultivation was going to be sullied by the installation of solar panels. The site was the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s downtown Denver office and she had no say. Then a funny thing happened.
- If our hot water heaters ran off daytime solar, we would slash emissions and soak up cheap energy
Your hot shower or bath uses 15-30% of your household’s total energy, second only to the heating and cooling of air. More than half of all Australian households rely on electric water heaters with a storage tank. These act like thermal batteries and often store more energy than a home battery.
- Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone
The standard trope when talking about timezones is to rattle off falsehoods programmers believe about them. These lists are only somewhat enlightening – it’s really hard to figure out what truth is just from the contours of falsehood. So here’s an alternative approach.
- The 3 AI Use Cases: Gods, Interns, and Cogs
We talk about so many things when we talk about AI. The conversation can roam from self-driving cars to dynamic video generation, from conversational chatbots to satellite imagery object detection, and from better search engines to dreamlike imagery generation. You get the point.
- Sleep perfectionists: the exhausting rise of orthosomnia
The other day, I was plodding away on the treadmill at the gym when I overheard two blokes chatting. My ears pricked up. A juicy story?
- Why we need to fight back against sexy Asian lady robots
Techno-Orientalism is a strand of futurism that condemns and erases Asian cultural power. We need to eradicate it, says Annalee Newitz
- 28 Years Later: Danny Boyle’s New Zombie Flick Was Shot on an iPhone 15
All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. Even though professional, cinema-quality digital cameras are now commonplace, they're generally not small or compact.
- Seagrass restoration along Sydney's coastline a vital intervention to save marine life
Unless you are a gardener it can be hard to understand the wonder and bliss green thumbs tend to possess. But the skilled scientists growing underwater meadows can relate to their terrestrial horticulturalists.
- What a 160-Year-Old Theory About Coal Predicts About Our Self-Driving Future
The Jevons paradox still has much to teach us.
- Study Finds Consumers Are Actively Turned Off by Products That Use AI
Researchers have found that including the words "artificial intelligence" in product marketing is a major turn-off for consumers, suggesting a growing backlash and disillusionment with the tech — and that startups trying to cram "AI" into their product are actually making a grave error.
- LLM-driven C-to-Rust. Not just a good idea, a genie eager to escape
Opinion Rust changes worlds. The iron ore we mine to feed the industrial age started out as iron atoms dissolved in oceans two billion years ago. Then photosynthesis happened, pouring out oxygen that rusted that iron out of the water into the solid minerals we've found so useful today.
- Is JK Rowling's brain actually full of black mould? An investigation
One of the enduring mysteries of our times for the online community, is why a formerly beloved children’s author would throw her career and reputation down the drain purely so she can make the lives of LGBTQIA+ people marginally worse.
- How not to use box shadows
Usually, a designer will carefully position squares within other squares with consistent margins, paddings, and typography for optimal accessibility and understandability. Wisely, they further add layered shadows and perhaps a few images to help visually distinguish widget interaction and state.
- Oil Companies Sold the Public on a Fake Climate Solution — and swindled taxpayers out of billions
The fossil fuel industry’s carbon capture bamboozle, explained.
- How Trees Hold Their Breath to Avoid Wildfire Smoke
An unplanned experiment when wildfire smoke rolled through Colorado shows how trees keep some of the smoke out.
- Sodium-ion batteries are set to spark a renewable energy revolution – and Australia must be ready
The extent to which renewables should dominate Australia’s energy grids is a major issue in science and politics. Solar and wind are clearly now the cheapest form of electricity. But limits to these technologies can undermine the case for a renewables-only electricity mix.
- Loab is showing us the unimaginable future of artificial intelligence
Meet Loab. Loab was created entirely by artificial intelligence.
- Watching a video game is basically playing it
I turn off my phone and prepare for another round of Dead by Daylight. The last match was tense — in the game, solo Killers need to capture an entire four-person group of Survivors, and this particular Survivor team didn’t want that to happen.