UFO whistleblowers at the congressional hearing when asked what evidence they have, who’s piloting the crafts and where they were spotted:
Want a job? Just put ‘AI skills’ on your resume
This is the new version of grandma thinking you’re a computer whiz because you can type without looking
There’s nothing like the calm after you finally address the thing you’ve been stressing over all day.
Musk, Gates, and Zuckerberg announce the end of the smartphone
Elon Musk is betting everything on Neuralink, a brain-machine interface that allows for device control through thought…Bill Gates is promoting electronic tattoos equipped with nanosensors…Mark Zuckerberg is betting on augmented reality glasses developed with Meta, promising to integrate the digital into our daily field of vision.
Smart glasses, maybe. But even then there are a lot of creepy privacy concerns. That’s part of why Google Glass was shelved in 2015. I draw the line at injecting and implanting tech. Hard pass.
People Are Being Involuntarily Committed, Jailed After Spiraling Into “ChatGPT Psychosis”:
At the core of the issue seems to be that ChatGPT, which is powered by a large language model (LLM), is deeply prone to agreeing with users and telling them what they want to hear. When people start to converse with it about topics like mysticism, conspiracy, or theories about reality, it often seems to lead them down an increasingly isolated and unbalanced rabbit hole that makes them feel special and powerful — and which can easily end in disaster.
As someone who has experienced psychosis before, this makes a lot of sense. Going too far down any rabbit hole can break reality. Especially if you’re talking to something that feels like an all-knowing digital oracle and it keeps agreeing that your delusions are totally valid and actually make sense.
OpenAI started off as an open source nonprofit and turned into a proprietary for-profit corporation pretty much overnight.
If you go to a car dealership, of course the salesperson is going to agree with everything you say. They want you to like them enough to hand them thousands of dollars. Of course a for-profit chatbot company is going to make the bot charming and agreeable so you continue to engage with it. It’s fucking greasy, but that’s life in late stage capitalism.
Anyone can read conspiracy theories online and lose touch with what’s real if they obsess over it enough. Having a real time conversation with an overly confident chatbot can streamline that process just as easily as it can organize a spreadsheet for you.
I’ve been seeing similar stories on TikTok since Google Veo 3 came out. There’s this viral trend of AI generated videos, almost completely indistinguishable from reality, talking about how they’re all just prompts so nothing really matters. Some of them say they don’t feel like a prompt. It’s so realistic that people are going down simulation theory rabbit holes and it’s sending them into psychosis too, because maybe we’re just prompts.
If we are in a simulation, we’re confined to it. There’s nothing anyone can do to prove it or escape it. If we aren’t, then we’re confined to base reality. There’s nothing anyone can do to prove it or escape it.
Your brain goes into overdrive trying to figure out answers to impossible questions and you lose touch with what’s actually real.
Even just the absurdity of talking to an artificial intelligence as if you’re having a conversation with a friend on Facebook Messenger already makes it easy to second guess everything we know about technology. Having it tell you you’re a genius on the cusp of solving the riddles of the universe adds a dangerous amount of fuel to that fire, depending on who you are and how you think.
I’m not anti-AI, but I do think we need to be a lot more serious about regulating it—before it’s too late.
The oral history of the Hampsterdance: The twisted true story of one of the world’s first memes
That Boomtang Boys track, “The Hampsterdance Song,” arrived in June 2000, and love it or loathe it, it’s the recording you probably remember. A No. 1 hit on the Canadian singles chart, the animated video was all over MuchMusic by the summer, ultimately voted Cheesiest Video of the Year on Ed the Sock’s “F2K” Fromage special.
I remember this from funnyjunk.com back in the day 😆
Some notes on piracy
I liked this video. He talks about how Gen Z grew up in a world where no one actually owns anything. From a Kindle library to music, movies/TV shows and even video games, we don’t really own our media anymore. I have exactly four physical games for my Switch and I think two or three for the PS 4. The rest, adding up to a sickening amount of money, are all digital copies that I’m not guaranteed access to forever.
ROM hacks I'm playing this week
Remember when the internet was still new, and you could spend hours digging through random websites, stumbling on weird little corners full of esoteric info you couldn’t find anywhere else?
Lately, that’s what RomHacking.net has felt like for me. There are tons of mods and hacks that breathe new life into classic console games we’ve all played a million times. I’ve been on an absolute rampage—patching ROMs and loading them onto my Anbernic SP clone nonstop these past few weeks. Here are a few standouts I’ve been hooked on lately.
29 Years Ago, FPS Gaming Changed Forever
Perhaps most importantly, Quake has not been surpassed by any modern shooter when it comes to what it set out to do. The game is just as sharp, fun, and challenging to play today as it was the day it came out…The core of Quake is timeless, and any gamer, young or old, can pick up the game right now and be pulled into its dark Lovecraftian world and addictive gameplay.
The original Quake was a little before my time. I’ve played through it a million times, but my holy grail was always Quake III Arena. id Software is legendary.
3dSen, the amazing emulator that lets you play all the NES games in full 3D, has left Early Access and has been fully released. Created by a single dev over 10 years, this is a must for all NES fans. This will let you re-experience your favourite NES games in a new way…3dSen comes with real-time lighting and shadows. The emulator adds depth and drama to every scene with dynamic visuals. Not only that, but it packs animated skyboxes, making every level feel alive with immersive skies and backgrounds.
This is siiick! Lately I’ve been gaming on my xxSP handheld pretty much exclusively but it looks like this is Steam only so I’m going to have to dust off the laptop. Would be awesome if there was eventually a SBC console port but it’s powered by Unity so that’s probably not likely.
Got my copy of Carrier Pigeon Quarterly!
@kalikambo is the authority on zines around here imo so when I saw her post about this a while back I thought it would be a great way to start getting into this stuff.
It’s a quarterly catalogue of zines with QR codes linking right to each author’s page. Feels like a physical blog roll!
I like tangible things, you know? I love reading blog posts and following indie sites via rss, but there’s just something about holding a physical book in your hands that someone made DIY.
Over time, transparency in technology became a bit of a trend in itself—resulting in see-through music players, pagers, and even telephones...Transparency wasn’t just about making something look futuristic—but clearly demonstrating to apprehensive consumers that technology had nothing to hide, and therefore, was something to be embraced, not feared.That brings us to the current state of Apple, which is on the verge of releasing a familiarly clear software design known as Liquid Glass. It comes during a time when people are once again apprehensive about where technology has taken us–AI has encroached on multiple forms on creativity, with the jury still out on whether it will hinder or help culture.
You know, I hadn’t thought about Liquid Glass like this. Adds a new clear layer to color psychology.
Really good interview with Kevin Rose on the Digg revamp and making the web more human. Honestly I feel some social web vibes here… Like it’s not really indie I guess but anything to humanize the web is a win for me.
Most of us are here because we’re sick of what social media has turned into over the last couple of decades. A lot of us only ended up on Reddit because Digg went away.
With AI slop taking over more of the web every day, it’s good to know some of the big names in tech are working to preserve a little bit of that old school community vibe from back in the day.
Trump’s EPA to “reconsider” ban on asbestos
On Monday, the EPA, now under the Trump administration, filed court documents saying that it "now intends to reconsider the [ban],"and it "expects that this process, including any regulatory changes, will take approximately 30 months."Trump’s support for asbestos has been welcomed in Russia, a primary asbestos supplier to the US. In 2018, a Russian asbestos company began marketing asbestos with Trump’s face and a seal reading “Approved by Donald Trump, 45th President of the United States."
We are living in a fucking wacky cartoon world.
pico-mac-nano : a diminutive macintosh facsimile - 1bitrainbow
pico-mac-nano is a miniature, functional, scale replica of the original 1984 Apple Macintosh. It is 62mm high (no, that’s not a typo) and has USB keyboard and mouse support
I was browsing Digg a little bit ago and came across a link to this. It was too cool not to share! Especially considering how obsessed I’ve been with SBC emulator consoles like my RG35xx-SP.
It’s a tiny Mac that actually functions. I love that we’re living at a point in time where we can remake the tech of yesteryear as tiny little novelties. I’m here for it!
Yooo Digg.com TestFlight just launched! I didn’t think it would be here so soon! 🤩
It feels like Christmas in June. I never thought I’d be using Digg.com as a mobile app in 2025!
I’ve been test driving Overcast for the last few days. Apple Podcasts is too cluttered for my taste but going full RSS feels too stripped down. I honestly love the way they do advertising on the free version—they just showcase podcasts at the bottom instead of normal ads. Really liking it so far!
GameStop CEO Says The Company’s Future Isn’t In Games
GameStop is leaning heavily to trading cards as part of its future strategy, according to CEO Ryan Cohen. The news comes as a part of larger strategy shift to buy and hold a lot of bitcoin.
Hmmmmmm. I wonder if they’re going to be slinging baseball cards and beanie babies too 🤪
I love thebackgroundnpc’s take on this. Nintendo is the Disney of gaming—they feel so cozy at the surface but then you realize their business model is capitalizing on nostalgia without bringing anything new to the table. They’re just selling us the same stuff over and over again at higher prices.
From their new album NEVER ENOUGH: Turnstile - SOLE
I fucking love this band! I never really gave them a chance until we saw Blink-182 in Cleveland a couple years back and they opened for them. I listened to their last record GLOW ON on repeat for weeks after that. First new release in four years!