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    Boar’s Head Shuts Down Virginia Meat Plant After 9 Deaths Linked to Listeria

    I’m sure they’ll do all they can to ensure the other facilities are up to code but it makes ya wonder how it got so bad in the first place. Shit happens but I don’t think I’ll be eating Boar’s Head any time soon 🤢

    Flappy Bird announces its return, but with a… twist

    So, who is the Flappy Bird Foundation? Well, get ready for a big ol' bummer. When you dig deeper, you realize the foundation specializes in the selling of everyone’s favorite Ts, NFTs.

    Yes, unfortunately, the company behind the game’s return snagged the copyright after inactivity and is using it to sling crypto. Dong himself is not directly involved here.

    I was so excited for Flappy Bird to come back but not like this 🙃

    Music industry’s 1990s hard drives, like all HDDs, are dying

    You cannot trust any medium, so you copy important things over and over, into fresh storage. “Optical media rots, magnetic media rots and loses magnetic charge, bearings seize, flash storage loses charge, etc.,” writes user abracadaniel. “Entropy wins, sometimes much faster than you’d expect.”

    Backups are important

    OpenAI releases o1, its first model with ‘reasoning’ abilities

    The training behind o1 is fundamentally different from its predecessors, OpenAI’s research lead, Jerry Tworek, tells me, though the company is being vague about the exact details.

    With o1, it trained the model to solve problems on its own using a technique known as reinforcement learning, which teaches the system through rewards and penalties.

    Swingin' Back to Shellac

    Most 78s were 10-inches and held about three-and-a-half minutes of music. They were primarily made of shellac, which, believe it or not, is a resin secreted by lac bugs in the forests of Thailand and India.

    TIL old records are an insect product 🤯🎵

    Ohio’s oldest continuously operating inn appears to be for sale

    At 212 years old, the Buxton Inn is billed as “Ohio’s oldest continuously operating inn,” and has even housed multiple celebrity guests throughout its tenure, including Cameron Diaz, Jennifer Garner, Henry Ford, and Yo-Yo Ma.

    This place is a few miles down the road from us. It’s always been touted as one of the most haunted places in Ohio. It’ll be interesting to see what the new owners do with it when it sells! Hopefully they keep it operational. Ghosts or not, it’s a cool piece of history.

    Ford Seeks Patent for Software That Records Your Conversations to Serve You Ads

    If this kind of thing catches on I’m trading in my car for a Huffy. My phone already knows enough about me.

    Re: RSS Feeds Are Great

    Instead of mindlessly scrolling “for you” feeds, I now spend that time reading posts from other bloggers I follow via RSS. It’s been a wonderful experience.

    There’s great content out there, but you must curate it yourself. An RSS reader is a great way to do that.

    I’ve been doing the same thing for a while now too. I blogged about quitting social media and shifting over to Micro.blog recently. I don’t think that would’ve been possible without a well curated RSS feed to fill the void!

    Woman started wildfires so she could flirt with sexy firefighters

    A 44-year-old woman from Tripoli, Greece, was sentenced to three years imprisonment after deliberately starting two wildfires. Local media reports that she wanted to flirt with the sexy firefighters responding to douse the blazes, which did not spread far before being put out.

    Sounds like one of those “only in America” things but not this time!

    This robot is being controlled by a King oyster mushroom

    When the researchers shined a UV light on the fungus, it triggered an electrical impulse that quickly sent a signal to the motors and actuators in two custom built robots.

    This mostly feels like “powering a lightbulb with a potato v2.0” but the goal is to one day use fungi to monitor soil health. The robot thing is kinda click-baity but it’s cool they’re able to do something using electrical impulses from a mushroom. Reminds me of how they can “play a synth”

    We may not be responsible for the world that created our minds, but we can take responsibility for the mind with which we create our world

    I like this guys’s take on defining what addiction and trauma are and how they correlate. Gotta figure out who you are before the healing starts 🧘

    Little white lies about blue light

    The frequently cited 2013 study about blue light and its affect on sleep had just 5 participants and questionable methodology…Melatonin levels—not sleep quality—were measured before and after the 30 minute experiment. There was no control group.

    a 2021 study with 167 participants that tracked actual sleep quality between 3 groups of people…concluded there was no observable benefit from using Night Shift.

    Reminds me of when Bionic Reading was going viral. It sounds like it makes sense but its probably just a really good placebo effect

    The Internet Archive just lost its appeal over ebook lending

    The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in a fight to lend out scanned ebooks without the approval of publishers. In a decision on Wednesday, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that permitting the Internet Archive’s digital library would “allow for widescale copying that deprives creators of compensation and diminishes the incentive to produce new works.”

    Honestly I’m a little surprised physical libraries haven’t been outright banned at this point 🤦

    I thought I had this profound thought about picking the people in your life, etc then I realized it’s already a thing:

    If you can’t change the people around you, change the people around you

    Cheesy? Maybe. But I like it 😜

    New VWs will answer some of your questions with ChatGPT

    I was just reading about how people don’t want fancy tech packages in their car if it raises the price. Then I saw this article from The Verge:

    Drivers in cars that support ChatGPT will need to be subscribed to VW’s Plus Speech with AI service to get it

    …the company says when drivers ask for things like restaurant recommendations or for the chatbot to tell you a story, that will go to the cloud

    It’s like onboard navigation. A shittier (paid) version of a free thing your phone can do and probably no one wants built into their car

    NaNoWriMo Says Condemning AI Is ‘Classist and Ableist’

    Daniel José Older, a lead story architect for Star Wars: The High Republic and author of multiple series including Outlaw Saints, posted his resignation from the NaNoWriMo writers board

    I agree it’s dumb to allow AI in a writing contest but there’s been such an uproar from high profile writers on X. You can’t complain about how bad AI is for the planet and how it’s just a grift when you’re posting from Elon’s hellsite lmao it literally has a LLM built in and it’s ran by an actual supervillain. you’re directly supporting that if you use X

    Former Riot Games employees leverage generative AI to power NPCs

    Retail Mage is a roleplaying game that allows players to take on the role of a wizard working as a salesperson at a magical furniture store. The main goal of the game is to earn five-star reviews by helping customers. But it’s really up to the players to decide if they actually want to work or cause chaos. With AI NPCs as customers and human players being able to say and do almost whatever they want, the possible outcomes should vary widely.

    Actually a really cool use for gen ai in games

    AnandTech shuts down after 27 years

    For the past several years it seems as if there has been a trend away from ultimate understanding in content online and towards the tenets of modern mainstream media (sensationalism and the general silliness you see on US cable TV news).

    I never read AnandTech but I definitely feel where its founder was coming from when he said this in an interview with The Verge, all the way back in 2011

    Black mold, flies and roaches, rancid smells: No wonder Boar’s Head caused a listeria outbreak!

    Boar’s Head deli meat was recalled last month after it caused a listeria outbreak that killed at least nine people and sent 57 others to the hospital…A black mold-like substance was seen throughout the room at the wall/concrete junction…Inspectors also found “a green algal growth…dripping over product being held.”

    Eww. I always thought Boar’s Head was a super high quality brand but I guess not 🤢

    This Is Doom Running on a Diffusion Model

    the diffusion model is trained gameplay footage of Doom to produce the next frame based on the frames that came before it and player input.

    the development process for video games under this new paradigm might be less costly and more accessible, whereby games could be developed and edited via textual descriptions or examples images.

    this feels like the worst kind of use case for ai that would directly affect human game devs o_O

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