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Reconnecting with friends
Once you hit a certain age, life accumulates, and staying in touch with friends becomes a challenge. Here are a few tips to reconnect with friends you’ve grown apart from.
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Flooded with AI slop
The ability of AI to near instantaneously churn out paragraphs of text is being weaponized to overwhelm well meaning officials.
One morning in October of 2024, Fredericton city councillor Margo Sheppard received an email with the subject line: “The Real Policy Crisis: Prioritizing ‘Nature’ Over People.” It was polished — almost algorithmically smooth — and it calmly urged her to reconsider Fredericton’s net-zero policies.
Over the next month, a flood of similar emails followed, all aimed at getting Fredericton to abandon global climate targets. Sheppard is used to emails from organizations on all kinds of issues, but not this many, not on this issue — and not so well crafted. She grew suspicious.
“If we’re getting them in Fredericton,” Sheppard thought, “councillors all across the country must be getting them too.”
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Ukraine hunting drones with a shotgun and an airplane
It’s such a simple idea: fly a two seater single engine plane, give the passenger a shotgun, and go drone hunting. Click through for a crazy picture of one setup.
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Publishing newspapers at 15
A group of teenagers are publishing their own weekly newspaper in Montauk, NY.
Billy Stern, the paper’s 15-year-old top editor, kept tabs on their progress in a planning document on his laptop. According to his color-coding system, reporters had already filed articles about nearby summer camps and the construction of a new hospital on the grounds of a former baseball field.
He turned to Teddy Rattray, 15, the paper’s most prolific columnist and Billy’s friend since Little League, to float ideas for a restaurant review.
“We still haven’t done hot dogs,” Teddy said. Billy agreed: Hot dogs should be an editorial priority.
The operation has grown slicker since the boys got into the news business last year, as eighth graders at East Hampton Middle School. Billy had been looking for a summer job that was more stimulating than his usual gig squeezing lemons at a food truck. He enlisted Teddy and Teddy’s cousin Ellis Rattray to put together an eight-page paper exploring Montauk from a teenager’s perspective.
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Play Doom anywhere
First person shooter Doom has earned a meme-like reputation for practically being able to be played anywhere. This stems from decisions made during its creation, enabling portability.
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I Don’t Have Spotify
I Don’t Have Spotify is a clever, one trick web app that takes Spotify links and finds music on other services. It works well for songs and albums.
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How the Trump Administration is breaking the government
A collective of writers have put together a website documenting how the Trump Administration is breaking the government. It’s detailed, concise, and well sourced.
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Infrared enabled contact lenses
Every day we get a little closer to the future, and recently, Chinese scientists have created contact lenses that can see infrared light.
The team screened various biocompatible polymeric materials (used to make commercial contact lenses) to find just the right refractive index and optical and mechanical properties, and integrated them with the aforementioned nanoparticles to make upconversion contact lenses (UCLs). Then they tested their lenses on mice, giving them a choice between a dark box and a box illuminated with infrared light. Mice wearing the contacts chose the dark box; those without augmented vision showed no preference. And the pupils of the contact-wearing mice constricted in response to infrared light, while brain imaging showed the visual processing centers reacting to it as well.
