PJH Studios

Author: Patrick

  • The bankification of everything

    Every company offers credit card now. This has led to every company becoming an unregulated bank.

    Upward of 40 percent of Americans now pay for basic items like groceries and health care using borrowed money — and this excludes credit cards. A third of younger Americans hold their savings on nonbank tech platforms like Venmo, and industries from retail to transportation derive anywhere from 14 percent to half of their profits from partnerships with credit card companies.

    While this new type of financialization takes many different forms, the endgame is the same: Most major corporations now aspire to become unregulated banks, opening up new avenues to make even more money hand over fist. Banks operating credit cards are the highest-profit-margin enterprises in the economy. Every company wants a share of the loot, amassed from high fees and low overhead costs.

  • Taco Bell 50K marathon

    In Denver, someone figured out a 50 km loop that stops at 10 Taco Bells. Naturally, you would create an ultra marathon involving eating Taco Bell menu items.

  • Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman and MJ Lenderman broke up. Then she had to record a love song for him

    Karly Hartzman wries an essay about her breakup, yet having to record a love song. It’s full of lyricism and captures a certain feeling.

    I filled my Marvin the Martian cup with tequila on our neighbors’ porch next door. While swaying on the wooden porch swing, I ate collard greens with pork-jowl bits that my bandmate Xandy brought to the party. I nursed several pieces of homemade cornbread.

  • Everynoise, the music genre explorer

    Everynoise, the music genre explorer. You click a genre and get a sample. Selections skew electronic, but still fun.

  • Geoguessing

    Did you know that there are competitions surrounding identifying a certain geographic, location, a.k.a.geoguessing? Like, could you identify a location in 30 seconds based on a single image?

  • Arcade cabinet art

    Dan Sinker perused a collection of arcade cabinets, taking the colorful art, design and typography.

  • Covid altering immune systems?

    One idea is that Covid may be altering our immune systems.

    Malgorzata Gasperowicz, a Calgary based developmental biologist, says that if immunity debt fully explained rising infection counts we’d expect to see a uniform rebound across all pathogens. But we don’t, she says.

    For instance, a 2024 study of more than 4000 viral cases from Ontario, Canada,4 found higher rates of bacterial infections in people recovering from covid-19 than in those recovering from influenza or RSV—although study groups weren’t perfectly matched by age or clinical setting, limiting direct comparisons.

    Jeimy says that many infants and toddlers admitted to hospital with rare infections since 2022 weren’t yet born when pandemic restrictions were in place, and they therefore couldn’t be experiencing immunity debt. They were, however, likely exposed to SARS-CoV-2.

    Wolfgang Leitner, chief of the Innate Immunity Section at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), speculates that covid-19 may somehow impair the immune system’s “memory” of past infections, potentially making even healthy people more vulnerable to future pathogens. He wonders whether the virus leaves lasting scars on the immune system’s T cell defences. “But that’s just (my) hypothesis,” he emphasises in an email.

  • Will o the wisps explained

    We may finally have a full explanation into how will ‘o wisps work. We knew methane and other swamp gasses were involved, but how did they ignite?

    As with the static electricity produced by stroking hair, fur, or carpet in the right conditions, the microlightning results from a buildup of opposing charges until the field created is strong enough to make them leap a gap.

    High-speed imaging reveals the source of the charge as the surface of tiny bubbles of methane, which become either positively or negatively charged as they move through water, split, and combine. The charge concentration appears to survive the bubbles’ escape to the air. When the spark jumps the gap between a neighboring positive and negatively charged bubble, it leads to non-thermal oxidation, releasing energy from the chemical reaction between methane and oxygen, but mostly as blue-violet light rather than heat.

  • AI for science research

    Top AI technologists are spurning major offers to start an AI focused company specializing in advancing science

    Dr. Agarwal is among more than 20 researchers who have left their work at Meta, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and other big A.I. projects in recent weeks to join a new Silicon Valley start-up, Periodic Labs. Many of them have given up tens of millions of dollars — if not hundreds of millions — to make the move.

    As the A.I. labs chase amorphous goals like superintelligence and a similar concept called artificial general intelligence, Periodic is focused on building A.I technology that can accelerate new scientific discoveries in areas like physics and chemistry.

    “The main objective of A.I. is not to automate white-collar work,” said Liam Fedus, one of the start-up’s founders. “The main objective is to accelerate science.”

  • Playing SimCity 2000 as adult

    SimCity 2000 was a fun sandbox game as a kid, and looking back, building an airport first wasn’t a good choice. Ars Technia played the game with an adult lens.

    Can I live my values by sparing some money in a tight budget for homeless shelters or anti-smoking initiatives? Should I trust my police captain when he says crime is out of control, or should I wonder if he’s just protecting his own livelihood? Do I really want to spend more money and land space on solar power plants, or is a little pollution from the cheaper coal plant worth the trade-off?

    While these kinds of decisions plague me now in a way they never did as a child, the trade-offs I don’t have to make in SimCity 2000 also stand out. If I want to build a train line in SimCity 2000, I can literally pause time and just drag the tracks across the entirety of downtown. Here in the real world of suburban DC, I’ve watched as construction of the Purple Line light rail has dragged on outside my window for years, snarling traffic and running up costs in the process.