An interesting idea: 3D printed, open-source industrial construction equipment that could create a village or small town if necessary, called the Global Village Construction Set.
Category: Technology
Mostly related to issues surrounding technology and computers, main include current events or news.
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A neat JavaScript calendar generator
If you have ever done any web development at all and tried to make a calendar, you’ll know that it is one of the more difficult things to get right. It’s more than just generating boxes and numbers. There’s other sorts of logic that need to be taken into account. Here is a neat JavaScript calendar generator.
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Tech Force
In an attempt to fix a self-inflicted wound, the US government is launching a program called Tech Force to hire technology workers.
But shortly after coming into office, Trump folded the USDS into the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) before renaming it to the DOGE Service and firing dozens of workers at the agency. The administration has sought to cut large parts of the federal government, including its tech talent, pushing out many workers and demoralizing the ones who remain.
Now, the Trump administration is turning to some of the nation’s biggest tech companies to revamp the technology used by the government. In June, the US Army similarly brought on executives from Meta, OpenAI, Palantir, and Thinking Machines Lab to advise the military branch on tech.
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Chat GPT paramour
The movie, Her, is becoming real life as people begin to fall in love with AI avatars.
Michael Inzlicht, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, said people were more willing to share private information with a bot than with a human being. Generative A.I. chatbots, in turn, respond more empathetically than humans do. In a recent study, he found that ChatGPT’s responses were more compassionate than those from crisis line responders, who are experts in empathy. He said that a relationship with an A.I. companion could be beneficial, but that the long-term effects needed to be studied.
“If we become habituated to endless empathy and we downgrade our real friendships, and that’s contributing to loneliness — the very thing we’re trying to solve — that’s a real potential problem,” he said.
His other worry was that the corporations in control of chatbots had an “unprecedented power to influence people en masse.”
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Google’s XR smart glasses
Privacy issues aside, Google’s XR smart glasses look to be an impressive leap in the device class as they take advantage of a paired phone to do the heavy processing. If these were completely hands free, they’d make a perfect device for those with limited dexterity or motor function in their hands.
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The Em Dash responds to AI slander
In McSweeney’s, the Em Dash responds to AI slander.
Writers have been using me long before the advent of AI. I am the punctuation equivalent of a cardigan—beloved by MFA grads, used by editors when it’s actually cold, and worn year-round by screenwriters. I am not new here. I am not novel. I’m the cigarette you keep saying you’ll quit.
You think I showed up with ChatGPT? Mary Shelley used me… gratuitously. Dickinson? Obsessed. David Foster Wallace built a temple of footnotes in my name. I am not some sleek, futuristic glyph. I am the battered, coffee-stained backbone of writerly panic—the gasping pause where a thought should have ended but simply could not.
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Self driving cars as a public health solution
The science fiction idea of all traffic consisting of autonomous vehicles lowering traffic accidents, is nearing a reality. Waymo released intro of data documenting nearly 100,000,000 miles of cars driven, and the numbers show significant safety outcomes.
The self-driving car company Waymo recently released data covering nearly 100 million driverless miles in four American cities through June 2025, the biggest trove of information released so far about safety. I spent weeks analyzing the data. The results were impressive. When compared with human drivers on the same roads, Waymo’s self-driving cars were involved in 91 percent fewer serious-injury-or-worse crashes and 80 percent fewer crashes causing any injury. It showed a 96 percent lower rate of injury-causing crashes at intersections, which are some of the deadliest I encounter in the trauma bay.
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AI animation acceleration
Disney is giving animators an AI tool to accelerate character animation.
To maintain the “creator-first approach” that centers human artists — a hallmark of last century’s Walt and Roy Disney partnership — Min says that Disney looked into “pretty much all of the AI companies.”
“We looked at thousands of companies, all big and small, and what Animaj does well is that the artist is really driving the process,” he says, adding that you don’t really see this in video-generating AI apps like Sora and Veo, which read your text prompts and spit out (usually nonsensical) videos. “This is the artist drawing the key frames from A to Z, and then allowing things to be filled in in between. That’s why we selected Animaj.”
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When your car becomes a brick
One of the frustrating things about modern life is when a device that requires software to work properly suddenly does not mean working properly, you essentially have a very expensive brick. Vehicles, that require gears, pistons, and all sorts of other mechanical bits and bobs–are also becoming very expensive bricks due to all of the software required.
Software-dependent cars are still new enough that it’s unclear how they will age. “It’s becoming the ethos of the industry that everyone’s promising a continually evolving car, and we don’t yet know how they’re going to pull that off,” Sean Tucker, a senior editor at Kelley Blue Book, told me. “Cars last longer than technology does.” The problem with cars as smartphones on wheels is that these two machines live and die on very different timescales. Many Americans trade in their phone every year and less than 30 percent keep an iPhone for longer than three years, but the average car on the road is nearly 13 years old.
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Activists simulate ICE raids in FortNite
Activists simulate ICE raids in FortNite.
The “special event” held on November 20, where players took on different roles that reflect real-life ICE raids, was the first initiative by New Save Collective, a baker’s dozen of gamers with backgrounds in activism and organizing, whose goal is to educate gamers and teach people about their rights when dealing with ICE in real-world situations. On November 21, at 7:30 pm ET, gamers will gather in Epic’s massively popular battle royale, Fortnite, to hold a closed scavenger hunt that will serve as a more casual educational opportunity. The group is working with several immigration advocacy groups, as well as collaborating with content creators, to spread their message online.