While I don’t think they ever truly went away, cassette players are making a comeback of sorts with a thriving underground and indie tape scene. Maxell is making a new one with bluetooth and USB-C.
Category: Technology
Mostly related to issues surrounding technology and computers, main include current events or news.
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The Way of Code by Rick Rubin
I’m not sure if this is sincere or satire: The Way of Code by Rick Rubin, inspired by Lao Tzu. It contains 81 koans about programming, each accompanied by a AI generated gif.
The artwork above was created by vibe coding, generated based on the themes of each chapter. You can add prompts to change the images to your liking. You ultimately get to shape each of the art pieces.
This is how art creation always happens.
It starts with a prompt, a seed. It can be several sentences or something you notice on a walk. Anything can work as a first prompt. Only you can decide that.
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This band doesn’t exist
Velvet Sundown, a band with 350,000 monthly listeners, most likely doesn’t exist–a growing phenomenon enabled by AI.
Though they’re not yet dominating the charts, disturbingly realistic AI songs are slowly but surely creeping into our headphones – and you may even be listening to them without realizing what you’re hearing. Smuggled into popular playlists and hidden in plain sight among authentic, well-known tracks, AI-generated artists with fake photos, ChatGPT-generated biographies and no genuine fans to speak of are picking up hundreds of thousands of streams.
One such artist is The Velvet Sundown, a band with almost 350,000 monthly Spotify listeners but no discernible online presence or social media accounts. (“There’s not a shred of evidence on the internet that this band has ever existed,” as one Redditor put it.) While we can’t confirm that the band’s music is AI-generated, a glance at their artist image and bio should be enough to persuade even the least skeptical observer.
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AI can’t have my em dash
A supposed tell that something was written with AI is the use of the em dash—signifying a pause for a related thought. But really, it’s proof of what AI was trained on.
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Mary Meeker covers AI trends
For the better part of the 2010s, Mary Meeker’s trends report was a must read for anyone working in technology. 2019 was the last edition, but she’s returned, delving into AI.
Venture capitalist Mary Meeker just dropped a 340-page slideshow report — which used the word “unprecedented” on 51 of those pages — to describe the speed at which AI is being developed, adopted, spent on, and used, backed up with chart after chart.
“The pace and scope of change related to the artificial intelligence technology evolution is indeed unprecedented, as supported by the data,” she writes in the report, called “Trends — Artificial Intelligence.”
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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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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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Introducing the Slate truck
Two segments of the U.S. car market that are non-existent: an affordable truck and a basic electric vehicle that isn’t $35,000+. The Slate truck aims to do both for approximately $20,000. Open sourced specifications allow for customization. If the build quality is good and the aftermarket accessories create a healthy modding community, this thing will sell. And it’s not ugly!
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Subtitles in smart glasses
An interesting and useful application for smart glasses, real time subtitles in the lens. I am curious how well these will work in noisy situations like a crowded restaurant.
Meant specifically for the hard of hearing, the Captify glasses create closed captions from the audio they pick up with dual beamforming microphones, focusing directly on the person in front of you while cutting out any surrounding chatter. The speech is transcribed by your phone, which is connected to the glasses over Bluetooth, and the resulting transcription is projected in front of your eyes in glowing green text only you can see.