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.
Category: Technology
Mostly related to issues surrounding technology and computers, main include current events or news.
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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.
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CVE Program saved by private foundation
The Common Vulnerabilities and Exploitations database is a collective and comprehensive database for computer security. It’s critical for maintaining nearly any computing device. The US Government helped fund it as a necessary resource until April 16, 2025. A consortium of partners foresaw this and were prepared, establishing a foundation to keep it running.
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Collaborating with Algorithms
Algorithms are everywhere in our daily life. We can let them roll over us or we can attempt to collaborate and guide them.
It’s not just that Spotify’s recommendations tend to be pleasant because it has a lot of data about me. It’s that Spotify has the listening history of 675 million people, whose interests may overlap with mine in countless different ways. Over the years, I’ve developed a set of habits that help me hone those recommendations — things like making playlists, rejecting recommendations I don’t like, exploring artists’ catalogs, and maybe most importantly, digging through other people’s playlists.
This is what I call lean-forward listening. While it’s easy enough to click on Discover Weekly every Monday, lean back and listen to the whole thing like a radio show, and then move on to the next playlist, the more effort you put into curating your experience, the better the algorithms will work next time. At the very least, you’ll find your way onto a playlist that algorithms didn’t create.
I purposely jump between genres to keep all the various lists and feeds fresh and diverse. It works for the most part. I’d go so far to say this might be an aspect of modern media literacy: possessing an awareness that the media you’re consuming is controlled by others and understanding how you can influence it matters.
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Video games bleeding into real life
The term Game Transfer Phenomenon, or GTP, was first coined by Angelica Ortiz de Gortari, a psychologist at the University of Bergen in Norway. She first proposed the concept a decade ago while working on her doctoral thesis under the supervision of Mark Griffiths, head of Nottingham Trent University’s International Gaming Research Unit. Ortiz de Gortari was motivated by her own experience of GTP. One day, she was walking around her local supermarket and realised that she was imagining peering at products on the shelves through a rifle scope.
“I thought, ‘Wow! This is interesting’,” she recalls. “A phenomenon that changes your perception by encouraging you to see objects through the lens of the game you’re playing,” she says, adding that her response had felt involuntary, leaving her with serious questions about what it meant.
I’m sure we’ve all done something like this after a long Tetris or Super Mario session.
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Waymo crashes less than human drivers
Maybe we’ll get driverless cars some day. Waymo vehicles are showing promise, crashing less than human drivers.
Last September, I analyzed Waymo crashes through June 2024. So this section will focus on crashes between July 2024 and February 2025. During that period, Waymo reported 38 crashes that were serious enough to either cause an (alleged) injury or an airbag deployment.
In my view, only one of these crashes was clearly Waymo’s fault. Waymo may have been responsible for three other crashes—there wasn’t enough information to say for certain. The remaining 34 crashes seemed to be mostly or entirely the fault of others