Category: Technology
Mostly related to issues surrounding technology and computers, main include current events or news.
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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
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COBOL runs the world
If Excel, Powerpoint, and Outlook operate the surface level, what you can see of modern business, COBOL is the collective history of plumbing keeping a business functioning. Especially when it comes to financials.
Consider: Over 80% of in-person transactions at U.S. financial institutions use COBOL. Fully 95% of the time you swipe your bank card, there’s COBOL running somewhere in the background. The Bank of New York Mellon in 2012 found it had 112,500 individual COBOL programs, constituting almost 350 million lines; that is probably typical for most big financial institutions. When your boss hands you your paycheck, odds are it was calculated using COBOL. If you invest, your stock trades run on it too. So does health care: Insurance companies in the U.S. use “adjudication engines’” — software that figures out what a doctor or drug company will get paid for a service — which were written in COBOL. Wonder why, when you’re shopping at a retailer you will see a clerk typing into an old-style terminal, with green text on a black background? It’s because the inventory system is using COBOL. Or why you see airline booking agents use that same black screen with green type to change your flight? “Oh, that’s COBOL — that’s definitely COBOL,” laughs Craig Bailey, a senior engineer at Faircom, a firm that makes software to help firms manage those old systems.
And DOGE is just going to waltz in and retire these systems? Whoo-boy.
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ChatGPT turning images into Studio Ghibli
ChatGPT turning images into Studio Ghibli
The trend kicked off pretty wholesomely. Couples transformed portraits, pet owners generated cartoonish cats, and many people are busily Ghibli-fying their families (I’ve stuck to selfies, not wanting to share with OpenAI my siblings’ likenesses). It’s an AI-generated version of the human-drawn art commissions people offer on Etsy — you and your loved ones, in the style of your favorite anime.
It didn’t take long for the trend to go full chaos mode. Nothing is sacred: the Twin Towers on 9/11, JFK’s assassination, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang signing a woman’s chest, President Donald Trump’s infamous group photo with Jeffrey Epstein, and even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s congressional testimony have all been reimagined with that distinctive Ghibli whimsy (it’s not clear whether these users transformed uploaded images, or prompted the system to copy them). Altman has played into the trend too — he even changed his X profile picture into a Ghibli rendering of himself and encouraged his followers to make him a new one.
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Max Scherzer on robo-ups
MLB is trialing robo-umps and a ball/strike challenge system this spring training. Max Scherzer, a smart baseball guy with opinions, raises good points.
“What problem are we really solving?”
…
“If you said, ‘Do we like the challenge system versus the status quo?’ Yes,” Scherzer said. “But do we like the challenge system versus maybe some other options here? That’s where I’m kind of skeptical.”
This is where we can almost catch you muttering, Uh-oh. But hear him out. He’s a fan of the technology. But …
“I just think there are two other ways to use the technology,” he said. “Look, the technology, the way we can measure this, it’s great. So how can we use it in a way that minimizes its impact in the game?”
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Visualizing all the books
Recently, Anna’s Archive, perhaps one of the largest online shadow libraries, put out a call for visualizing all the books that have an ISBN. This would be helpful to understand how complete their coverage is.
Here’s a comprehensive explainer as to how the winning entry was designed.
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Building a (T1D) smartwatch from scratch
Andrew Childs built a Type 1 Diabetes monitor from scratch.
My 9 y.o. son has Type 1 diabetes, which basically means his pancreas is on manual (hard) mode 24×7. A healthy pancreas not only produces insulin, which helps convert glucose in the bloodstream into energy – it also produces glucagon, which tells the liver to release glucose into the bloodstream when blood sugar levels are too low. A person with T1D has to manage without either of these guardrails, and a low blood sugar can become a medical emergency if left untreated.
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Luddite teens
It sounds like a hipster indie band, but Luddite Teenagers are meeting up to emphasize connections without the distraction of technology.
“Our club promotes conscious consumption of technology,” she said. “We’re for human connection. I’m one of the first members of the original Luddite Club in Brooklyn. Now I’m trying to start it in Philly.”
She pulled out a flip phone, mystifying her recruit.
“We use these,” she said. “This has been the most freeing experience of my life.”