An essay examines how Japanese woodblock printmakers since the 1880s have depicted telegraph and power lines as symbols of modernity rather than eyesores, contrasting this with Western social media users who frequently mock utility wires as ugly. It highlights a 2021 Nerima Art Museum exhibition, curated by Yosuke Kato, that gathered roughly 130 works from the 1850s to today under the title 'Densen Kaiga' (Electric Wire Paintings), showing wires as a recurring visual motif in Japanese art and anime.
Chess.com quietly launched a free educational poker platform called Gambit in May, letting players learn poker and build an Elo-style rating without real-money stakes. The company says it's now developing similar rating systems for other classic games like go, backgammon, and mahjong, using AI-assisted coding to build these platforms faster with smaller teams.
A retrospective analysis argues that Nintendo's worst-performing console wasn't the GameCube or Wii U, but the Virtual Boy, a mid-1990s system that was discontinued in less than a year and sold far fewer units than either of those later machines. Despite its poor reception at launch, the piece notes a recent resurgence has made the Virtual Boy more accessible to try today than it has been in decades.
YouTube's Manage YouTube History page, found under Personalization settings, lets users view, search, filter and selectively delete their watch history. Options range from removing single entries to wiping data from a specific time range or clearing everything, giving people direct control over the signals that shape their recommendations.
Elon Musk confirmed that SpaceX is constructing a foundry in Bastrop, Texas, dedicated to casting turbine blades and vanes, a notoriously difficult manufacturing bottleneck in gas turbine production. Musk said the in-house casting operation could cut up to 18 months off the timeline for bringing new natural gas turbines online, supplementing solar power as SpaceX and Tesla scale up 100GW/year of solar capacity.
Mike Moore, the former Mississippi attorney general who helped broker the 1998 $246 billion tobacco settlement, is now advising state attorneys general pursuing similar action against social media firms. This follows Meta's roughly $17 billion settlement this week over claims it misrepresented how Facebook and Instagram harm children's mental health, a deal that included usage limits, age verification tools and parental controls. Moore, co-leading a nonprofit called Attention Initiative, wants a broader settlement covering more companies including TikTok and YouTube.
Citrix's Desktop as a Service now includes UniconOS, a lightweight, write-protected Linux environment installed alongside Windows on a separate partition. If Windows is disabled by ransomware or a bad update, employees can boot into UniconOS instead and reach their virtual apps and desktops through Citrix DaaS and SecurAccess, while Windows itself remains untouched and unrepaired.
At an annual robotics showcase in Beijing, humanoid robots competed across events including sprints, standing high jump, kickboxing and dance routines. Several machines reportedly surpassed human world records, including in the 100-meter and 400-meter sprints, while others suffered dramatic falls during the competitions.
A hobbyist bought two ASRock BC-250 mining cards from AliExpress for £126 and £103 respectively, and successfully unlocked all 40 compute units on both despite AMD's binning meant to disable some cores. One card also unlocked all 8 CPU cores, while the other had one faulty core, but both performed well running the gpt-oss-20b language model via llama.cpp, hitting up to 100 tokens per second at 8K context.
A new installment in an ongoing Domain-Driven Design series examines how separately owned and deployed bounded contexts, such as Ordering and Fulfillment, communicate business facts to each other. It introduces the concept of an integration event as a stable public contract distinct from internal domain events, delivered via asynchronous messaging systems like Kafka, RabbitMQ, or Azure Service Bus.
Roborock has released the Qrevo 2 Pro, a midrange robot vacuum that combines suction and mopping capabilities in one device. Testing found the unit performs cleaning tasks well but its object-avoidance sensors frequently fail to detect cables, leading it to snag or ingest them during runs.
A developer has published free, GPL-licensed source code for three old Windows 3.1x-era programs: a limited implementation of Conway's Game of Life, a GDI object-cleanup utility called GDI Rescuer, and a Mastermind-style game called Code Breaker. The Game of Life program notably demonstrates mixing 16-bit C with 32-bit assembly via winmem32.dll and handling palette and DIB color translation quirks of the era.
GoKawiil