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The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

It’s as if the smell of burnt plastic from a dollar store has permeated the world. Things are worse: chipboard furniture, T-shirts unrecognizable after a second wash, packaged foods with more preservatives than ingredients. Airplane seats turned into backrests. Automatic restroom lights that turn off at a whim. But also newspaper articles shamelessly written with ChatGPT and its algorithmic prose. Nothing is made to be loved. Only to be bought. In a study titled The Concept and Measurement of P

The Catholic Church Reportedly Called in an Exorcist to Deal With "Yeti Cult" Running Bizarre Blood Rituals at Archdiocese of Denver

What started as a routine weekend getaway for seminarians from the St. John Vianney Theological Seminary in 2024 took a hard turn into the surreal. The archdiocese of Denver confirmed that an exorcist was called in after a bizarre series of events involving a ceremonial dagger, a mysterious blood oath, and a man in a yeti costume. As first reported in an extensive investigation by The Pillar, a publication covering the Catholic church, the incident is causing controversy and raising questions a

The curious case of the Unix workstation layout

Scroll through the blog: ‹ Newer | List All | Older › The Curious Case of the UNIX workstation layout Posted on 2025-07-19 Contents Background Cathode Ray Dude recently did an excellent video about the history of the PC case, particularly the early- and mid-1990s, and the various mainboard layouts that pre-date the ATX standard. You should watch it. Here it is. The rest of this blog will contain some spoilers for that video. UNIX workstations I have a bunch of 1990's RISC/UNIX workstatio

Erythritol linked to brain cell damage and stroke risk

From low-carb ice cream to keto protein bars to "sugar-free" soda, the decades-old sweetener erythritol is everywhere. But new University of Colorado Boulder research shows the popular sugar substitute and specialty food additive comes with serious downsides, impacting brain cells in numerous ways that can boost risk of stroke. The study was published in the Journal of Applied Physiology. "Our study adds to the evidence suggesting that non-nutritive sweeteners that have generally been purport

Mushroom learns to crawl after being given robot body (2024)

Your support helps us to tell the story Read more Support Now From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging. At such a critical moment in US history, we need

I tried Vibe coding in BASIC and it didn't go well

With the rise of LLM systems (or “AI” as they are annoyingly called), the term “vibe coding” is all the rage recently. Vibe coding is when you rely almost entirely on these “AI” system to write your code for you via a series of drawn-out conversations. Putting on my cranky old man hat, I find most of it rather frustrating. Now I’m not some retro-sycophant who refuses to use modern tools. I’ve been a software professional for over 30 years at this point and I’ve used lots of tools throughout the

Hungary's oldest library is fighting to save books from a beetle infestation

Hungary's oldest library is fighting to save 100,000 books from a beetle infestation toggle caption Bela Szandelszky/AP PANNONHALMA, Hungary — Tens of thousands of centuries-old books are being pulled from the shelves of a medieval abbey in Hungary in an effort to save them from a beetle infestation that could wipe out centuries of history. The 1,000-year-old Pannonhalma Archabbey is a sprawling Benedictine monastery that is one of Hungary's oldest centers of learning and a UNESCO World Herit

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sells an additional $12.94 million worth of shares

Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia Corp., speaks during a news conference in Taipei on May 21, 2025. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sold 75,000 shares on Friday, valued at about $12.94 million, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Friday's sale is part of a plan adopted in March for Huang to sell up to 6 million shares of the leading artificial intelligence company. Earlier this week, Huang sold 225,000 shares of the chipmaker, totaling about $37 million, ac

Popular Sugar Substitute Marketed to Diabetics Linked to Stroke, Heart Attack, Brain Cell Damage

Image by Getty Images Studies A widely-used sugar substitute found in products marketed to people with diabetes may involve more risks than rewards. In a new study published in the Journal of Applied Physiology, researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder found that erythritol — an organic compound used for so-called "stevia" products sold by the brands Wholesome, Truvia, and Splenda — can harm brain cells and increase the risk of stroke and heart attack. Created during the corn ferme

Psychiatric Researchers Warn of Grim Psychological Risks for AI Users

Without even looking at medical data, it's pretty clear that "artificial intelligence" — a vast umbrella term for various technologies over the years, but currently dominated by the data-hungry neural networks powering chatbots and image generators — can have life-altering effects on the human brain. We're not even three years out from the release of the first commercially-available LLM, and AI users have already been driven to paranoid breaks from reality, religious mania, and even suicide. A

Indie App Spotlight: ‘Nunch’ is an elegantly designed calorie and macro tracker

Welcome to Indie App Spotlight. This is a weekly 9to5Mac series where we showcase the latest apps in the indie app world. If you’re a developer and would like your app featured, get in contact. Many people want to do a better job monitoring their diet and eating habits, but don’t exactly know where to start. Nunch is a fantastic new app to make the process a lot more seamless. Top features Nunch‘s top feature is certainly its interface. It’s very clean, and gets straight to the point. On the

OpenAI's experimental model achieved gold at the International Math Olympiad

It's a major milestone for AI models, but this level of reasoning won't be available to the public anytime soon. OpenAI has achieved "gold medal-level performance" at the International Math Olympiad, notching another important milestone for AI's fast-paced growth. Alexander Wei, a research scientist at OpenAI working on LLMs and reasoning, posted on X that an experimental research model delivered on this "longstanding grand challenge in AI." According to Wei, an unreleased model from OpenAI wa

Threat actors downgrade FIDO2 MFA auth in PoisonSeed phishing attack

A PoisonSeed phishing campaign is bypassing FIDO2 security key protections by abusing the cross-device sign-in feature in WebAuthn to trick users into approving login authentication requests from fake company portals. The PoisonSeed threat actors are known to employ large-volume phishing attacks for financial fraud. In the past, distributing emails containing crypto seed phrases used to drain cryptocurrency wallets. In the recent phishing attack observed by Expel, the PoisonSeed threat actors

The tech that the US Post Office gave us

is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO. When you crack open your mailbox, it’s almost as if your letters just appear. Long before the days of speedy, overnight mail deliveries, postal service workers meticulously sorted through letters by hand and transported mail on horseback. For more than 250 years, the US Postal Service has worked behind the scenes to build a faster delivery network,

Piramidal (YC W24) is hiring a full stack engineer

We are looking for a software engineer to help us enable interactions and automations with Piramidal’s newest technologies. We value proactive, customer-centric engineers who prioritize foundational details (data models, architecture, security) to enable excellent products. In this role you will: Build and maintain the infrastructure and backend systems for our flagship platform focused on neural data. Collaborate closely with ML engineers to iterate on applying our latest models. and Work w

2025 Infrastructure Report Card

Choose State Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Connecticut Delaware District of Columbia Florida Georgia Hawaii Idaho Illinois Indiana Iowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York North Carolina North Dakota Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas Utah Vermont Virginia Washington West Virginia Wisconsin Wy

Piano Keys

Piano Keys If you've ever looked closely at a piano keyboard you may have noticed that the widths of the white keys are not all the same at the back ends (where they pass between the black keys). Of course, if you think about it for a minute, it's clear they couldn't possibly all be the same width, assuming the black keys are all identical (with non-zero width) and the white keys all have equal widths at the front ends, because the only simultaneous solution of 3W=3w+2b and 4W=4w+3b is with b=0

Mushroom learns to crawl after being given robot body

Your support helps us to tell the story Read more Support Now From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging. At such a critical moment in US history, we need

The Curious Case of the Unix workstation layout

Scroll through the blog: ‹ Newer | List All | Older › The Curious Case of the UNIX workstation layout Posted on 2025-07-19 Contents Background Cathode Ray Dude recently did an excellent video about the history of the PC case, particularly the early- and mid-1990s, and the various mainboard layouts that pre-date the ATX standard. You should watch it. Here it is. The rest of this blog will contain some spoilers for that video. UNIX workstations I have a bunch of 1990's RISC/UNIX workstatio

The borrowchecker is what I like the least about Rust

Written 2025-07-18 Among the 2010's cohort of programming languages, Rust is probably the most widely lauded. The main selling point of Rust is that it manages to combine speed and low-level control with a high level of bug-resistance, more commonly referred to as safety. The main innovation of Rust - really, its claim to fame - is its borrowchecker: the part of its compiler that enforces Rust's ownership rules and thereby allows Rust to achieve all the memory safety that garbage collected lan

Make Your Own Backup System – Part 1: Strategy Before Scripts

Backup: Beyond the Simple Copy For as long as I can remember, backup is something that has been underestimated by far too many people. Between flawed techniques, "Schrödinger's backups" (i.e., never tested, thus both valid and invalid at the same time), and conceptual errors about what they are and how they work (RAID is not a backup!), too much data has been lost due to deficiencies in this area. Nowadays, backup is often an afterthought. Many rely entirely on "the cloud" without ever asking

How to Watch France vs. Germany From Anywhere for Free: Stream UEFA Women's Euro 2025 Soccer

In-form France take on eight-time champions Germany in a mouthwatering Women's Euro 2025 quarterfinal clash at St. Jakob-Park Stadium on Saturday. Below, we'll outline the best live TV streaming services to use to watch this match as it happens, wherever you are in the world, and how to use a VPN if the game isn't available where you are. The French have never won a major tournament, but may sense this could be their year after they navigated the tournament's group of death with three impressi

Is the iPhone 17 Pro Going to Be Big and Orange? We Rounded Up the Rumors

Key takeaways: The rumored iPhone 17 Pro is expected to be released in early September. The Pro is rumored to be getting a scratch-resistant antireflective display. Colors could include black, silver, dark blue and orange. The new iPhone is likely just a couple of months away from release, and rumors about an iPhone 17 Pro have been ramping up. Although whispers about an ultrathin iPhone 17 Air have hogged a lot of the attention, the Pro models tend to include more upgraded features. In addi

Topics: 17 apple iphone max pro

Best Squat Racks of 2025

Choose a squat rack that fits your needs: "Focus your time and energy researching those racks that fit perfectly into your space and for the height of the people who will be using the rack," said Steve Stonehouse, VP of education and programming at Body Fit Training. You'll also want to check the quality of the machine. "There is a different quality and standard for commercial racks as opposed to personal racks," he explains. When deciding on the quality of the rack, something to consider is the

Today's Wordle Hints, Answer and Help for July 20, #1492

Gael Cooper CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the '70s and '80s," as well as "The Totally Sweet '90s." She's been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She's Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she'll be first in line.

Today's NYT Strands Hints, Answers and Help for July 20 #504

Looking for the most recent Strands answer? Click here for our daily Strands hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles. Today's NYT Strands puzzle is another summer-themed one, this time, focusing on clothing. If you need hints and answers, read on. I go into depth about the rules for Strands in this story. If you're looking for today's Wordle, Connections and Mini Crossword answers, you can

Microsoft says it will no longer use engineers in China for Department of Defense work

In Brief Following a Pro Publica report that Microsoft was using engineers in China to help maintain cloud computing systems for the U.S. Department of Defense, the company said it’s made changes to ensure this will no longer happen. The existing system reportedly relied on “digital escorts” to supervise the China-based engineers. But according to Pro Publica, those escorts — U.S. citizens with security clearances — sometimes lacked the technical expertise to properly monitor the engineers. I

In Court for Fatal Crash, Tesla Admits It Wasn't Even Tracking Autopilot Crashes for the First Three Years of the Program

With so many massive and well-publicized safety issues, nothing should surprise us about Tesla's internal culture — but new revelations from the country's first federal Autopilot crash trial have us shaken once again. As Law360 reports, an engineer at Elon Musk's car company revealed during a wrongful death trial this week that until 2018, the company didn't even keep records of Autopilot crashes — even though the assisted driving feature had been rolled out three years prior. In a taped depos

Bizarre "Infinity Galaxy" Could Hold the Secrets of Supermassive Black Holes

Astronomers using data collected by the James Webb Space Telescope have discovered a spectacular cosmic object they're calling the "Infinity Galaxy." The site of an epic head-on collision between two galaxies, it could harbor the secrets to how the heaviest black holes in the universe, the supermassive black holes found at the hearts of galaxies, are born and reach their unbelievable masses — masses extreme enough to organize trillions of stars around them. "Everything is unusual about this ga

Angry Callers Accusing Real Customer Support Staff of Being AI

A penny for the thoughts of our thankless call center workers. Long have they had to endure indignant customers fuming at them for problems beyond their control. And now they must suffer accusations that call their very humanity in question, Bloomberg reports, as the proliferation of AI tech has many callers suspecting that the human they're speaking to is actually a chatbot. If these customer support personnel weren't treated like robots before, in other words, they are now — in a distressing