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In a Decoder interview, comedian and podcaster Adam Conover traces his path from CollegeHumor through cable's Adam Ruins Everything and Netflix back to YouTube, where he now runs a podcast called Factually! He contends Hollywood abandoned large swaths of TV programming to YouTube while chasing Netflix and HBO-style prestige, and rejects the notion that this shift democratized media.
A Reddit user analyzed their extended Spotify streaming history for a 2,000-song playlist and found a 72-track sequence played in the exact same order on two consecutive days. The repetition occurred even with the 'Fewer Repeats' setting enabled and without changing devices or playlists. Other users report similar patterns, including one case where 27 of 30 upcoming tracks matched a prior queue.
Australia's government unveiled a proposed 'My Feed, My Way' law that would require social media platforms to let users over 16 choose between an algorithm-driven feed or one showing only content from people they follow. Platforms would need to notify users to select a default option, and non-compliance could bring fines up to AU$109.2 million (about $79 million). The bill, headed to Parliament this year, also targets addictive design features in AI chatbots and games aimed at minors.
Terrastruct has released TALA, its custom autolayout algorithm for D2 diagrams, as open-source software under the same MPL-2.0 license used for D2 itself. TALA is an orthogonal layout engine tuned for software architecture diagrams, optimizing for symmetry, flow, clustering and other aesthetic qualities, and it uniquely allows users to lock specific node coordinates while letting the engine handle the rest.
Meta has settled a child safety lawsuit brought by more than 40 states plus DC and several territories, agreeing to pay up to $17 billion over a decade. As part of the deal it will roll out teen-specific product changes, including a default two-hour daily usage cap, overnight app blocks from midnight to 6 a.m., muted notifications during school hours, hidden likes, disabled cosmetic filters, and an option for a non-algorithmic feed.
The piece revisits Robert Bridson's 2007 single-page paper, which offers a fast algorithm for placing random points—like trees in a procedurally generated forest—so no two fall closer than a set minimum distance. It contrasts this compact, widely-cited solution with a nearly 1,000-page 2024 proof of the geometric Langlands conjecture, highlighting the range of scales in mathematical work. The algorithm uses a grid and an active-point list to sample points efficiently in an annulus around existing points, avoiding the slowdown of naive rejection sampling.
Dyson has released the CameraJet, an electric toothbrush priced at $499 that embeds a tiny camera in the brush head to livestream footage of your mouth to a paired smartphone over Wi-Fi. An AI system called Gap Optical Targeting analyzes 28 images per second from that camera to spot gaps between teeth and fires a targeted mouthwash spray to clean them within milliseconds, effectively flossing while you brush.
Graze, a startup that lets users build and control their own social media feed algorithms, announced it is joining Flipboard. Over 21 months, Graze had delivered more than 41 billion posts to 12 million users, and its founder said combining forces with Flipboard would accelerate its mission rather than spending years rebuilding infrastructure already in place at Flipboard.
Researchers led by Foschi and colleagues, publishing in Nature, developed an artificial-intelligence algorithm called kine that reconstructs continuous, movie-like views of relativistic plasma jets from black holes using sparse observational data. These jets, which blast material at over 98% of the speed of light, have historically been studied only through isolated snapshots, making it hard to trace their evolution over time.
Researchers developed an imaging method called kine that turns interferometric radio telescope measurements into dynamic video reconstructions rather than static snapshots. The technique relies on a neural field representation of a source's changing brightness distribution and was tested extensively on synthetic datasets before comparison with the established CLEAN method on real observations.
Amy Phung and Richard Camilli of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution developed a navigation method that lets underwater robots map their surroundings using sonar, which works regardless of water clarity, then pairs that data with a French-developed image-matching algorithm to estimate depth in real time. This combination lets a vehicle safely approach objects even when cameras are blinded by sediment clouds stirred up during seafloor operations.