Category: Newsletters

A computer game-style drone attack system has gone viral among Ukrainian military units and is being extended to reconnaissance, artillery and logistics operations, the nation’s first deputy prime minister has told the Guardian. Drone teams competing for points under the Army of Drones Bonus System killed or wounded 18,000 Russian soldiers in September, with 400 drone units now taking part in the competition, up from 95 in August, Ukrainian officials said. The system, which launched more than a year ago, rewards soldiers who achieve strikes with points that can be exchanged to buy more weapons in an “Amazon-for-war” online store called Brave1 filled with more than 100 different drones, autonomous vehicles and other drone war material. It has a leaderboard topped by teams with names such as Achilles and Phoenix. (via The Guardian)

This restaurant serves excellent food but there’s one catch: It’s in a prison

Prison food and high cuisine simply don’t belong in the same sentence. Unless you’re going to the Clink. The Clink is a restaurant group based in the UK, not a prison. Their restaurants serve high-end fare — the one in Brixton, London, features a £48.50 gourmet menu (about $63) that features an amuse bouche, a choice of salads, a soup of the day, and entrees ranging from a chargrilled pork chop to a BBQ jerk monkfish. Reservations are hard to come by but if you land one, the experience is generally worth the wait; in 2024, a reporter for Business Insider described it as “delicious and reasonably priced for London.” It has more than a thousand reviews on TripAdvisor, averaging 4.8 stars, which puts it in the top 100 of all London restaurants. But there’s a catch: The Clink is situated inside a prison. And the people making your food, serving you your meal, and bussing your dishes? They’re all prisoners. (via Now I Know)

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Ukrainian drone operators win points they can use for weapons”

I’ve used this analogy before in other contexts, but the way we respond to or think about artificial intelligence reminds me of the old parable – first recorded in a Buddhist text from about 500 BCE – about the blind men who encountered an elephant for the first time. The man near the trunk thought it was a kind of snake, and the one near its legs thought it was a kind of tree; the man near the tusks thought it was a kind of spear, and so on. Casual users of OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude or Google’s Gemini probably have one vision of what AI is or can do – it can answer simple questions. University students probably see it as a way to write term papers more quickly. Others who use tools like OpenAI’s Sora video-generation engine have a different idea: they might see it as a tool much like Adobe’s Photoshop or Apple’s iMovie, but one that can create things that don’t exist. And those using AI tools in the lab might see it as a kind of supercomputer that can detect cancers or fold complex proteins.

All of these things are applications of current AI engines – so-called large-language models, or generative pre-trained transformers (which is what the GPT in ChatGPT stands for). In a sense, they are just tools, like a slide rule or a personal computer, or a steam-powered locomotive. But in the aggregate, all of these tools – and newer ones that are still being developed – look a lot like a tidal wave of disruption that could sweep through virtually every industry. In other words, AI looks a lot more like the Industrial Revolution, where mechanical processes took over a host of different industries, leading to the extinction of some jobs and the creation of others – new tasks that no one had even thought of before the machines came. In economic terms, it’s a classic example of what Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction,” in which new innovations replace and make obsolete older innovations. So electricity replaces fire, cars replace horse-drawn carriages, and refrigeration replaces ice harvesting.

In their book AI Snake Oil, Princeton computer scientist Arvind Narayanan and PhD student Sayash Kapoor argue (among other things) that the blanket term AI covers a wide range of different technologies and methods, some reliable and others not. It’s as if we didn’t have terms for different forms of transportation, they write – all we have is the word “vehicle.” In such a world, they say, there would be “furious debates about whether or not vehicles are environmentally friendly, even though no one realizes that one side of the debate is talking about bikes and the other side is talking about trucks.” Someone who only uses ChatGPT to generate grocery lists or recipes probably thinks all the talk of an AI-powered apocalypse is nonsensical, because they may be unaware that modern LLMs have been shown to fabricate lies about both their behavior and their motivation, especially if they have been given an incentive, which we know because Anthropic continues to do research in an attempt to understand why Claude does what it does.

Note: This is a version of my Torment Nexus newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Is AI like the slide rule or is it the Industrial Revolution?”

MaryBeth was 25 when she married a pilot named Bob Lewis. The couple had five daughters. When the girls neared adulthood and empty-nest syndrome kicked in, MaryBeth wanted more children. In her late 40s, she used in vitro fertilization to give birth to twin girls. And she wasn’t done. Despite medical mishaps, miscarriages and raised eyebrows from friends, she kept going, and going, eventually giving birth to her 13th child at the remarkable age of 62. But to bring this last set of twins into the world, MaryBeth went further — she tricked an I.V.F. clinic, a judge and even her own husband. These deceptions left MaryBeth, who is now 68, potentially facing a yearslong prison sentence. She has lost her job and is barred from her children’s school. She has dropped nearly 70 pounds from the stress and cries herself to sleep at night. Over two years, MaryBeth has spent more than $500,000 fighting for her freedom and for custody of the twins who she maintains are her 14th and 15th children. (via NYT)

There’s an orchestra in Boston that consists of people typing on manual typewriters

One night in 2004, Boston-area artist Tim Devin was presented with the gift of a child’s typewriter at a bar. His typing eventually annoyed the waitress who asked him to stop, whereupon he responded “It’s OK, ma’am. I’m the conductor of the Boston Typewriter Orchestra.” Thinking there was something to the idea, he assembled a group of interested performers on the night of October 20th, 2004 in Somerville, Massachusetts. An office setting was quickly decided upon as an overarching theme for live performances. The members (usually numbering between four and eight people) perform wearing white shirts and neckties, engage in typical workplace banter and write office-themed lyrics to satirical or comedic effect. The typewriters are utilized in a rhythmic fashion while melodic elements are supplied by the vocalists. The group uses several varieties of manual typewriters from such manufacturers as Underwood, Smith Corona, Hermes, Remington and Royal. (via Wikipedia)

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “She wanted a 15th child and then came the felony charges”

A once in a century discovery of a cache of long-lost letters has revealed how the English poet WH Auden developed a deep and lasting friendship with a Viennese sex worker and car mechanic after the latter burgled the Funeral Blues author’s home and was put on trial. Auden, a prominent member of a generation of 1930s writers that also included Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender, described his unconventional arrangement with the man he affectionally called Hugerl in the posthumously published poem Glad. “Our life-paths crossed,” it reads, “At a moment when / You were in need of money / And I wanted sex”. But little was known about the life and full criminal history of Hugo Kurka until Auden scholar Helmut Neundlinger mentioned his name in an Austrian TV programme occasioned by the 50th anniversary of the poet’s death in 2023. The next morning, Neundlinger received an email from a woman who had grown close to Kurka and his wife after they settled in the Austrian countryside in the 1990s and inherited their belongings after they died of cancer. (via The Guardian)

A 77-year-old cyclist survived for three days after a crash by drinking red wine

A French cyclist survived for three days after a horrendous 130-foot fall into a ravine, kept alive by the bottles of red wine he had in his shopping bag, police said. The 77-year-old missed a bend on his bike on his way home from the supermarket on a lonely road in the mountainous Cevennes region, careening down a rocky slope and into the ravine near Saint-Julien-des-Points. Unable to climb out, the man tried to shout every time a vehicle passed. But no one heard his cries. As the hours turned into days, he was sustained by the bottles of wine he was taking home to his caravan, rescuers said. Finally, passing roadworkers heard him yelling and spotted the twisted frame of his bicycle. A helicopter airlifted him to hospital, with rescue doctor calling his survival “a miracle … given the cold and the rain, with almost nothing to eat or drink” other than the wine. (via CBS News)

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Poet W.H. Auden’s lover was a sex worker who stole from him”

The second time I met Rodney Alcala was on March 23, 2013. We were inside one of the North Infirmary Command buildings on Rikers Island, two months after he’d been sentenced for raping and murdering Cornelia Crilley and Ellen Jane Hover, both women in their early 20s and living in New York City, in the 1970s. He was trailed by a prison guard, his baggy dove-gray jumpsuit hung loosely around his bony frame. His once black hair had turned the color of steel wool, still in greasy ringlets streaming past his shoulders. He was so much shorter than I remembered. Glasses that had been round wires were now rectangular. As he stiffly shuffled toward me, I felt stage fright — then a surge of real fright when I realized he wasn’t handcuffed. The first time was in April 1969, on a wet day on St. Marks Place in the East Village. He introduced himself as Jon Burger; I was 14 years old and he was 25. Four-decades-plus later, I learned his real name when it flashed across a television screen beneath his face: “Rodney Alcala, The Dating Game Serial Killer, Sentenced to Death.”(via The Cut)

Japan’s new prime minister is an Iron Maiden fan and former heavy metal drummer

Speaking on Japanese radio station Tokyo FM’s “BABYMETAL” podcast in August, Sanae Takaichi confirmed a longtime affinity for the iconic British heavy metal band Iron Maiden, but said her favorite artist was Japanese drummer Yoshiki, of the X JAPAN rock band from Chiba. Yoshiki is one of the founding members of the group, which has been around since the early 1980s, and Takaichi said she admired both his drumming and his piano playing, which she called “absolutely wonderful — technically brilliant and beautiful.” She also told Tokyo FM that she still listens to the heavy metal band Iron Maiden regularly. Takaichi’s passion for guitar-driven loud music doesn’t stop at fandom. She rocks. Since her days as a student she’s played both the drums and guitar, and says it’s that parallel that makes her such a fan of Yoshiki. (via CBS News)

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “She survived an encounter with the Dating Game serial killer”

James Joyce would rise late, after an inebriated evening spent belting out songs at the local boozer, and get his writing done in the early afternoon. Cheever did much the same, but got out of bed earlier.  Hemingway would stay up boozing but be at his typewriter by six the following morning. He famously wrote standing up because his leg had been injured in the war, he said, but also to stop himself drifting off. Francis Bacon used to paint hungover, though not because his mind was sufficiently numb to be able to concentrate, but because it was revved up: ‘I often like working with a hangover,’ he said, ‘because my mind is crackling with energy and I can think very clearly.’ Patricia Highsmith would hit the vodka before starting work, not to perk her up but to reduce her energy levels, which veered toward the manic. She also surrounded herself with pet snails, in the hope that some of the slowness would rub off. (via LitHub)

These 7,000-year-old mummies don’t share any DNA with modern homo sapiens

Between 14,800 and 5,500 years ago, during what is known as the African Humid Period, the Sahara Desert – known for being one of the driest places on Earth – actually had enough water to support life. Back then, it was a savannah that early human populations settled in to take advantage of the favorable conditions. Among them was a mysterious people who lived in what is now southwestern Libya and should have been genetically Sub-Saharan — except, upon a modern analysis, their genes didn’t reflect that. Led by archaeogeneticist Nada Salem from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, a team of researchers analyzed the genes of two 7,000-year-old naturally preserved mummies of Neolithic female herders from the Takarkori rock shelter. Though genetic material does not preserve well in arid climates, which is why much about ancient human populations in the Sahara remains a mystery, there was enough fragmented  DNA to give insights into their past. (via Popular Mechanics)

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “These authors liked to write while they were hungover”

I know what many of you are thinking as you read the headline on this post: The best thing ever? But what about Twitch Plays Pokemon, in which millions of people simultaneously played the game by posting commands in a chat room? Or the Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group, the website that indexes every size and shape of plastic bread-bag closure? What about the legendary video of a whale being blown up by dynamite on a beach in Oregon? What about Strawberry Pop-Tart Blowtorches or Bert Is Evil? I agree that those things are amazing, and I thank Zeus for the internet every day because of them (I used to collect this kind of thing on an old website of mine, which is archived here). But I think when we put aside the things that we personally enjoy about the internet, there is no question that the creation — and ongoing maintenance — of Wikipedia is a shining example of everything the internet was supposed to do, but in the vast majority of cases has failed to do. Collaborative effort on that kind of scale is vanishingly rare, and even more rare is the ability to keep that kind of work going for years, let alone for the more than two decades that Wikipedia has been around.

Why am I writing a paean to Wikipedia? I expect that some of you probably know of one reason already, but for anyone who doesn’t, Elon Musk just launched something called Grokipedia, which he describes as an “open source” alternative to Wikipedia. It is allegedly powered by the AI he built for X, which is known as Grok (as more than one person has pointed out, his Wikipedia alternative doesn’t really qualify as open source, because open-source projects are required to make all of their underlying codebase publicly accessible and shareable, and Grokipedia hasn’t done that). But this isn’t just about another Wikipedia competitor — there have been of plenty of them over the years, and there will undoubtedly be more. Even Google, which noticed how often Wikipedia showed up in its search results, tried at one point to launch a competitor, which it called Knol (something even Google staffers later admitted was a terrible name). Knol was supposed to aggregate crowd-sourced knowledge from experts and regular Google users, but it was barely even alive in the world before it suddenly vanished without a trace.

Musk claims that Grokipedia is intended to be an unbiased knowledge source that will be edited by his AI (and then laser-etched on tiny stones that will be placed throughout the solar system apparently, to “protect against civilizational regression”), but it is also a fairly transparent attack on what Musk and the American right say is Wikipedia’s “woke” bias. The decision to create a Wikipedia alternative appears to have sprung from comments by David Sacks, a friend of Musk’s who is a venture investor in technology as well as the AI and crypto czar for the White House. Sacks said on X that Wikipedia is “hopelessly biased” and is run by an “army of left-wing activists” who “fight reasonable corrections,” then said there was a market opportunity for AI to rewrite Wikipedia and take into account what he called “all the banned sources.” Musk responded that xAI, his artificial intelligence company, was doing exactly that for “all of human knowledge.”

Note: This is a version of my Torment Nexus newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Wikipedia is the best thing the internet has ever made”

It’s the fall of 1864. The war is going very badly for the Confederates. John Wilkes Booth is kind of the Brad Pitt of North America. He was a famous, dashing young actor, a committed supporter of the Southern Confederacy. A man who despised Lincoln. He begins to plot to kidnap Lincoln, in order to bargain Lincoln’s life for the exchange of the tens of thousands of Confederate prisoners who are in prisons all along the Canadian border. So he has this plot and where does he go? He goes to Montreal. He knows this is where some of the leading Confederate agents are. He knows this is where they’re getting their money and their support. He checks in at the St. Lawrence Hall. The owner who admires Booth, makes sure he gets one of the best rooms. Booth settles in. He’s playing cards with some of the leading Confederate agents and spies. (via CBC)

For 25 years this dolphin guided ships through a dangerous channel near New Zealand

Pelorus Jack was a Risso’s dolphin that was famous for meeting and escorting ships through a stretch of water in Cook Strait, New Zealand. The animal was reported over a 24 year period, from 1888 until his disappearance after 1912. Pelorus Jack was usually spotted in Admiralty Bay  near French Pass, a notoriously dangerous channel used by ships travelling between Wellington and Nelson. Pelorus Jack was once shot at from a passing ship, and was later protected by a 1904 New Zealand law. The dolphin guided the ships by swimming alongside a water craft for 20 minutes at a time. If the crew could not see Jack at first, they often waited for him to appear. He was first seen around 1888 when he appeared in front of the schooner Brindle. When the members of the crew saw the dolphin bobbing up and down in front of the ship, they wanted to kill him, but the captain’s wife talked them out of it. (via Wikipedia)

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Lincoln’s assassin planned the shooting while in Montreal”

It started with a suitcase hidden under a bed. It was 2009, and Antony Easton’s father, Peter, had recently died. As Antony started to engage with the messy business of probate, he came across a small brown leather case in his father’s old flat in the Hampshire town of Lymington. Inside were immaculate German bank notes, photo albums, envelopes full of notes recording different chapters of his life – and a birth certificate. Peter Roderick Easton, who had prided himself on his Englishness (and been an Anglican) had, in fact, been born and raised in pre-war Germany as Peter Hans Rudolf Eisner, a member of one of the wealthiest Jewish families in Berlin. The contents of the suitcase shone a light into a past that Antony knew almost nothing about. The revelations would lead him on a decade-long trail, revealing a family devastated by the Holocaust, a vanished fortune worth billions of pounds and a legacy of artwork stolen under Nazi rule. (via the BBC)

He was a championship snooker player but he is mostly remembered for his ability to drink

Bill Werbeniuk was a cult hero in the world of snooker, known for his prodigious consumption of lager. Four times a quarter-finalist in the Embassy world championships at the Crucible in Sheffield, between 1978 and 1983, he achieved a career-high ranking of eighth in 1984-85. At a time when snooker was emerging as a major television attraction, he became one of the game’s best loved characters. Born in Winnipeg, Werbeniuk was the son of a Canadian professional champion and former armed robber, fence and drug dealer. Werbeniuk suffered from hypoglaecaemia, a condition which enabled his body to burn off sugar and alcohol exceptionally quickly. He was thus able to cope with drinking at least six pints of lager before a match, a pint per frame during it, and a few sociable ones afterwards. He drank the Scottish professional Eddie Sinclair under the snooker table by consuming 42 pints. At one stage, the inland revenue allowed his spending on lager as a tax deductible expense. (via The Guardian)

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “An old suitcase and a family fortune lost under Nazi rule”

Japanese singer-songwriter Yoko Ono had an obsession with artist Salvador Dalí’s surrealism, and decided she wanted to buy a strand of hair from Dalí’s famous mustache. Ono offered to pay the artist $10,000, which is the equivalent of about five or ten times that in today’s dollars. But while Dalí was happy to take Ono’s money, he wasn’t so keen on sending her anything so intimate. According to reports, he was worried Ono was a witch and thought that she might use it for occult purposes. So instead of sending her a hair, he sent his partner to the garden to find a dry blade of grass, and sent it off in a pretty box. It was exactly the kind of stunt you’d expect from Dalí, who thrived on blurring the line between art, myth, and mischief. What’s more surreal than getting a counterfeit piece of mustache hair from Salvador Dalí? (via Now I Know)

Our brains remember stories differently depending on how they are told

In a new brain scan study, neuroscientists found that telling the same story different ways activates different memory mechanisms in the listener’s brain, shaping how someone remembers what you told them. The results don’t suggest that either form of storytelling—conceptual or perceptual—is necessarily easier to remember than the other; participants in the new study recalled the stories told in these two ways roughly equally. But the findings do show that different storytelling techniques can change how that information is stored and retrieved, perhaps explaining why some people are better at recalling stories with certain types of information compared to others. Memories aren’t stored in one place in the brain. Instead memory traces are distributed throughout the brain’s outer layers. These networks connect to a deep-brain structure called the hippocampus, which helps form and retrieve memories. (via Scientific American)

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Salvador Dali sold a blade of grass to Yoko Ono for $10,000”

The white marble headstone of Spc. 4 Richard Leroy McKinley may look like the other headstones in Section 31 but it marks Arlington National Cemetery’s only radioactive grave and the story of America’s first fatal nuclear accident. In 1961, McKinley was serving as an operator at the U.S. National Reactor Testing Station just outside of Idaho Falls. On January 3, 1961, following a 10-day closure for the holidays and maintenance, operators returned to work at the reactor station. Shortly after 9:00 p.m., a steam explosion erupted in the SL-1 reactor. When responders arrived at the reactor at 10:35 p.m., they found dangerously high levels of radiation and three men — Army Spc. John Arthur Byrnes, Navy Seabee Richard Carlton Legg, and McKinley – lying on the ground. Byrnes and Legg were already dead; McKinley miraculously survived the initial blast but died shortly after being placed in an ambulance. He was 27. (via Arlington Cemetery)

Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky and Freud all lived within a short walk of each other in Vienna

Trotsky and Stalin were just two of a number of men who lived in central Vienna in 1913 and whose lives were destined to mould, indeed to shatter, much of the 20th century. It was a disparate group. The two revolutionaries, Stalin and Trotsky, were on the run. Sigmund Freud was already well established. The psychoanalyst, exalted by followers as the man who opened up the secrets of the mind, lived and practised on the city’s Berggasse. The young Josip Broz, later to find fame as Yugoslavia’s leader Marshal Tito, worked at the Daimler automobile factory in Wiener Neustadt, a town south of Vienna, and sought employment, money and good times. Then there was the 24-year-old from the north-west of Austria whose dreams of studying painting at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts had been twice dashed and who now lodged in a doss-house in Meldermannstrasse near the Danube, one Adolf Hitler. (via the BBC)

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Why one Arlington Cemetery grave has a lead-lined casket”

Albert Clarke was a rascally nine-year-old when he inherited the estate of Margaret Wise Brown, his next-door neighbour, who had no children of her own. Ever since, as “Goodnight Moon” has drifted toward the center of America’s collective consciousness, he has floated on the fringes of society. No steady job. No fixed place of abode. Dozens of arrests. Rarely has his life traced a path through terrain even remotely resembling the world of Brown’s stories. Over the years, that world has yielded to him nearly $5 million. Today, he has $27,000 in cash. “I’m an inept bungler when it comes to business matters,” Clarke says, as ash drops from his cigarette into the folds of his trousers. “If it wasn’t for the fact that Margaret Wise Brown left me an inheritance, who knows? I could’ve been a homeless person. I could’ve been a poor, broken-down homeless person.” Clarke and his children have moved seven times in the past five years, their household a jumble of cardboard boxes and photos taped to the walls. (via Joshua Prager)

(Update: After this newsletter was published, I received an email from Ellen Geiger, the literary agent who represented Margaret Wise Brown, who pointed out that the piece I linked to was written 25 years ago, and that Albert “died a couple of years ago after having done his best and been a loving and supportive father to his children.” Just thought some readers might want to know that)

David Bowie borrowed his name but he is said to be one of the worst singers of all time

Norman Carl Odam known professionally as the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, is an outsider performer who is considered one of the pioneers of the genre that came to be known as psychobilly in the 1960s. As a teenager he combined his interests in outer space and the American west to create the name “Stardust Cowboy”, adding the word legendary because “I am a legend in my own time.” He recorded his signature song “Paralyzed” in 1968. He played dobro and bugle, while T-Bone Burnett played drums. The track features unintelligible snarls, growls, and similar vocalisms, surrounded by frantic strumming on acoustic guitar, Burnett’s equally frantic drumming, and occasional slurred yelps of the song’s title, “Paralyzed!” The words that are uttered change with each performance, and are occasionally intelligible. (via Wikipedia)

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “He got $5M from Goodnight Moon’s author and lost it all”

It’s a truism – at least in my experience – that the coverage of new product launches often seems to focus on the minutiae of a product. With Apple’s new phones, for example, it’s about how rounded the corners are or how big the bezel is, how many camera bumps it has, and that sort of thing. In part this is because new products are just that — new — and so many journalists likely haven’t had had time to take whatever it is out for a real spin, and in part it’s because in a mature category like smartphones there’s literally nothing else to talk about. But it’s also because a lot of tech journalists tend to be hard-core geeks, and they (and their gadget-obsessed audience) love to pore over tiny details and go down rabbit holes. True to form, there was a lot of this in the coverage of OpenAI’s new ChatGPT-powered browser Atlas — the UI of the opening screen, the nuances of the layout, how a user accesses the browser’s extensions, and so on. All of this is as it should be, but none of that is what interests me about OpenAI’s browser.

Just to recap, OpenAI launched the browser on Tuesday. Under the hood, the browser is Chromium, the open-source version of Google’s Chrome browser, which the company released for anyone to use in 2008 (interesting fact: Google also developed the “transformer” software that would eventually become the foundation for GPT — generative pre-trained transformer — engines like ChatGPT). Chromium is also the foundation of most other non-Google browsers, including DuckDuckGo, and Microsoft Edge. It’s also worth noting that there are two other Chromium-based browsers that have AI aspects built into them: Perplexity has a browser that it calls Comet, and The Browser Company has one called Dia whose motto is “chat with your tabs.” With no disrespect implied to these other products, I think it’s fair to say that they have had very little pickup in either the broader tech community or the world of “civilians,” as I used to refer to non-tech-obsessed people. Deservedly or not, OpenAI is the Microsoft or Google of the AI market, based not just on media coverage but actual users: ChatGPT has about 700 million, and is according to some estimates is one of the fastest growing apps of all time.

So is Atlas the first AI-powered browser, or the first browser with AI features? No. But it is likely to be the only one with the kind of name recognition that might get civilians to download it and possibly even use it. Of course, any such discussion has to start with the reality that many people aren’t even aware that there are different browsers — they use the one that came with their computer, whether it’s Safari or Edge, and that’s that. Even if they have heard of Chrome, they probably aren’t going to download it, or try to figure out how to import their bookmarks or tabs or whatever. And the vast majority of people will never have heard of Firefox, let alone Arc or any of the other alternative browsers that are out there. They may not even be aware of what the word “browser” refers to. I have a vivid memory of trying to explain to my mother-in-law the difference between the little box that you type a URL into and the little box that you type into when you want to search. So if OpenAI is targeting this broader market, good luck to them.

Note: This is a version of my Torment Nexus newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “OpenAI’s new browser is a small part of a much bigger plan”

Authorities are scrambling to find the gang behind the heist that targeted high-security display cases in the famous French museum. The criminals, who disguised themselves as construction workers on a cherry picker, are still on the run. Authorities fear the one-of-a-kind, and therefore highly recognisable items, will be melted down and destroyed before thieves sell them on. There are fears that those responsible could be a part of the ‘Pink Panthers’ – a gang which previously stole £23,000,000 of diamonds from Graff jewellers in London back in 2003. Many members of the gang are ex-soldiers with extensive backgrounds in paramilitary training. The Panthers have a history of targeting museums as well as jewellers. In 2008, a museum in Switzerland had a Monet, Van Gogh, Cézanne and a Degas stolen, with an estimated worth of £119,162,880.(via MetroUK)

Time moves faster the higher up you go so your head is a little older than your feet

Scientists have long known that time passes faster at higher elevations — a curious aspect of Einstein’s theories of relativity that previously has been measured by comparing clocks on the Earth’s surface and a high-flying rocket. Now, physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology have measured this effect at a more down-to-earth scale of 33 centimeters, or about 1 foot, demonstrating, for instance, that you age faster when you stand a couple of steps higher on a staircase. Described in the Sept. 24 issue of Science, the difference is much too small for humans to perceive directly—adding up to approximately 90 billionths of a second over a 79-year lifetime—but may provide practical applications in geophysics and other fields. The NIST researchers also observed another aspect of relativity—that time passes more slowly when you move faster—at speeds comparable to a car travelling about 20 miles per hour, a more comprehensible scale than previous measurements made using jet aircraft. (via NIST)

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Louvre robbers could be the infamous Pink Panther gang”

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem is one of the most important spiritual sites for Christians, so it may come as some surprise that the keys to the church are entrusted to the care of two Muslim families. This tradition dates back several centuries and was reportedly instituted by Saladin, the founder of the Ayyubid dynasty, who expelled the Christian Crusaders from Jerusalem. According to the historical record, two Muslim families have been entrusted with the care of the church for over 850 years. The keys, which were created on July 15, 1149, were entrusted by the legendary Ayyubid Sultan Saladin to two Muslim families in Jerusalem. On February 10, 1187, Saladin designated the Joudeh Al-Husseini family as the only rightful keeper of the keys and authorized the Nuseibeh family to operate the doors. (via Greek Reporter)

The solution to a famous cryptographic puzzle has been sitting in a library for ten years

For 35 years, the world’s most sophisticated minds have attacked Kryptos, a sculpture at CIA headquarters, with everything in the cryptographic arsenal. Computer scientists deployed algorithms, and obsessives spent decades analyzing letter frequencies, transposition matrices, and polyalphabetic substitutions. They all failed to solve the final 97 characters carved into the sculpture’s copper sheets. Then last month, two journalists cracked it in one evening using a powerful tool in intelligence gathering: asking a librarian for some boxes. When Jarett Kobek, reading the auction announcement for Jim Sanborn’s planned sale of the solution, noticed a throwaway line about “coding charts” in the Smithsonian archives. He asked his friend Richard Byrne to request the boxes. Byrne spent September 2nd photographing papers. Sanborn had accidentally included them when archiving his materials a decade earlier. (via Why Is This Interesting)

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Muslim families hold the keys to Jerusalem’s famous church”