Previous iterations:

Serious Reads

Seven Days At The Bin Store

Baltimore Avenue runs from the University of Pennsylvania campus in the east, west through a neighborhood that’s a mixture of million-dollar houses, squats-turned-group-houses, and some of the city’s most persistent poverty. For the six-ish years I’ve lived here, I’ve watched a handful of bougie businesses open and quickly fold, leaving behind empty storefronts. Housing prices just go up and up, but the retail strip suggests an uneven gentrification. Those fluctuating fortunes are mirrored in starkly divergent views of whether Amazing Binz is an “amazing store with amazing stuff and amazing prices” (their first Google review) or “a place that sells crap” (a post on West Willy).
A rather American take on the mesmerisingly vast world of fast commerce.

The Surreal Landscapes of Industrial Waste in Russia

Photographer Alexander Sukharev set out to document these hidden hazards. As a co-founder of the Kosmaj Project, he spent months traveling across the country, from Moscow to Vladivostok, using a drone to capture the scale of the damage. What began as a planned visit to a few sites soon became an obsession, leading him to seek out these polluted landscapes in nearly every city he passed.
More pictures than words, but still fascinating.

After 20 Years, the Globally Optimal Boggle Board

Using a 192-core c4 on Google Cloud, it took about 5 days to check around 1 million 4x4 board classes (~23,000 CPU hours). This is about $1,200 of compute. That’s a lot, but it’s not a crazy amount. (Fortunately I had a friend in BigTech with CPUs to spare.)

The result was a list of all the Boggle boards (up to symmetry) that score 3500+ points using the ENABLE2K word list. There were 32 of them. Here are the top five:
  • plsteaiertnrsges (3625 points)
  • splseaiertnrsges (3603 points)
  • gntseaieplrdsees (3593 points)
  • dresenilstapares (3591 points)
  • dplcseainrtngies (3591 points)
Also I learned a few weeks ago that my family have been using house rules for Boggle for 20 years and I never knew. We were running a restriction of much longer character requirements per word, but the letters didn't need to be in adjacency to each other. Frankly I prefer this because I beat everyone in this variant :3

Strangers in the middle of a city: The John and Jane Does of L.A. General Medical Center

One man hit by a car on Santa Monica Boulevard in January 2017 lived for nearly two years with a traumatic brain injury before dying unidentified in the hospital. As of late 2024, a few Does had been there for more than a year.

If a patient has no identity, L.A. General can’t figure out who insures them. And in the U.S. healthcare system, not having a guarantee of payment is almost worse than not having a name.
I thought a lot about people with dementia who could so easily fall prey to this.

Zero-click searches: Google’s AI tools are the culmination of its hubris

But Google's intentions don't end with AI Overviews. Last week, the company started an expanded public test of so-called "AI Mode," right from the front page. AI Mode doesn't even bother with those blue links. It's a chatbot experience that, at present, tries to answer your query without clearly citing sources inline. (On some occasions, it will mention Reddit or Wikipedia.) On the right side of the screen, Google provides a little box with three sites linked, which you can expand to see more options. To the end user, it's utterly unclear if those are "sources," "recommendations," or "partner deals."

Perhaps more surprisingly, in our testing, not a single AI Mode "sites box" listed a site that ranked on the first page for the same query on a regular search. That is, the links in AI Mode for "best foods to eat for a cold" don't overlap at all with the SERP for the same query in Google Search. In fairness, AI Mode is very new, and its behavior will undoubtedly change. But the direction the company is headed seems clear.
Even DuckDuckGo is not safe, but it's better than whatever the fuck this is.

Inside a romance scam compound—and how people get tricked into being there

Compounding all the challenges, however, is the integration of cheap and easy-to-use artificial intelligence into scamming operations. The trafficked individuals we spoke to, who had mostly left the compounds before the widespread adoption of generative AI, said that if targets suggested a video call they would deflect or, as a last resort, play prerecorded video clips. Only one described the use of AI by his company; he says he was paid to record himself saying various sentences in ways that reflected different emotions, for the purposes of feeding the audio into an AI model. Recently, reports have emerged of scammers who have used AI-powered “face swap” and voice-altering products so that they can impersonate their characters more convincingly. “Malicious actors can exploit these models, especially open-source models, to produce content at an unprecedented scale,” says Gabrielle Tran, senior analyst for technology and society at IST. “These models are purposefully being fine-tuned … to serve as convincing humans.”

Light Reads

If on a winter's night a traveler

A timely reminder if you're reading Wikipedia articles at 2am.

Titin

Another light Wikipedia read before bed.

Shipment of emus that swam to mainland New South Wales now thriving at Potato Point

It's a fuckin emu ya daft cunt

Which Early Christian Heresy Are You?

Absolute banger of a quiz that was sent onto me recently. I am Pelagianism apparently!