Even though the companies sell different products, some similarities are impossible to ignore. “We need a new term for ‘internet-based small businesses that still use global supply infrastructure,’” said my friend, the culture writer Kyle Chayka, when I told him about this story. “We know these minimalist-ish generic aesthetics are not connected to any true local origin, but we see them as indicative of some kind of authenticity. My current thought is that they don’t feel local to a place, but instead they feel local to the internet, which is, after all, where we all live.”

Successfully marketing a product so that it feels local everywhere is an art.

The first panel of "Here" shows an unadorned corner of a room in a house. The 35 panels that follow all show the location in space depicted in the first panel at different points in time, ranging from the year 500,957,406,073 BCE to the year 2033 CE. The panels are not ordered chronologically, and most of the panels are subdivided into multiple panes to show different points in time within the same panel. A wide variety of people, animals, and furnishings are shown passing through the space, including several recurring characters, such as a woman shown cleaning the room in 1973, 1983, 1993, 1994, 1995 and 1996. The corner of the room itself is the most enduring presence in the story; panels show the house being constructed in 1902 and sheltering several generations of occupants before burning in a fire in 2029 and being demolished in 2030. The space is shown to be a barnyard in the 19th century before the house is built, and the site of open-air band concerts after the house has been razed.

The question we should be asking is: as A.I. becomes more powerful and flexible, is there any way to keep it from being another version of McKinsey?

Drag and drop accounts you follow on the right side, to lists you have created on the left side.

There's a lot of misinformation circulating that obscures or softens Jack Dorsey's relationship to #Bluesky, Bluesky to Twitter, &/or Dorsey to Musk/Twitter.

On Dec 11, 2019, Dorsey announced on Twitter that he'd started Bluesky as part of Twitter, to serve Twitter, & funded by Twitter $, "to develop an open & decentralized standard for social media." (One already existed. Clearly the goal was one he controlled.)

"The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this [Bluesky] standard."

violet cybrespace decodes the qr code on a fast food drink cup using pen and paper

Defense lawyers in a civil case surrounding Tesla driver Walter Huang’s fatal 2017 car crash have claimed that Musk’s apparent 2016 statements on Autopilot, and others, could have been deepfaked. And, because the statements may or may not be authentic, the company has argued that Musk shouldn’t be forced to face questions about them.

Un peu plus d'un Wallon sur quatre (27%) avoue écrire des SMS, des e-mails ou autres messages en conduisant, ressort-il d'une étude de l'Agence wallonne pour la sécurité routière (AWSR) publiée jeudi. Certains trouvent même cela facile. De manière générale, les automobilistes surévaluent leurs capacités au volant, selon cette étude.

This web app sorts/searches through images in a directory on your computer using OpenAI's CLIP model, and the new File System Access API. Here's the Github repo for this web app, and here's the Github repo for the web-ported CLIP models.

Real-time video, audio, and data for developers

LiveKit is an open source Twilio Video or Agora alternative. Build live video and audio applications and features using a modern, end-to-end WebRTC stack.

Audio + Mastodon = Audon

Audon is a service of realtime audio streaming for Mastodon.

A self-hosted archiving service integrated with Internet Archive, archive.today, IPFS and beyond.

LONDON/SAN FRANCISCO, April 6 (Reuters) - Tesla Inc assures its millions of electric car owners that their privacy “is and will always be enormously important to us.” The cameras it builds into vehicles to assist driving, it notes on its website, are “designed from the ground up to protect your privacy.”

But between 2019 and 2022, groups of Tesla employees privately shared via an internal messaging system sometimes highly invasive videos and images recorded by customers’ car cameras, according to interviews by Reuters with nine former employees.

Some of the recordings caught Tesla customers in embarrassing situations. One ex-employee described a video of a man approaching a vehicle completely naked.

This is an Ecco the Dolphin Text Generator that creates animated gifs and static images using the ripple generating algorythm from Ecco 2 The Tides of Time

Features:

• Theme Selection
• Font Selection
• Background Effect Distortions
• Animated Characters
• International Character Support
• Russian Character Support
• Hiragana and Katakana Support

(
"author_is_elon",
candidate =>
candidate
.getOrElse(AuthorIdFeature, None).contains(candidate.getOrElse(DDGStatsElonFeature, 0L))),
(
"author_is_power_user",
candidate =>
candidate
.getOrElse(AuthorIdFeature, None)
.exists(candidate.getOrElse(DDGStatsVitsFeature, Set.empty[Long]).contains)),
(
"author_is_democrat",
candidate =>
candidate
.getOrElse(AuthorIdFeature, None)
.exists(candidate.getOrElse(DDGStatsDemocratsFeature, Set.empty[Long]).contains)),
(
"author_is_republican",
candidate =>
candidate
.getOrElse(AuthorIdFeature, None)
.exists(candidate.getOrElse(DDGStatsRepublicansFeature, Set.empty[Long]).contains)),
)

It's an essay that valorises the creativity of users, that talks about people's joy at using tools for things they're not intended for, that talks about how messing around on the computer is a joyous thing. And... it's this kind of folk or real understanding of how the system works that lets people do unexpected things with the system. The kind of... it's fun to play with the computer. But so often the way AI is pitched is... "this will let you be creative without having to mess around dealing with the actual substance of the work". And... you can't be creative without getting your hands messy. That's where the ideas come from!

Detroit's pre-techno history that spawned the techno movement itself