A Dutch supermarket chain introduced slow checkouts for people who enjoy chatting, helping many people, especially the elderly, deal with loneliness. The move has proven so successful that they installed the slow checkouts in 200 stores.

Penny Hardy, You Blew Me Away, 2014, recycled metals #WomensArt

A lot of people make fun of Elon Musk's tunnels, but I'm impressed by it. You could give me 1,000 years and I'd never come up with a solution to traffic as dumb as "a single lane tunnel for only one kind of car that you still have to drive in". Truly beyond the scope of my mind.

The space between paragraphs in online stories is getting filled with more and more stuff (video ads, display ads, links to other stories) that it's a chore to read anything online. I often have to scroll down 7-8 inches to get to the next paragraph.

No ‘ordinary’ tea towels in our house 🎛️

Conny Helder, ministerLZS, vindt “dat het niet meer past”… En waar worden vakmensen mee van hun werk gehouden? Met paarse krokodillen die gevoed blijven worden door de olifant in de kamer die het Ministerie van VWS in stand blijft houden: Huidig zorgstelsel.

"Perfect your memories" is perhaps the most haunted phrase I've ever read.

Sam Altman OpenAI That is, the very people in charge of building #ChatGPT want to believe SO BADLY that they are gods, creating thinking entities, that they have lost all perspective about what a text synthesis machine actually is. >>

Vintage blue screen of death… 😁 #vintagesynth

Here, video of the Moon traverses three security monitors and a large acrylic bell jar as a “Pepper’s Ghost” reflection illusion. The effect is being manipulated by sounds from my synthesizers in real-time. #practical #vfx #avart #videoart #diy #imagineering

losing the verified badge is going to be really bad news for people like me who are completely full of shit and required a signifier like that to be taken seriously. it’s frankly sort of a scary time for some of us in the full-of-shit community

As with many Twitter policies that are poorly thought out, if you wait 24 hours they get reversed.

If you’re making arguments for synthetic data in public governance, using “AI” synthesized user feedback, or broadly adding distance between human participation and the design of the systems that define their life… you are part of the technology and democracy problem.

“There was an exchange on Twitter a while back where someone said, ‘What is artificial intelligence?’ And someone else said, ‘A poor choice of words in 1954’.” A more helpful term would be “applied statistics.” Ted Chiang talking to Madhumita Murgia on.ft.com/3N6VD4W

Pale Blue Dot is a photo of Earth that was taken by the Voyager 1 space probe in 1990 from a distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles) as it was leaving our solar system. This is what Carl Sagan said about the photo: "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's