Mandelnaut is the ultimate 1990s poster shop spinner, generating beautiful images of fractals with a huge array of options and settings and outputting images at custom dimensions.

Making fractal wallpapers: rendering escape-time fractals, finding beautiful views, and teaching models to judge them

There are Mandelbrots, Multibrots, Julias, and Phoenixes to explore and zoom around, 13 rendering modes, and hundreds of color schemes organized by hue and various pallette cycling knobs and dials on top. — Read the rest

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TL;DR: Get $150 in travel data credit, usable in 200+ countries, for just $69.99 (reg. $150) with aloSIM.

The last thing anyone wants to do after landing in their travel destination is wander around looking for the best and most affordable network carriers. — Read the rest

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Christopher Paul is running unopposed to become the chief of police in Elizabeth, Louisiana, a village of 417 people. Paul, however, was recently charged with raping two 13-year-old girls twenty years ago, creating a dilemma for locals who might not want someone suspected of serious crimes to be their only full-time police officer. — Read the rest

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Kenjiro Tsuda, an actor famed in Japan for his lustrous baritone, sued TikTok over an account that used an AI-generated replica of his voice in more than 180 videos. Tokyo District Court ruled this week that a persons' voice can be protected under Japan's publicity rights law. — Read the rest

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Fujifilm's ever-growing Instax range trends toward both high-end retro and pocketable fun (consider the runaway success of Kodak's Charmera), with both to be found in the Instax Pal 2. Shorn of its printer and only 1.4 x 1.6 x 3.6 inches (37 x 42 x 92mm), it's completely unlike the bloblike original in style. — Read the rest

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Executives from Samsung and Micron, two of the world's top sellers of random access memory, warned this week that the RAM shortage would continue through 2028. AI companies take it all for their datacenters, and what's left for everyone else will continue to command premium prices. — Read the rest

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Florida recently ordered law enforcement agencies to remove Flock cameras installed on the state's roads: the intrusive technology and regular misuse by police officers has led to a national backlash against the company and surveillance cameras in general. Most are already gone, but there's a problem: there are Flock cameras in St. — Read the rest

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Book of Shapes [via] is a collection of minimalist generative SVG patterns created by Nikolaj Sokolowski. Beautiful and elaborate, yet each defined by a few lines of code, they can be customized for use on the web or in print. — Read the rest

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In an attempt to shame the Texas senatorial candidate, who is not accused of bribery or securities fraud, Dementia Donnie keeps calling the omnivorous James Talarico a "vagan."

The number one way we know James Talarico isn't a "vagan" is because he isn't constantly telling us how ethical he is for being one. — Read the rest

The post Trump keeps trying to label Texas' meat-eating Talarico a "vagan" appeared first on Boing Boing.

AI detection is a difficult job, made worse for everyone by it being such a delicious ingredient in academic snake oil. But one service has clearly outperformed the others in tests: Pangram. It went beyond obvious characteristics of LLM output such as perplexity and ngram distance, training its own classifiers on large collections of human text and generative imitations. — Read the rest

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In 2006, The BBC reviewed predictions about robotics and AI made in the 1980s. Now, another 20 years later, we can reappraise its appraisal. When Will Intelligent Machines Take Over?

The segment features Sir Clive Sinclair, icon of early home computing, who plainly claims that the endgame of computing technology is AI. — Read the rest

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TL;DR: Give your PC a software upgrade with this $50 Microsoft Office 2024 Professional Plus lifetime license for Windows.

For some reason, software expenses always come up at the worst time. But this Boing Boing-exclusive Flash Sale is an easy way to get ahead of those unexpected costs. — Read the rest

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In yet another moment of "this guy is not competent to be President of the United States" moment, Donald Trump demonstrated how pilots used to use "little steering-wheels" to control airplanes. The plane he was discussing, the Boeing 737 MAX, certainly still has yokes. — Read the rest

The post Grandpa Pudding Brains demonstrates the little "steering-wheels" airplanes "used to have" appeared first on Boing Boing.

America's most boring sycophant, JD Vance, was mercilessly heckled at a rally for Byron Donalds and Sen. Ashley Moody (R-FL), and he created some interesting backstories for them.

While good ol' Just Dance, Vance didn't know the protesters' names, where they were from, or what brought them to a place where heckling a credibilityless, self-professed liar seemed like a good use of time—he was willing to imagine political positions and opinions for them. — Read the rest

The post Fox cuts away while JD Vance argues with hecklers and the positions he assigned them appeared first on Boing Boing.

Kurt Andersen, co-founder of the late great Spy magazine, announced that the 40th anniversary of the magazine will be celebrated on Substack, where "we'll start publishing starting next Monday the 5th, a limited series of daily excerpts and links from the magazine's archive, with bits of new commentary and context. — Read the rest

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The Merrimack Valley Collection is a legendary comic book collection in which someone bought comics off the rack and stored them in a cardboard box for almost 80 years. Heritage Auctions sold many of these comics in a couple of auctions in Dallas last week. — Read the rest

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Following his meeting with top AI executives yesterday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring that artificial intelligence will henceforth be known as "super intelligence." The order, which applies to federal government, follows a call he made last week during his speech to the United Nations General Assembly. — Read the rest

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In the latest issue of Why Is This Interesting, Mark Slavonia writes about the annual parallel parking championship in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where people compete to see who can parallel park.

The rules are that the clock starts ticking when the referee sees your reverse lights go on. — Read the rest

The post In Pittsburgh, people compete to see who can parallel park fastest and closest to the curb appeared first on Boing Boing.

A REACH medical evacuation helicopter crashed into the Pacific while departing Catalina Island. Of the five people aboard, two have died; two were taken to hospitals, and the patient is missing.

Catalina Island is a beautiful and remote place to live. — Read the rest

The post Catalina medevac crashes into the sea after picking up a patient for a flight to the mainland appeared first on Boing Boing.

A young rabbit was having a terrible time attempting a flyout at the local skatepark. Stuck in the bowl and unable to escape, the cottontail made a new friend.

This kind, patient skater pulled off an amazing tailgrab and eventually helped his new bunny buddy escape. — Read the rest

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"I wish it was AI. It's in my backyard, and it's scary," said a man who used AI to create an image of a venomous Gaboon viper and had teams of police and reptile hunters searching for the dangerous creature.

Santa Ana Police called in experts to help them find a four- to five-foot-long Gaboon viper after a gentleman shared photos of one in his neighbor's yard. — Read the rest

The post Officers search Santa Ana for a deadly but AI-generated African viper appeared first on Boing Boing.

France's Académie Goncourt has withdrawn Canadian-Haitian author Thélyson Orélien's novel C'était ça ou mourir (It Was That or Die) from consideration for its top literary prize. The book shows signs of being written by AI, reports The Guardian.

A lyrical first-person account of how a history and geography teacher flees a home country mired in gang violence… Published in France by Grasset in August, it has sold about 35,000 copies and won the Prix du roman Fnac, with translation rights sold to more than 20 countries.

— Read the rest

The post Novel withdrawn from running for France's top literary prize after AI claims appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Get unlimited website hosting, unlimited NVMe SSD storage, unlimited bandwidth, and 54 free lifetime domains with this Hostdeal Unlimited Plan lifetime subscription for just $149.99 (reg. $1,800).

If you're already hosting multiple websites for clients, small businesses, or your side projects, you'll know how costly things can get. — Read the rest

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Newly-installed traffic lights at a busy corner in Stretford, England, keep failing and leaving motorists fightened and confused. Part of a £17.6m (about $24m) redevelopment of the town center, the new lights have gone out three times, reports the Manchester Evening News, a pattern one local councillor described as "very odd." — Read the rest

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A school principal is on leave after voicemail caught her making ill-considered remarks about the parents of a 5-year-old girl who reported that she was inappropriately touched by a classmate. The parents of the girl, attending Grand Oaks Elementary school in Harris County, Texas, called to report the incident on September 25. — Read the rest

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Freckle is a small, square smartphone aimed at youngsters aged 7-13, designed to give them "independence" without providing features that encourage prolonged or repetetive use.

The $199 device has a 3.1", 720 × 720 touchscreen and runs a proprietary operating system, ClayOS, with no app store, web browser or social media apps—and definitely no YouTube. — Read the rest

The post Freckle is a kid's phone that sends them on real-world quests appeared first on Boing Boing.

Back in the day, when writing on the Internet was new and cool, I wanted a keyboard that had specialized keys for useful tasks such as multiple copy/paste, blockquote wrapping, and the all-important Curators' Code symbols. In essence, a Bloomberg Terminal for blogging. — Read the rest

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Last month's flooding in Carmel, Indiana, saw the White River burst its banks and destroy a number of homes—and caused a highway overpass to collapse. Eleven inches of rain fell in two days, raising the river to a record 24.6 feet crest. — Read the rest

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A movie featuring the SCP Foundation mythos proved controversial after the studio paying for the production, A24, implied in marketing that it would own the material. The problem is that the SCP Foundation is a sprawling collaborate project of unclear origins. — Read the rest

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Contractors working for the city of Sheffield, England, have repainted the street sign for Pool Square at least eight times since being awarded a highway maintenance contract there, reports The Star. It's more likely than not they will do so on any given year. — Read the rest

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