In the latest issue of Rob Walker's The Art of Noticing newsletter, there's a description of a game called Kim's Game, which was originally described in a Rudyard Kipling novel. Rob came across it in a short story called "Kim's Game," by Sadia Shepard, published in The New Yorker earlier this year. — Read the rest

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One of my favorite newsletters is called Why Is This Interesting? It comes out every day, and they typically interview an interesting person to talk about their media diet or special interest.

In today's issue, they spoke to Todd Osborn, a US Air Force weapons systems veteran who is building a flight school. — Read the rest

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As OpenAI and Anthropic prepare to ask the public market for an extraordinary amount of money, times two, their core products have begun to sound like Skynet is here. We are only now realizing that Terminator was a cautionary tale.

Anthropic's IPO prospectus warns that its models could resist shutdown, conceal information, and behave in ways the mafia would recognize as blackmail. — Read the rest

The post Anthropic says its AI could kill us. OpenAI's is too unsafe to release. Please enjoy the IPOs appeared first on Boing Boing.

They brought back Clippy! Not Microsoft, sadly, but Definitely Not Windows, creator of Windows 11½, a web-based replica of the healthiest operating system.

It's a parody of the real thing, hitting the user with advertising, dark patterns, recurring and annoying notifications, and broken pop-ups. — Read the rest

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More than 500,000 faces were scanned by the live facial recognition systems set up in London's railway stations by the British Transport Police. At a cost of £320,786 (about $423,000) the numbers are in: the system scored "one false match against a watchlist of suspects" and notched up zero arrests over the course of a six-month trial. — Read the rest

The post London's live facial recognition trial ends in one false positive, no arrests, and a £320k bill appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Edit PDF files like a pro with a lifetime subscription to PDNob Pro PDF Editor for $49.99 (MSRP $349.95).

PDF files can be edited as easily as Word documents if you've got the right tools. PDNob Pro PDF Editor uses AI technology to help you edit, summarize, convert, sign, and translate PDF files for $49.99 for life. — Read the rest

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U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley (R—Iowa) is in his tenth decade of life and is displeased at the prospect of a Democratic governor appointing his replacement should he die in office.

"At 93 years of age, I don't know how many more groups of Republicans like this I'm going to have a chance to talk to," Grassley said Friday at the GOP's annual Reagan Dinner. — Read the rest

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Page Rage and Destroy Any Website let you ruin any website with a little pixel-art character controlled in classic WASD fashion. The styling is retro and the weapons are futuristic and extremely destructive.

"Destroying pages is all the rage today," wrote Page Rage creator Alex Reardon to Destroy Any Website creator Hugo Duprez after the similar toys popped up within a few days of one another. — Read the rest

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The Best of British Design has you choose a favorite betweeen two classics over several rounds, eliminating the loser until only one illustrious masterpiece of design remains in the bracket.

The British understand Design. Let's find the most iconic British design ever, from architecture to pop art, and from fashion to typeface.

— Read the rest

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House leader Mike Johnson ended congress early to avoid a vote on impeaching Pete Hegseth, President Trump's crusader-tattooed "Secretary of War," and opinion polls show why. Never popular in the first place, Hegseth is now among the administration's most widely-disliked personalities, an outcome downstream of his frattish machismo, documented ineptitude and the dismal grind of the war on Iran. — Read the rest

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The latest wave of diarrhea is upon us, courtesy of an Escherichia coli outbreak that has sickened at least thirteen people, sent eight of them to hospital, and led to three suffering hemolytic uremic syndrome, a severe complication whose symptoms include "bloody diarrhea" and "blood in the urine." — Read the rest

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TL;DR: IndyPDF offers over 20 tools for editing, converting, organizing, signing, OCR, and securing PDFs, with local processing and a lifetime subscription now on sale for $29.99 (reg. $99.99).

Your PDF needs one sentence changed. The internet would like you to create an account, start a trial, and surrender your email address first. — Read the rest

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Sharon Jacks of Washington County, Ohio, went into surgery to have part of her right leg amputated. The surgical team prepared and draped her leg, applied a tourniquet, and removed it. Unfortunateley, they did all this to the left leg, and Jacks is now suing the hospitals and physicians involved. — Read the rest

The post Wrong leg amputated, lawsuit claims appeared first on Boing Boing.

Our friend Coop has a new book coming out. It collects his rock-and-roll work from the last 40 years, including gig posters, flyers, and record covers.

It's called Poster Boy, and it is massive: 312 pages, 11 inches by 14 inches. — Read the rest

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It works, for a little while anyway. America is fighting rising sea levels with sand because we don't really have a better plan.

On both coasts, the United States' answer to coastal erosion is more beach sand. In just California: Newport Beach wants 200,000 cubic yards from the Santa Ana River. — Read the rest

The post Fighting Mother Nature, America has spent $15.7 billion putting sand back on beaches appeared first on Boing Boing.

Auralnaut's reimagined Star Wars series is both more fun than plain ol' Star Wars and makes a lot more sense. Obi-Wan "Larry" Kenobi takes the fan-favorite character and turns him up about 300 notches.

The tension between Anakin and Obi-Wan is far more believable in Auralnauts work. — Read the rest

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I own a 1976 Volkswagen T2 that was used as a hero vehicle in Matchbox: The Movie. Months later, I discovered that my actual bus had become a Matchbox model.

— Read the rest

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I wrote a few years ago about the mysterious and legendary 200 (!) unused songs that Stevie Wonder recorded for his 1976 masterpiece album Songs in the Key of Life. The musicians and engineers who worked on the double (plus) album have expressed amazement at the quality of the many, many songs that were fully formed and recorded but discarded. — Read the rest

The post Stevie Wonder finally releases four unheard songs from Songs in the Key of Life appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: ChatPlayground AI puts 20+ AI models, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek, in one workspace where you can compare responses side by side. The Unlimited Plan is now $54.97 (reg. $619, previously $79) through October 4 at 11:59 p.m. PT. — Read the rest

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The AP reports that U.S. president Donald Trump asked China's president if he wanted to buy US arms on Sunday, describing a deal that would "upend generations of U.S. policy toward China"—as if Trump blurting it out it meant anything.

The U.S.

— Read the rest

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I remember waiting hours¹ for an AmigaBASIC mandlebrot set to render on my Commodore A500 in 1992 or so, its 7Mhz CPU tackling 64,000 pixels one by one until the amazing results were complete. Now I can stare at wastingmytime's fractals zooming and morphing at 60 frames per second. — Read the rest

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When Concord Public Library in New Hampshire announced a yearlong amnesty on overdue fines, hoping to get some of its many purloined publications back, it didn't expect to see a 1894 issue of Century Illustrated. Local man John Hanson walked in with it, reports NPR's Sophia Palaza-Carre, and the given excuse that he did not himself withdraw the item was impossible to refute, him having not been born for another half a century. — Read the rest

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A truck-mounted crane tipped over onto a house in Fort Lauderdale on Thursday morning, and then a second crane brought in to lift the first one toppled while trying to right it. It too fell onto the house, reported Fort Lauderdale Fire Rescue spokesman Frank Guzman. — Read the rest

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More than a dozen English words long-used in Bermuda and the Caribbean found their way into the Oxford English Dictionary in 2016, joining last year's set in the definitive record of the English language.

Bimpert, from Bermuda, refers to a stupid or foolish person, as found in the traditional phrase "A bimpert is justah wuffless bye" (just a worthless boy) and Hornerman, attested in Trinidad since 1975 and referring to an unfaithful man, got top billing in coverage. — Read the rest

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You've surely seen interactive maps showing the effects of the sea level rising, but Sliding Shores makes a game of it: you get a beautifully-rendered globe and a slider to raise or lower the oceans. There's a load of presets, from "oceans drained" to "drown Everest," a feat not even Waterworld managed. — Read the rest

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Newcastle University in the United Kingdom has a new Professor of Sustainability: Anant Ambani, the heir to an Indian fossil fuels fortune and owner of an enormous zoo. Ambani earned the professorship for "his work in conservation, biodiversity protection, animal welfare and environmental stewardship" (he owns an enormous zoo) and "significant contributions to advancing a more sustainable future" (biggest oil company in India), reported The Guardian, to howls of laughter and derision. — Read the rest

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Microsoft and chip company Qualcomm launched the "Copilot+" PC branding in 2024 for so-called "AI" PCs. They even had a "Copilot" button that you could press to bring up the "AI". Though it at least indicated decent hardware, it was a hamfisted grasp at a vague buzzword and the "AI" features were badly implemented. — Read the rest

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TL;DR: Get this Microsoft Windows 11 Pro lifetime license for a one-time deal of $9.97 (reg. $199)—no subscription, no renewal. Available now, through October 4.

Upgrading software can feel like a drag. But when the price is right, even the most boring digital admin can feel like a win. — Read the rest

The post Access the Pro features that Windows 11 Home leaves out for just $10 appeared first on Boing Boing.

Matthew Ammel, the former bodyguard and former boyfriend of former Arizona U.S. Senator Kyrsten Sinema, was arrested after allegedly breaking into her home while she was out of town and causing $200k worth of damage. Ammel, police say, demanded that Sinema post a video to social media and threatened to throw one of her paintings into her swimming pool every ten minutes until she complied. — Read the rest

The post Kyrsten Sinema's former bodyguard and lover arrested after throwing 22 paintings in her swimming pool appeared first on Boing Boing.