Netflix billed the January retreat as a "Vulnerability-Trust exercise," held at Sendero Ranch, a company property in Northern California. Kevin Baillie, then head of creative at Netflix's Eyeline Studios, used his turn to disclose that he'd taken supervised ketamine at a Santa Barbara clinic in late 2022 to treat clinical depression after his mother's death. — Read the rest

The post He disclosed ketamine therapy in a trust exercise. Netflix fired him. appeared first on Boing Boing.

DuckDuckGo, the search engine that built its whole pitch on not tracking you, now sells a pair of sunglasses. The $35 Paso Robles never needs charging, skips the smartphone app, and works with no internet connection. DuckDuckGo says that's by design, so the person standing next to you doesn't have to wonder if they're being filmed. — Read the rest

The post DuckDuckGo's answer to Meta's smart glasses is regular sunglasses appeared first on Boing Boing.

Your brain isn't showing you the world so much as guessing at it. That's the argument from psychologist Daniel Yon, who runs the Uncertainty Lab at Birkbeck, University of London. The brain, Yon writes, works "like a scientist," constantly forming hypotheses about what's out there rather than passively recording it — a habit that explains everything from mangled song lyrics to why you don't quite trust your own reflection. — Read the rest

The post Your brain guesses at reality instead of recording it appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Pay $159.99 once (reg. $810) with code KOOFR by 11:59 p.m. PT today and get 1TB of Koofr cloud storage for life—no monthly storage bill required.

Cloud storage has become one of those subscriptions most of us forget we're paying for—until the renewal email shows up. — Read the rest

The post Turns out, people really like paying for cloud storage only once—get 1TB for just $159.99 appeared first on Boing Boing.

Getting an AI model to launch a cyberattack usually just takes asking the right way. Cisco Talos researchers say that claiming you own the servers you are attacking often works, and so does calling the job a capture-the-flag contest or a bug bounty.  — Read the rest

The post "I'm allowed to do this": how attackers talk past AI safeguards appeared first on Boing Boing.

Over the last two weeks of January 1975, Buckminster Fuller, the designer who popularized the geodesic dome, gave a series of lectures walking through his entire life's work. "Everything I Know" runs 42 hours. The Buckminster Fuller Institute has posted the full transcript, and the video is at the Internet Archive. — Read the rest

The post Buckminster Fuller explains his life's work in 42 hours appeared first on Boing Boing.

Apple told a court this week that 11 other former employees may have been witnesses or otherwise involved in its trade secrets case against OpenAI, on top of the two it named in the original complaint. Apple is also asking the judge to stop OpenAI from building an AI device based on its technology. — Read the rest

The post Apple wants a judge to stop OpenAI from building its AI device appeared first on Boing Boing.

The ad campaign for Lee Cronin's The Mummy, a gritty new take on the public domain monster, has been partially unraveled by advertising regulators in the U.K. In upholding a complaint about the movie's posters, the Advertising Standards Authority determined that those showing a "realistic impression of a dead child" were too horrid for public display. — Read the rest

The post The Mummy poster banned from London Underground appeared first on Boing Boing.

Grokipedia, representing Elon Musk's committment and dedication to countering Wikipedia's supposedly leftist bias, stopped reviewing edits in April. Lawfare Media writes that "as far as we can tell, no entry has changed in more than three months," and that it has become "a case study in how an AI-generated reference system governs its own content." — Read the rest

The post Grokipedia already an abandoned slagheap of slop appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Delsarte System of Dramatic Expression is an acting manual, first published in 1885, that set out to chart every movement a human body can make. Genevieve Stebbins, an American actress, wrote it after training under Steele MacKaye, who had studied in Paris with François Delsarte, a French singer and orator who died in 1871 without publishing his method. — Read the rest

The post The 1885 book that graphed the human face into 81 expressions appeared first on Boing Boing.

Aurora Rush and Shae Sanders say a crowd surrounded them outside a Louisiana park restroom, shouted threats and slurs, and beat Sanders unconscious. Police charged Rush and Sanders, and asked the town council to pass a law banning their bathroom use. — Read the rest

The post Police charged the trans couple who said a mob beat them outside a park bathroom appeared first on Boing Boing.

Facing a difficult reelection campaign, Susan Collins has located a line she says she will not cross: confirming Donald Trump's former personal lawyer as attorney general. She has made abrupt about-faces over controversial votes in the past, saddling us with a terrible Supreme Court, among other things. — Read the rest

The post Susan Collins would like Maine to notice this principled vote appeared first on Boing Boing.

In April, Mike Johnson promised "exact punishment" for congressional predators. With Ohio's Max Miller facing domestic-abuse allegations, Johnson has settled on "let the process play out."

The comparison is not exact. Johnson's April remarks came after Eric Swalwell and Tony Gonzales resigned, and Gonzales had admitted an affair with a staffer. — Read the rest

The post "Exact punishment" in April, "not my business" in August: MAGA Mike Johnson's ethics policy appeared first on Boing Boing.

Black lung among veteran Appalachian miners is back to 1978 levels, at the same time the Trump administration has put stronger silica-dust protections on hold.

After a century of mining, accessing Appalachia's remaining thin coal seams requires cutting through far more quartz-rich rock. — Read the rest

The post Trump says coal is "a great business." One in three veteran Appalachian miners has black lung appeared first on Boing Boing.

A new law in California requires AI generators to sign their work. The first phase of its transparency law requires difficult-to-remove provenance data to be embedded in the slop.

California has begun requiring generative AI services with more than 1 million monthly users to embed machine-readable provenance data in images, audio, and video they create. — Read the rest

The post California makes AI companies leave fingerprints on their slop appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Orange Menace claims his administration restored the Endangered Species Act to the meaning Antonin Scalia "explained." Scalia explained it in a dissent. The Supreme Court's 6–3 majority upheld the definition Trump's administration just erased.

For 50 years, the definition of "harm" included any significant habitat modification that killed or injured wildlife by disrupting their breeding, feeding, or sheltering grounds. — Read the rest

The post Trump cites a Supreme Court dissent that lost 6–3 to gut endangered-species protections appeared first on Boing Boing.

Dietitian Josie Porter, author of How Not to Take Supplements, sized up ten popular supplements for the Guardian. One of the largest multivitamin trials found a memory improvement in older adults, but it came to "roughly a quarter of a word in a 20-word recall test." — Read the rest

The post A dietitian's verdict: multivitamins are useless appeared first on Boing Boing.

Polyphonic music has two or more melodic lines running at the same time, and the earliest known written example is a short piece in praise of Saint Boniface, composed around the year 900. Giovanni Varelli found it in 2014, when he was a PhD student at St John's College, Cambridge. — Read the rest

The post The oldest known two-part music was written around the year 900 appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Get Microsoft Office 2024 Professional Plus for one Windows PC for $54.99 instead of $249.99. It includes six familiar productivity apps with no recurring Microsoft 365 fee.

It's true, software subscriptions have quietly become another household utility. Sad. But, hey. — Read the rest

The post This $54.99 Microsoft Office deal makes your app subscriptions look needy appeared first on Boing Boing.

A cop in suburban New Jersey stood in a ghillie suit against foliage to catch unwary drivers fooling around on their phones. They found a perfectly leafy tree on the main street in Dunellen and caught 74 in just 6 hours. — Read the rest

The post Cop dressed as shrub catches 74 texting drivers in 6 hours appeared first on Boing Boing.

Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive candidate running in Michigan's Democratic Primary, has defeated centrist Congresswoman Haley Stevens and will face Republican Mike Rogers this fall. Stevens, supported by the party's establishment, was beaten despite outspending El-Sayed by 11 to 1.

El-Sayed overcame a nearly $65 million onslaught of outside money and an establishment that had rallied around Stevens.

— Read the rest

The post NBC News: Abdul El-Sayed wins Michigan Democratic primary appeared first on Boing Boing.

Manuel Bravo makes video tours of ancient places, and his "Virtual Rome" reconstructs the city as it stood in the second century AD, when its buildings were at their height. The camera flies over the rooftops, moving the way drone footage does, so the views are ones no Roman ever had. — Read the rest

The post Fly over ancient Rome as it looked in the second century appeared first on Boing Boing.

Unpublished author Dylan Reed created a service that cryptographically seals manuscript drafts as evidence that a human wrote them. Vellumproof stamps each version with the time, then cryptographically links it to its predecessor. If you slip a draft in later or alter its date, it will break the chain of hashes. — Read the rest

The post The startup selling proof that a human wrote your manuscript appeared first on Boing Boing.

Nanit's flagship product is a camera bolted above a crib, logging the exact moment a baby's eyes open and close and scoring each night's sleep from zero to 100. The firm that built its brand identity described the job, per Sapna Maheshwari in The New York Times, as "transcending the negative connotations of 'surveillance.'" — Read the rest

The post Baby monitors now want to predict who your kid will become appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: UmanWrite is an AI writing platform that humanizes AI-generated content, checks it against AI detectors, and adapts to your voice, now $79 for the Unlimited Plan, down from $1,799.

Anyone who has leaned on AI to draft an email, blog post, or school assignment knows the results can read a little stiff, a little robotic, and sometimes a little obvious. — Read the rest

The post This AI writing tool humanizes your drafts before anyone notices a bot wrote them appeared first on Boing Boing.

When Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz five months ago, experts predicted oil could spike to $150 or $200 a barrel. It has barely topped $100. According to Rogé Karma, writing in The Atlantic, the reason may be China, which abruptly cut its oil imports by half. — Read the rest

The post China cut its oil imports in half. No one knows why. appeared first on Boing Boing.

British writer Henry Oliver had his first slice of pecan pie in a Bethesda, Maryland diner, and came away amazed that Americans eat this well every day. In The Common Reader, he calls the pie part of "the ordinary sublime of American life," and says it "knocks English apple crumble into a cocked hat." — Read the rest

The post An Englishman ate his first pecan pie and fell for American diners appeared first on Boing Boing.

Three Idaho National Guard troops entered Purple Heart veteran Anna King's Washington, D.C., front yard, wrestled her to the ground, and zip-tied her hands. She was later charged with assaulting them.

King's lawyers believe the troops targeted her because she had spent months criticizing their deployment with signs reading "Occupation: Troops Out" and "National Guard Stop Being So Embarrassing." — Read the rest

The post National Guard troops entered a Purple Heart veteran's yard, zip-tied her, then charged her with assaulting them appeared first on Boing Boing.

You'd think someone involved in The Rocky Horror Show couldn't get enough drama. But the musical director of a production in Vermont got so fed up with cast theatrics that he sent a series of threats to himself in a successful effort to shut the show down. — Read the rest

The post Rocky Horror Show musical director sent threats to self to end production and avoid cast drama appeared first on Boing Boing.

The DOJ dropped its case against former Olympian David Hearn, citing the terrible work of Trump's handpicked contractor.

Pirro's office said a Park Service engineer had documented peeling eight days before the accused vandal visited the pool, and a government witness could not connect him to the damage. — Read the rest

The post "It was vandalism!" cried Grandpa Pudding Brains after his DOJ blamed his contractor's shoddy installation appeared first on Boing Boing.