- newScammers are already using the hantavirus to fleece people
When I say scammers are using the hantavirus, I don't mean they're engineering devious biological weapon attacks (although I'm sure they would if they could.) It feels like it's barely been any time at all since a hantavirus outbreak left a Dutch cru…
- 5 hours ago 11 Jun 26, 4:46pm -
- newClaude AI is having a moment — this $20 course helps you keep up
TL;DR: The Claude AI Professional E-Degree is on sale for $19.99 (MSRP $49) through June 14 and includes hands-on training for prompting, automation, integrations, workflows, and practical Claude AI productivity skills.Every once in a while, the i…
- 6 hours ago 11 Jun 26, 4:00pm -
- newAn anonymous group posted internet puzzles to recruit code-breakers, then vanished
Cicada 3301 is the name of "three sets of puzzles posted under the name '3301' online between 2012 and 2014." The first appeared on 4chan on January 4, 2012, and ran for nearly a month; a second came in 2013, and a third in 2014. — Read the rest T…
- 6 hours ago 11 Jun 26, 3:44pm -
- newFive men left a basketball game in 1978 and drove into a mystery
The Yuba County Five were five young men from Yuba County, California, "each with mild intellectual disabilities or psychiatric conditions," who went missing after a college basketball game on February 24, 1978. Their car "was found abandoned in a re…
- 7 hours ago 11 Jun 26, 3:25pm -
- newGiant inflatable Elon Musk appears in Times Square, protesting Grok's lack of limits
New York, baby! Greatest city in the world! Or at least it is for a few hours this morning, because it's playing host to a massive inflatable bust of Elon Musk that appeared unannounced in Times Square. The inflatable, which is a shockingly good lik…
- 7 hours ago 11 Jun 26, 3:23pm -
- newIn 1932, John W. Campbell imagined machines outliving humanity
In 1932, a 22-year-old John W. Campbell — later the Astounding editor who shaped midcentury science fiction, and, as has been well documented, an open fascist — published "The Last Evolution" in Amazing Stories. It's narrated by the last thinking…
- 7 hours ago 11 Jun 26, 3:19pm -
- newThe first Tarzan pulp sold for $58,560 at a record-setting auction
A worn copy of a 1912 pulp magazine, graded just 2.0, sold for $58,560 this month because Tarzan is on the cover. All-Story No. 94, from October 1912, contains "the First Appearance of Tarzan" — Edgar Rice Burroughs' introduction of Tarzan of the A…
- 7 hours ago 11 Jun 26, 3:17pm -
- newA sculpture at CIA headquarters has kept a coded message secret for 35 years
Kryptos is a sculpture by artist Jim Sanborn on the grounds of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Dedicated on November 3, 1990, it carries four encrypted messages. "Of these four messages, the first three have been solved, while the fourth messa…
- 7 hours ago 11 Jun 26, 3:08pm -
- newHow Claude Shannon used his wife as a language model in 1950
Grant Sanderson's new 3Blue1Brown video starts from a 1940s question — how far can you compress text? — and arrives at why it matters for AI. The bridge is from Claude Shannon's information theory: "prediction and compression are mathematically…
- 8 hours ago 11 Jun 26, 2:34pm -
- newEstonian supermarket built around a 10,000-year-old Ice Age boulder
While shopping for groceries in Estonia, customers at the Viimsi Shopping Center in the town of Haabneeme can come face-to-face with a piece of ancient history: this gigantic Ice Age boulder estimated to be around 10,000 years old. The stone was unco…
- 9 hours ago 11 Jun 26, 1:31pm -