Apparently citydwellers in the US are walking 15% faster than they did in 1980 that's the result of some cool research ... ... by academics who acquired video from four major pedestrian areas in big cities, taken in 1979-80 ... ... then compared it to video from the same precise spots in 2008-2010 Other findings: - people *linger* less - they're more likely to be alone Item #3 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter, read/subscribe here:
Linkfest #28: Neolithic Octopuses, Weeping Trees, and a Forty-Year-Old Snowman
Hello! It’s time for "the opposite of doomscrolling” — or, my latest “Linkfest”, in which I painstakingly debone the entire Internet to e...
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A quick shout-out to @npub1hhfk...qrnt -- I realized it had been too long since I had exported and backed up my newsletters and subscriber list ... ... so I went into the dashboard and did it It took, like *one and a half minutes* *Including* poking around to figure out how to do it very smooth
Scientifically cool discovery, but kind of a bummer ... You know how Europa, the moon of Jupiter, has an icy shell that covers a *huge* amount of water -- 2X that of Earth? it was always a very exciting candidate for "another place in our solar system where life might have emerged" The problem is, new estimates suggest the upper ice layer is 21 miles thick -- that's 4X the height of Mount Everest *quite* a barrier to studying the water below damn https://www.science.org/content/article/surprisingly-thick-ice-jupiter-s-moon-europa-complicates-hunt-life
Ed Zitron went to Amazon and bought its best-selling laptop — a $238 machine running Microsoft S, a hobbled version designed to limit what a user can do The laptop is janky, slow, awful — and the internet it opens onto is a shitshow of upselling, slop, and con schemes, where the walled gardens are preferable mostly because they offer an illusion of order His point: for *most* people, computing is psychologically abusive He’s right Read the whole thing!
Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
Never Forgive Them
In the last year, I’ve spent about 200,000 words on a kind of personal journey where I’ve tried again and again to work out why everything digi...
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Okay people, it's time 🕙 once again ♻️ for "the opposite of doomscrolling" 🌞 My latest "Linkfest" newsletter just dropped 📬 , with the finest cuts of science, culture and technology Free to read and subscribe here!
Linkfest #28: Neolithic Octopuses, Weeping Trees, and a Forty-Year-Old Snowman
Hello! It’s time for "the opposite of doomscrolling” — or, my latest “Linkfest”, in which I painstakingly debone the entire Internet to e...
 Includes: ⛄ a 40-year-old snowman ⛪ a cardboard cathedral 🚲 powering an ebike with 130 vape batteries 🐌 the giant hot-pink slugs of Australia 🎲 the D&D wristwatch 📖 rawdogging "Ulysses" 🐙 Neolithic octopuses ... and SO MUCH MORE image
ChatGPT, being trained on a lot of pretty mediocre and overly flowery writing, tends to overuse some uselessly flourish-y words ... ... as with the discovery a while back that it keeps on saying "delve", as in, "let's delve into this" (something it picked up, reportedly, via training data from Nigerian business circles) what *other* words does it overuse? Jordan Gibbs did a fascinating analysis: https://medium.com/@jordan_gibbs/which-words-does-chatgpt-use-the-most-7c9ff02416a8 Unpaywalled: https://archive.is/9CCq9 image
"If you’re not a breadwinner on Substack, you’re the yeast. The yeast is responsible for driving app downloads, granting access to their social graph, and funneling their readers towards the platform’s top earners." Excellent essay by Tyler Denk, channeling recent and equally sharp critiques by @Anil Dash
Big Desk Energy
Death by a thousand substacks
If you’re not a breadwinner, you’re the yeast.
Australia generates such a massive amount of power from solar ... ... i.e. frequently in oversupply -- cranking out more juice than the cities can use ... ... that it is moving on to the next challenge: How to configure the grid, and its use of other forms of baseload generation, to keep things stable Really fascinating piece here:
Australia struggling with oversupply of solar power
As Australia surges past a solar-powered milestone, questions turn to how much is too much, and can we hope to store it all?