In October, researchers found 30 new underwater species including a carnivorous “death-ball” sponge: Its spherical form is covered in tiny hooks that trap prey, a clear contrast to the gentle, passive, filter-feeding undertaken by most sponges.
(h/t clover)
xkcd made a fun pairwise comparison chart for shielding against a variety of external entities such as gamma rays, sharks, and toxic dust with things like air, lead, water, and a shark cage. It’s very silly but a quite interesting.
Previously on “Why The Hell is Machine Learning Involved in This?”
A machine learning model that helps heal a wound. What could possibly go wrong?
How machine learning is helping seismologists understand earthquakes and predict them more efficiently
Literally groundbreaking.
Ocean waves and the maths behind them
What’s the Italian for “surf’s up, big kahuna?”
Bloomberg on the scale of Hurricane Melissa's destruction in Jamaica
“Chuck Watson, a disaster modeler at Enki Research, estimates economic losses at almost $7.7 billion, or about 39% of the island’s gross domestic product.”
Theia Vogel on LLMs and the infamous seahorse emoji
C:/HORSE
C:/HORSE/RUN
RUN/HORSE/RUN
Researchers from three US universities recently published a study on three new species of snailfish found off the coast of California. Our discovery of not one, but three, new species of snailfishes is a reminder of how much we have yet to learn about life on Earth and of the power of curiosity and exploration.
(via; h/t clover)
How to turn a VHS player into a gaming PC
Don’t sleep on this project!
Estampa created a cartography of generative AI, showing all the inner workings of the technologies behind way too much online activity right now: What set of extractions, agencies and resources allow us to converse online with a text-generating tool or to obtain images in a matter of seconds?
(via)
FlowingData posted about Bloomberg’s network diagram showing how Nvidia and OpenAI have a ton of circular deals with lots of multi-billion dollar enterprises, funneling money amongst themselves each other. It’s remarkable (derogatory).
Nelson rules
No, Nelson Muntz did not pay for me to write this.
Country names and the periodic table
Some countries are very radioactive!
While looking for console-themed CSS frameworks, I found this cool recreation of the PS2 startup screen. All HTML + CSS, no JS!
tektite.cc is a tool to help you migrate to a Blacksky PDS. I did it with my Bluesky account and it was so easy.
Web performance consultant Harry Roberts went on the look out for low and mid-tier mobile devices that real people are using in 2025 as a way to more accurately measure different experiences of the Web for people without iPhones and high-end Android phones.
A water-cooled steampunk PC made of copper
Party like it’s 1899
TIL: The first digits of the powers of two appear to follow a pattern:
1, 2, 4, 8, 1, 3, 6, 1, 2, 5…
7 and 9: always the sheep, never the shepherd.
Microsoft's new agentic web protocol 'NLWeb' done messed up in the most trivial of ways
Falling at the first traversal.
Dr Abeba Birhane on AI for Good Summit censoring her keynote speech at the last minute
It’s all infinite possibilities until someone says something they don’t like.