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LinkMe, September '24 edition: Come across an interesting link recently that you'd like to share, but don't want to work it up into a full post? Share it here for our perusal, nbd. And if you'd like to post something but need some inspiration, check out the links here to see what other members have found interesting and would like to read more about!...

Several months ago, a dentist visited his parents' new house for the first time and immediately spotted what looked like a human jawbone in the travertine tile (previously). A few emails later, it is positively identified as a probable hominid fossil and they are connected with appropriate researcher (subsequently). The tile has been removed safely and is undergoing further examination. Some additional tiles with...

'He was in mystic delirium' : was this hermit mathematician a forgotten genius whose ideas could transform AI – or a lonely madman? (Guardian)

"I'm not going to let anybody underestimate me," said Adam, who has multiple sclerosis and is known for her ability to zoom down the court, her signature sleek ponytail flying out behind her. "The guys think they're going to come and hit into me and knock me over, and I hit them right back and put them on their face and kind of roll...

Back from the brink, hairy-nosed wombats settle into ready-made new home. The success of conserving and breeding one of the world's most endangered animals, the northern hairy-nosed wombat, has seen the species move to a third location for the first time in decades.

The For-Profit City That Might Come Crashing Down [NYT Gift link] The dream of Próspera, founded by a U.S. corporation off the coast of Honduras, was to escape government control. The Honduran government wants it gone. As we peered over the edge of the tower's rooftop, I considered the story of a subcontractor who was working at the apartment tower at night two months...

"public-school enrollment has declined by about a million students" Alec MacGillis looks at a national trend by profiling secondary school closures in upstate New York. (SLNew Yorker)

How Do You Change a Chatbot's Mind? When I set out to improve my tainted reputation with chatbots, I discovered a new world of A.I. manipulation. (gift link) A while back, Kevin Roose published an article in which a chatbot professed its love for him (NYT). Now he's persona non grata among chatbots. Can he improve his reputation among them?My theory about what happened...

The U.S. surgeon general has issued a public health advisory on the stresses of modern parenting. "41 per cent [of parents] said most days they "were so stressed they couldn't function" — double the number reported by non-parents — while 42 per cent said they were so stressed they felt numb.""You know more than you think you do." - Dr. Spock, who besides being...

Wonderland is a new social network community centered around nature journaling sponsored by John Muir Laws and the Wild Wonder Foundation. Wonderland will allow users to share their work, plan events, connect with local clubs, etc.Content from experts to beginners. Resources for getting started. Previously.

Give novelists 120 years of packed daily commutes, late night rides home from bars and restaurants, early morning trips to the beach, and now the subway isn't just buried in the bedrock of Manhattan, it's burrowed deep within New York novels of the last twelve decades, a source of wonder, despair, quotidian boredom. Join us as we ride alongside fictional characters plucked from the...

Is there even a "thing" called "language"? "Mistaking the impressive engineering achievements of LLMs for the mastering of human language, language understanding, and linguistic acts has dire implications for various forms of social participation, human agency, justice and policies surrounding them."Link is to coverage in El Reg. Original paper here. Also, previously (just 5 hours ago, so maybe this is too soon, but strikes...

How Japan's black bears became a deadly problem. Japan recorded 219 bear attacks on people in the 12 months leading up to March 2024, including six fatalities. The situation is becoming so severe that government officials have warned some bears are viewing humans as prey.

After 27 years, AnandTech is shutting down AnandTech, a widely read tech magazine is closing its doors after publishing over 21,500 articles and running a lively discussion forum for all things computer related. The site will stay alive and the forums will continue to operate. In a farewell post the editor Ryan Smith mentions Tom's Hardware "". . . for everyone who still needs...

That's it. That's the headline. Reported by Jalopnik, msn.com, Yahoo! News. Months ago TheOnion.com reported on a different story.

The secret inside One Million Checkboxes, a technical and emotional reflection on running the site and unexpected discoveries: "Teens wrote me a secret. I found them." Previously on MeFi and it's now "shutdown" and all the boxes are checked, but you can play locally only at the site. And earlier from the creator: Scaling One Million Checkboxes to 650,000,000 checks.

"Technostalgia can be described as the fuzzy feeling one gets when seeing a device one used to use, having forgotten all its limitations or why it was upgraded. It is the warm endearment toward home computers of the 1980s that one might have encountered as a child, or else an unexplained fetishism for technology that predates one's own lifetime but which represents a certain...

'On its face, asking language to make sense without word order seems impossible. We speak words one at a time, and write and read that way, too. But our intuitions about how language works may not reflect what really goes on inside our heads. "How do you know you're purely sequential?" Vaswani asked me. Anyway, he continued, "why should you impose your restrictions on...

Photos of 2005 Haditha Massacre Finally Published - "On Tuesday, The New Yorker published 10 of the massacre photos—part of a collaboration with the "In the Dark" podcast that joined the magazine last year.' // The podcast's reporting team had filed its public records request four years ago, then sued the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Central Command over their failure to hand over...

Previously, in 2019 a Scottish tourist unexpectedly ends up in the faux-Bavarian town of Leavenworth, WA. Now: 4 Bavarian tourists visited Leavenworth. Here's what they thought (archive)

So what happened to all this ferment and excitement, all of the high-powered theory being done under the banner of Western Marxism? It's the damndest thing, but all of those smart, important Marxists and neo-Marxists, doing all that high-powered work, became liberals. Every single one of the theorists at the core of the analytic Marxism movement – not just Cohen, but Philippe van Parijs,...

Steph Tisdell wanted to be a lawyer. But being a comedian, actor and author lets her make more change. Comedian-turned-actor Steph Tisdell (who is a Ydinji woman) takes on a new creative challenge: writing a young adult novel that explores "diversity within diversity."Steph Tisdell is one of my favourite comedians - her stand up comedy is extremely worth watching.

"The Old Way and The New". (slyt.11:00+) 1912. Considered the first presidential campaign film. "This is an example of how politics has long been evolving along with, and in response to, new media," Historian Trygve Throntveit notes "This was quite extraordinary to release a film like this and in some ways it just goes to show that we always have constantly adapted our politics...