If you want to sell AI to the Russian state, you're going to have to tune it to the nation's "traditional spiritual and moral values" before you have a shot, reports Vedomosti, a Russian-language business daily out of Moscow. — Read the rest

The post Russia to test AI models for traditional spiritual and moral values appeared first on Boing Boing.

After more than a decade of reading on Kindle e-readers, I finally added custom fonts, and I'm blown away.

I was never sold. When Amazon's first "made for ereaders" font, Bookerly, came out, I set it on my Kindle and never looked back. — Read the rest

The post OK, custom Kindle fonts are really nice appeared first on Boing Boing.

Claude Monet's first paying work was caricature. At fifteen, he sold unflattering drawings of well-known men around Le Havre through a framing shop, and crowds gathered at the window to look at them. By his own later account, he was among the most successful artists in the Norman port city. — Read the rest

The post Before the water lilies, Monet drew cartoons of well-known locals appeared first on Boing Boing.

Roger Waters built the opening of Pink Floyd's "Money" in 1972 out of spliced tape: cash registers, torn paper, and coins. Open Culture posted a video of a German band that played those same sounds live at Abbey Road Studios, where Pink Floyd recorded The Dark Side of the Moon, and identifies the drummer as Sina Doering. — Read the rest

The post A band recreated the cash register sounds from "Money" live appeared first on Boing Boing.

Pompous scholars were a standard joke on the Italian stage through the 16th century. Arnoud Visser writes in The Public Domain Review that Francesco Belo, a playwright from Rome, published the first play to put one at the center. In El pedante, from the 1520s, the schoolmaster Prudenzio "talks in a mangled mix of Latin and vernacular." — Read the rest

The post A 1582 comedy translates "pedant" as "worthless idiot, donkey head" appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Get lifetime access to Microsoft Office Professional 2021 for Windows for just $32.97 (reg. $219.99). 

If you're a working professional who prefers a traditional, standalone software experience, Microsoft Office Professional 2021 for Windows Lifetime License might just be right up your alley. — Read the rest

The post Get lifetime access to the full MS Office 2021 suite for $33 appeared first on Boing Boing.

Canned sardines are hard to find in American supermarkets because of a fad diet. 

Corner of Fifth reports that the diet consists of tinned fish and water, black coffee, or plain tea. It spread on TikTok and YouTube and through keto communities, and Dr. — Read the rest

The post A viral diet and warm oceans emptied the canned sardine shelf appeared first on Boing Boing.

Phyllis Zorn, a reporter at the Marion County Record, will get $850,000 from the city of Marion, Kansas to settle her federal lawsuit over the 2023 police raid on the newspaper, reports the Kansas Reflector. Lawyers for Zorn and the city filed the motion to dismiss on August 11, three years to the day after the raid. — Read the rest

The post A Kansas reporter raided by police settles for $850,000 appeared first on Boing Boing.

Food safety lawyer Bill Marler says the FDA's new guide on fresh-cut produce admits it knows of no chemical wash that stops Cyclospora from spreading between pieces of cut produce.

Cyclospora is a parasite hazard in berries, fresh basil, fresh cilantro, and fresh salad mixes. — Read the rest

The post The FDA says you can't wash Cyclospora from your lettuce appeared first on Boing Boing.

The EU AI Act AI outputs to be "detectable as artificially generated" and "embedded within the content in a manner that is difficult for it to be separated from the content." 

But Sean Goedecke, a software engineer, explains why the European Union's new watermark rule for AI text won't work.  — Read the rest

The post You can remove an AI watermark from text by asking a second AI appeared first on Boing Boing.

The US Treasury sold $25 billion of 30-year bonds at a 5.22 percent yield, the most it has paid to borrow that far out since 2001, reports the Financial Times.

That's up from 5.06 percent at July's sale, and 4.91 percent just before Trump's second term began. — Read the rest

The post The government now spends more on interest than on the military appeared first on Boing Boing.

noRecognition is a line of basic fashion items (tees, hoodies and gaiters) printed with "adversarial" patterns demonstrated to stymie machine vision systems' ability to detect humans. If battleship dazzle for people has been tried many times, this effort has undergone extensive testing and you can now pre-order custom sets of clothing on Kickstarter. — Read the rest

The post Adversarial clothing: custom, one-off tees and hoodies that dazzle AI appeared first on Boing Boing.

In a new StarTalk episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-host Negin Farsad interviewed Jaron Lanier, the computer scientist who wrote the 2023 New Yorker piece, "There Is No AI."

Lanier thinks calling AI a "black box" where nobody knows what's inside these models is really just a way to avoid the truth: the box is full of people and their data. — Read the rest

The post The only thing inside an AI is people appeared first on Boing Boing.

WhatCable does what your eyes can't: it tells you what a USB-C cable can actually do. 40Gbps transfer? 100W fast charging? DisplayPort Alt Mode? So long as you have macOS and a port to plug it into, this free app will provide detailed specs on any of those annoyingly indistinguishable cables in your drawer. — Read the rest

The post App tells you what USB-C cables are capable of appeared first on Boing Boing.

Peter Bebergal, author of Season of the Witch, Strange Frequencies, and Appendix N: The Eldritch Roots of Dungeons & Dragons, has spent years thoughtfully exploring the borderlands where occultism, religion, pop culture, and imagination overlap. Writer and filmmaker JF Martel hosts the art and philosophy podcast, Weird Studies, and is the author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, for my money, one of the smartest and most provocative books about art and the imagination published in recent memory. — Read the rest

The post When Jewish mysticism answers the Call of Cthulhu appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Get Microsoft Windows 11 Pro for just $9.97 (MSRP $199) through August 20. The upgrade adds advanced security, productivity, and management features to compatible PCs — without the usual $199 price tag.

Windows 11 Pro is currently available for just $9.97, giving you a full-featured PC operating system at a fraction of the usual cost through August 20. — Read the rest

The post BitLocker, Copilot, and more are yours for $9.97 with this Windows 11 Pro deal appeared first on Boing Boing.

Thus, exits the Mouth of Moron.

After returning early from maternity leave at the request of her crying baby President, Leavitt learned that the press corps and senior White House staff had been left aboard a decoy plane under a credible missile threat while her boss escaped in a catering truck. — Read the rest

The post Seems Karoline Leavitt doesn't want to be left to die appeared first on Boing Boing.

North Korea's Red Star Linux OS ships with a modified Firefox called Naenara ("Our country") and lets users browse Kwangmyong, the country's isolated national intranet. It also comes with an office suite, media players, and video games. It sells for $15. — Read the rest

The post North Korea's operating system watermarks every file you touch appeared first on Boing Boing.

The British Transport Police announced it would start using facial recognition cameras in a London Underground station. The Victoria Underground station was the first to be equipped with cameras.

The cameras scan the faces of everyone who walks past them and compare each face to a watchlist of people the police or the courts want to find. — Read the rest

The post Police are now scanning faces at a London Underground station appeared first on Boing Boing.

Many restaurants in Japan put a small plastic device on tables. When you press it, a chime rings at the waitstaff station or in the kitchen, and a server comes to your table. 

Algis Tamosaitis writes the newsletter Japan or Die, and he explained the table call button for travelers. — Read the rest

The post In Japan, press the button on your table and a server appears appeared first on Boing Boing.