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The AI assault on the last of the open web
The threat to the open web is far more profound than just some platforms that are under siege. The most egregious harm is the way that the generosity and grace of the people who keep the web open is being abused and exploited. Those people who maintain open source software? They’re hardly getting rich — that’s thankless, costly work, which they often choose instead of cashing in at some startup. Similarly, volunteering for Wikipedia is hardly profitable. Defining super-technical open standards takes time and patience, sometimes over a period of years, and there’s no fortune or fame in it.
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Red roof Pizza Hut locations
Red roof Pizza Hut locations taste like nostalgia, and a cure for the DoorDash blues. What’s crazy, is that even the corporation that owns Pizza Hut doesn’t even know how many of these locations still exist.
Once a common sight across the country, these old-school, low-slung buildings had largely disappeared as the restaurant chain modernized its stores and focused on takeout. Mr. Pujol, a journalist who documents retro American highway culture, says he “freaked out,” and swerved into the parking lot.
He had not discovered an abandoned relic from the Reagan era. As a plaque near the door explained, this restaurant in Tunkhannock, Pa., was a Pizza Hut Classic. The interior design and menu had been painstakingly engineered to replicate the Pizza Huts of the 1980s and ’90s, when families and friends settled into red-vinyl booths on a Friday night to eat deep-dish pan pizza and drink Pepsi from red plastic cups.
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How much does it cost to hire a college mascot for a wedding?
This is the hard hitting journalism we need: how much does it cost to hire a college mascot for a wedding?
Last offseason, we asked, Does anyone object to having a Mascot at this Wedding?since we saw Goldy the Gopher at a wedding. We created a spreadsheet with all the mascot costs and broke it down conference by conference.
Now, we’re back again with a partnership with FOIAball, and we asked a question about which mascots were booked the most and what the mascots were booked for, and we also updated rates of some of the mascots we couldn’t get wedding prices for previously and ones that have changed.
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Electricity price heat map
Here is an interactive heat map of electricity prices across the country. It can be broken down at state, congressional, county, and ZIP Code levels
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Architects reviewed Trump’s ballroom
Architects are notoriously detailed people. And they have some feedback regarding Trump’s ballroom. The New York Times has a good article with interactive scrolling details that show the issues.
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Tripping on tomatoes
Scientists have created a breed of tomatoes that contain psychoactive properties.
The breakthrough could lead to more sustainable and scalable production of these compounds by using model plants to biosynthesize common psychedelic “tryptamines,” such as psilocybin from hallucinogenic mushrooms, N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) from plants, and psychoactive compounds secreted by the Sonoran Desert toad.
Eventually, this research could pave the way toward—as one example—tomato plants that contain microdoses of psychedelic cocktails in each fruit. However, the study’s authors emphasized that these modified plants would need to be limited to medical use in clinical settings, and should not be accessible to consumers for recreation.
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Artemis II launch stops a softball game
Artemis II launched a crew to orbit the moon on April Fools Day. It occurred during the same time as a women’s softball game between the University of Florida and Stetson. As the Artemis rocket ascended, the game stopped, and the entire stadium watched.
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The Modest Mouse cruise
Earlier this year, Modest Mouse headlined a cruise. Stereogum attended, and delivers a story not only about the cruise, why bands do these, but how the concept of a floating concert at sea came to be.
How do they decide which artists to approach about headlining their own cruise? It’s “a mixture of science and art and just gut,” Cuellar explains. “As a promoter, that’s probably the hardest part. I think you ask any promoter and it’s all gambling.” He says it’s less about finding acts that can headline arenas worldwide and more about finding ones with an extremely engaged fan base. There’s a big difference between asking your fans to kill a couple hours with you in their hometown versus investing the time and money to spend several days trapped on a boat together.
