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Wired headphones making a comeback
After years of decline in sales, wired headphones are making a comeback.
Maybe I gave up too easily. Recently, a quiet movement has grown in the shadows based on a controversial truth: wired headphones are better than Bluetooth. Sales are through the roof in recent months. You can often get better sound for the money with a wired pair, but it’s not just audio snobs either. Wired headphones are a full-blown cultural trend – a resurgence some tie to a broader anti-tech backlash. Whether it’s practical, political or aesthetic, one thing is clear. Wired headphones are back.
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A different MacBook Neo review
This computer is not for the people writing those reviews — people who already have the MacBook Pro, who have the professional context, who are optimizing at the margin. This computer is for the kid who doesn’t have a margin to optimize. Who can’t wait for the right tool to materialize. Who is going to take what’s available and push it until it breaks and learn something permanent from the breaking.
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Why are programmers seeing AI differently?
Anil Dash shares insights related to why programmers view AI definitely than, artists or other creatives. It boils down to cultural and historical elements of software programming – sharing code and reducing rework. And how they view labor.
I’ve come to the personal conclusion that the only way forward is for more of the hackers with soul to seize this moment of flux and use these tools to build. The economics of creating code are changing, and it can’t just be the worst billionaires in the world who benefit. The latest count is 700,000 people laid off in the last few years in the tech industry. We’ll be at a million soon, at the rate things are accelerating. Each new layoff announcement is now in the thousands.
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Even OnlyFans performers are outsourcing work
Capitalism is so pervasive even OnlyFans performers are outsourcing work
A more recent period of chatting work with a new agency offered improved conditions and pay, though still less than $4 an hour.
She said she knew the work would involve explicit content – but even so “sexting” was unpleasant.
“It’s kind of icky when you think about it, because you’ll have to do sexting a lot of times, like, several times in an hour because, you know, you’ll be talking to several fans all at once”.
She said the people she chatted to often seemed “really nice” but were obviously lonely, making the whole process feel sad, especially as she was not the person she was pretending to be.
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Selena Gomez Oreos trapping possums
In New Zealand, opossums are an invasive species. Selena Gomez Oreos are helping locals trap the critters.
“We wanted to try something that we could do in the field that mimicked the effect of a psychoactive drug,” Hickling explains. “And that’s when I came across this psychological paper which suggested that a combination of fat and sugar was quite addictive.” That finding, combined with a US study on rats that used Oreo cookies, sent Hickling down to the local New World. “It just so happened that they had these Selena Gomez Oreos, which I hadn’t even heard of. They had both cinnamon and chocolate, which possums like, and they were on sale.”
Hickling estimates he bought 20 packets of Selena Gomez Oreos for the trial, and soon was out in the field in Leeston attaching the cookies along the planks that lead up to the possum traps. “One of the things that’s nice about an Oreo is that you can just drill a little hole through it and just tap it on with a flathead nail,” he says. “People have tried to use Tim Tams in the past, but they are really expensive. Oreos are quite a bit cheaper, and they actually stand up to the rain quite well too, which is a little disconcerting.”
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A case for making standard time permanent
When we change the clocks, we always complain about how it disrupts our lives. Most people prefer daylight savings time – more sunshine to do more things. However, the science behind circadian rhythms suggest that standard time is when our bodies prefer.
The American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM), in its formal position statement, has been explicit that permanent DST is not the answer. Harvard sleep medicine researcher Elizabeth Klerman argues similarly that making daylight saving time permanent “is a horrible idea that puts us forever on the wrong time zone.” And there are many others.
The reality appears to be that the biological clock simply does not catch up with DST, and the misalignment accumulates rather than resolving. While it doesn’t ‘feel’ as acute as when we have actual jet lag (as in, we don’t have the deep disorientation that we get following a long flight across many time zones), the misalignment operates via the same underlying mechanism. And it quietly stacks up, month over month.
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Enshittification explained and personified
The Norwegian Consumer Council created a video that encapsulated our modern dystopia, explaining it and also personifying it–enshittification.
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Billionaires funding elections at extraordinary rates
Due to the Citizens United decision, we know that money is speech. We’ve also known for a while that the extremely wealthy are funding elections to an extraordinary degree and reaping the benefits.
The extraordinary spending in Montana is part of a new era of political power for the rapidly growing number of billionaires minted over the past eight years. The Times analysis found that 300 billionaires and their immediate family members donated more than $3 billion — 19 percent of all contributions — in federal elections in 2024, either directly or through political action committees.
Five presidential elections ago, before the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling that lifted many remaining campaign finance restrictions, the share of billionaire spending was almost zero — 0.3 percent, to be precise.
