Category: Technology

Mostly related to issues surrounding technology and computers, main include current events or news.

ChatGPT turning images into Studio Ghibli

ChatGPT turning images into Studio Ghibli

The trend kicked off pretty wholesomely. Couples transformed portraits, pet owners generated cartoonish cats, and many people are busily Ghibli-fying their families (I’ve stuck to selfies, not wanting to share with OpenAI my siblings’ likenesses). It’s an AI-generated version of the human-drawn art commissions people offer on Etsy — you and your loved ones, in the style of your favorite anime.

It didn’t take long for the trend to go full chaos mode. Nothing is sacred: the Twin Towers on 9/11, JFK’s assassination, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang signing a woman’s chest, President Donald Trump’s infamous group photo with Jeffrey Epstein, and even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s congressional testimony have all been reimagined with that distinctive Ghibli whimsy (it’s not clear whether these users transformed uploaded images, or prompted the system to copy them). Altman has played into the trend too — he even changed his X profile picture into a Ghibli rendering of himself and encouraged his followers to make him a new one.

2025-04-01
Max Scherzer on robo-ups

MLB is trialing robo-umps and a ball/strike challenge system this spring training. Max Scherzer, a smart baseball guy with opinions, raises good points.

“What problem are we really solving?”

…

“If you said, ‘Do we like the challenge system versus the status quo?’ Yes,” Scherzer said. “But do we like the challenge system versus maybe some other options here? That’s where I’m kind of skeptical.”

This is where we can almost catch you muttering, Uh-oh. But hear him out. He’s a fan of the technology. But …

“I just think there are two other ways to use the technology,” he said. “Look, the technology, the way we can measure this, it’s great. So how can we use it in a way that minimizes its impact in the game?”

2025-03-14
Visualizing all the books

Recently, Anna’s Archive, perhaps one of the largest online shadow libraries, put out a call for visualizing all the books that have an ISBN. This would be helpful to understand how complete their coverage is.

Here’s a comprehensive explainer as to how the winning entry was designed.

2025-03-05
Building a (T1D) smartwatch from scratch

Andrew Childs built a Type 1 Diabetes monitor from scratch.

My 9 y.o. son has Type 1 diabetes, which basically means his pancreas is on manual (hard) mode 24×7. A healthy pancreas not only produces insulin, which helps convert glucose in the bloodstream into energy – it also produces glucagon, which tells the liver to release glucose into the bloodstream when blood sugar levels are too low. A person with T1D has to manage without either of these guardrails, and a low blood sugar can become a medical emergency if left untreated.

2025-02-24
Luddite teens

It sounds like a hipster indie band, but Luddite Teenagers are meeting up to emphasize connections without the distraction of technology.

“Our club promotes conscious consumption of technology,” she said. “We’re for human connection. I’m one of the first members of the original Luddite Club in Brooklyn. Now I’m trying to start it in Philly.”

She pulled out a flip phone, mystifying her recruit.

“We use these,” she said. “This has been the most freeing experience of my life.”

2025-02-21
Bitcoin fortune buried in a garbage dump

It sounds like a joke, but there’s (bitcoin) treasure to the amount of $775 million in a UK garbage dump. The guy who lost the bitcoin is now trying to buy the dump.

2025-02-16
Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji

Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji – clever nerdery here. I’d imagine this gets fixed in places that would be susceptible to malicious code.

2025-02-16
WikiTok to infinitely scroll Wikipedia

WikiTok infinitely scrolls Wikipedia, randomly loading articles.

From the developer, Isaac Gemel, Ars Technia describes WikiTok as

… a neat way to stumble upon interesting information randomly, learn new things, and spend spare moments of boredom without reaching for an algorithmically addictive social media app. Although to be fair, WikiTok is addictive in its own way, but without an invasive algorithm tracking you and pushing you toward the lowest-common-denominator content. It’s also thrilling because you never know what’s going to pop up next.

A fun bookmark to avoid doomscrolling.

2025-02-13
More details on the Musk Coup

Three articles regarding the ongoing Elon Musk coup.

The newsy bits from the Verge, Elon Musk’s rapid unscheduled disassembly of the US government, particularly the GSA:

The GSA, an agency most of us have never had to think about, is in charge of buildings, sure. But also it runs an awful lot of the technical infrastructure of the government — it is basically the feds’ IT. If the US government were a brain, the GSA is the brain stem, the part that manages heartbeats and breathing so they’re below the level of thoughts.

The US Treasury has designated DOGE an insider threat:

Members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team have had access to the US Treasury Department’s payment systems for over a week. On Thursday, the threat intelligence team at one of the department’s agencies recommended that DOGE members be monitored as an “insider threat.”

And Mike Masnick sums it up, No people didn’t vote for this:

The campaign promised economic relief: cheaper eggs and lower gas prices. Instead, voters got an unelected tech billionaire systematically dismantling federal agencies, surrounded by a coterie of 4chan edgelord trolls LARPing as cabinet secretaries, all operating without congressional oversight or constitutional authority. They voted for economic stability and got the effective end of the American Constitutional Republic instead.

2025-02-11
The evil housekeeper problem

The evil housekeeper problem refers to a concept in computer security where once somebody is in the room where your computer is, security of that device can no longer be guaranteed. And right now, we are seeing this play out in real time with Elon Musk and DOGE.

You might think that there would be technical measures to stop someone right out of high school from coming in and changing the code to a government system. That the system could require two-factor authentication to deploy the code to the cloud. That you would need a smart card to log in to a specific system to do that. Nope—all those technical measures can be circumvented by coercion at the hands of the evil housekeeper.

2025-02-10