For a decade, Allbirds has made quality shoes with a focus on sustainability. In the early 2020s, the company expanded and went public, but they’ve been struggling mightily of late. Never fear, however, as A.I. is here. Or at least, the promise of something realted to artificial intelligence is, anyway.

I’ve worn and loved a couple pairs of Allbirds, but I was blissfully unaware of their recent financial struggles. As a result, I was quite confused when friend-of-the-site Mike A. pointed me to a press release in which Allbirds announced an “expansion into A.I. compute infrastructure”. What?

After digging around a bit, I believe it goes like this:

• The Allbirds corporate entity has sold off its shoe business to a portfolio company (“American Exchange Group”) for $39 million. What’s left?

• Well, the hollowed-out Allbirds entity itself still exists, and it’s holding that $39 million. As well, it’s publicly listed under the sweet ticker symbol BIRD.

• Now, they’ve announced that that hollowed-out entity will soon be renamed “NewBird AI”, and that this shell (ha!) of a company will raise another $50 million in funding to do some vague A.I. shit.

It takes time to get a publicly-listed company, and they want to cash in on this A.I. fad as soon as possible, so they’ve hollowed out their shoe company and turned it into an A.I. company, why not.

The former shoe company no longer owns any shoe company assets, but it does have A.I. aspirations (and fine, maybe another $50 million bucks in funding ). Naturally, the stock is now soaring. At the time of publication, BIRD stock is worth more than eight times what it was literally yesterday. I guess the market likes their plan and/or is now aware that they’ve unburdened themselves of a flagging shoe business.

While I don’t own any BIRD stock, I do hope to continue to be able to purchase Allbird shoes. I guess I’m now pinning my hopes on American Exchange Group being a good steward of the brand. As far as Newbird AI goes, I won’t be surprised if I never hear about it again.

Remember Magawa the HeroRat? He’s back, in giant statue form.

While Apopo’s actual HeroRats are huge, they’re thankfully not seven feet tall.

Out in Los Angeles, where horrific traffic ties up even emergency responders, some firefighters will soon be riding electric motorcycles.

The Los Angeles Fire Department is adding a new tool to its emergency response arsenal, and it’s not your typical fire truck. The department is rolling out 30 new ERidePro electric motorcycles designed to serve as fast, highly mobile medical response units.

While these vehicles won’t help much for actual firefighting, it’s hard to think of a more efficient option for getting personal on scene to help with medical issues.

In Wushan County, China, the wild new “Goddess” escalator system runs almost 3,000 feet and takes folks up 800 vertical feet.

[I]t’s made of 21 individual escalators, 8 elevators, 4 moving walkways and several pedestrian bridges. Riding all of them takes roughly 21 minutes.

It’s quite something to see:

If these escalators ever run into trouble, the fact that they will become stairs will not be so convenient.

I have never understood people who dislike wind turbines. They become a prominent part of any landscape once erected, that much is true. But to me, they are wondrous. They represent the possibility of a better, cleaner future, a future when we are no longer burning a dwindling supply of fossil fuels and polluting the very air we breathe. Aside from oil company executives, who wouldn’t want that?

Regrettably, turbines in Gloucester, Massachusetts, are being decommissioned well before the end of their useful lives. Gloucestrian Sarah Shemkus wrote about the loss.

After Jessica Johnston took a terrible fall while hiking, rescuers were able to save her, but they couldn’t find her border collie companion. A week and one crowdfunding campaign later, Molly the dog was located and brought back home in style.

Who’s a good dog? Molly! Also Bingo, a Jack Russell who was part of the rescue crew.

Molly got to take a ride with Precision Helicopters of New Zealand, who had handled the rescue and shared this outstanding photograph. They’ve also got a tremendous video.¹

Footnotes:

1. That video is archived here. ↩︎

This week, Anthropic accidentally leaked a whole bunch of information about Claude Code. In addition to revealing many of their future plans, the leak showed that the tool uses some rudimentary pattern-matching to detect user frustration.

Claude Code is actively watching our chat messages for words and phrases—including f-bombs and other curses—that serve as signs of user frustration.

The exact regex pattern is a delight to read:

/\b(wtf|wth|ffs|omfg|shit(ty|tiest)?|dumbass|horrible|awful| piss(ed|ing)? off|piece of (shit|crap|junk)|what the (fuck|hell)| fucking? (broken|useless|terrible|awful|horrible)|fuck you| screw (this|you)|so frustrating|this sucks|damn it)\b/

It’s very simple and surely very effective.