The ol’ day job has occasionally led me to read rather fabulous claims from self-professed audiophiles. While there are certainly folks out there who possess a keener ear than most, there are also people paying extreme amounts of money for nonsense which they then refuse to blind test. Perhaps they fear that they too would not actually be able to tell when audio signals were sent through a banana.

When infinite rebuyer Elon Musk merged xAI and SpaceX, he was quoted as saying “In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale.” I thought that sounded pretty stupid, but I didn’t dive into it. Thankfully, physics professor Rhett Allain has, in this Wired piece.

I’m pretty down on algorithmic newsfeeds. Also rather awful is the infinite scrolling that goes hand in hand with them. From Wikipedia:

In 2019, Aza Raskin, who claims to have invented the infinite scrolling technique, expressed regret at the invention, saying that he ‘did not foresee the consequences’ and describing it as ‘one of the first products designed to not simply help a user, but to deliberately keep them online for as long as possible’.

It seems unlikely that infinite scrolling will actually get killed by the EU, but I’ll hold out hope.

Machiel Reyneke thinks the modern longevity movement is a vampire disclosure program. There might be something to it.

There ain’t no rule says a dog can’t compete in an Olympic cross-country skiing event, so Nazgul the Czechoslovakian wolfdog went ahead and did this morning. There’s great video too.¹

Perhaps the best part is the amazing photo finish from Omega:

You might notice that the photo’s vertical line is aligned with Nazgul’s nose. My guess was that the system read his leg as a ski, and that the ski doesn’t count for crossing the finish line. A quick read NBC’s cross country primer seems to confirm this:

In cross-country skiing, the race finishes for each skier when the toe of their front boot crosses the finish line. A finish is not determined by the tip of a ski.

Nor, apparently, the tip of the leg of a dog.

The aforementioned primer goes on to note:

Electronic timing technology is used to identify official race finish times, like a photo finish system.

Thanks to that, we got this delightful photo.

Previously in dogs doing human activities: Peanut Butter Hit a Walk-Off Dinger

Footnotes:

1. Said video is, of course, archived here. ↩︎

I remain tickled by the fact that hundreds of people stood on the field dressed as grass during Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl LX halftime show. Thanks to this article on what it was like to be one of these performers¹, I am now also tickled to see photos like this one. Spot the face smiling within the grass:

Who knew grasses needed glasses?

Footnotes:

1. “Performers” is probably a strong word. ↩︎

Now here’s a hook:

Every year, doctors at a hospital in the Yunnan Province of China brace themselves for an influx of people with an unusual complaint. The patients come with a strikingly odd symptom: visions of pint-sized, elf-like figures – marching under doors, crawling up walls and clinging to furniture.

The culprit is a mushroom, “Lanmaoa asiatica”, which causes hallucinations of tiny people if it’s not cooked thoroughly. And apparently, that mushroom can be found in multiple places around the world, with multiple appearances.