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Posted by Jennifer Sandlin

Want to experience sleeping in one of the most iconic rooms in children's literature? Head to the Sheraton Boston Hotel and check out its new Goodnight Moon suite. The gorgeous suite recreates Margaret Wise Brown's classic 1947 children's book Goodnight Moon, illustrated by Clement Hurd. — Read the rest

The post You can now sleep in the actual Goodnight Moon bedroom appeared first on Boing Boing.

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Posted by Popkin

Image: Oleg Elkov / shutterstock.com

This cat's separated pupils look like the cracked ceramic technique known as kintsugi, and they're absolutely striking. Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. Instead of hiding the cracks, kintsugi celebrates them. — Read the rest

The post Cat with pupils that look exactly like cracked gold pottery appeared first on Boing Boing.

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Posted by msmash

Linus Torvalds is "fairly positive" about vibe coding as a way for people to get computers to do things they otherwise could not. The Linux kernel maintainer made the comments during an interview at the Linux Foundation Open Source Summit in Seoul earlier this month. But he cautioned that vibe coding would be a "horrible, horrible idea from a maintenance standpoint" for production code. Torvalds told Dirk Hohndel, head of open source at Verizon, that computers have become more complicated than when he learned to code by typing in programs from computer magazines. He said vibe coding offers a path into computing for newcomers. The kernel maintainer is not using AI-assisted coding himself. He said his role has shifted from rejecting new ideas to sometimes pushing for them against opposition from longstanding maintainers who "kind of get stuck in a rut." Rust is "actually becoming a real part of the kernel instead of being this experimental thing," he said. Torvalds said AI crawlers have been "very disruptive to a lot of our infrastructure" because they gather data from kernel.org source code. Kernel maintainers receive bugs and security notices that are "made up by people who misuse AI," though the problem is smaller than for other projects such as curl.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Posted by Jennifer Sandlin

I'm nearly 100% in agreement with journalist (and one of my personal heroes) Taylor Lorenz, who recently commented on the oversaturated yet never-ending "What's Going On" trend that's been making rounds on social media for weeks. She wrote, upon seeing another iteration featuring people I don't recognize and don't care to look up, "Enough of this trend please, we've been subject to enough." — Read the rest

The post This baboon-meerkat duo just ended TikTok's most annoying trend appeared first on Boing Boing.

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Posted by msmash

Britain said on Wednesday it would ban the resale of tickets to concerts, sport and other live events for profit, disrupting ticket touts and the platforms that benefit from their activities. From a report: Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said touts were ripping off fans by using bots to snap up batches of tickets for coveted shows and reselling them at sky-high prices. "Our new proposals will shut down the touts' racket and make world-class music, comedy, theatre and sport affordable for everyone," she said, after the government had promised action.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Posted by Grant St. Clair

A scene from Knives Out

You can say what you like about Rian Johnson's Knives Out whodunits, but Daniel Craig is clearly having more fun making them than he ever did with Bond.

Case in point: the first trailer for Wake Up Dead Man, the caper capping this trilogy (but hopefully not the last Knives Out movie overall). — Read the rest

The post Daniel Craig's thickest accent yet in new Knives Out trailer appeared first on Boing Boing.

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Posted by msmash

Chinese economist Gao Shanwen told a Washington panel in December that China's real GDP growth might be around 2% rather than the official figure near 5%. By January, Gao was no longer chief economist at SDIC Securities and went silent for almost a year. As FT points out in a long piece, China does not publish quarterly GDP breakdowns showing consumption, investment and net exports. Every other major economy produces these figures. The IMF in 2024 gave China a C grade for national accounts. The rating puts China on par with India and below Vietnam. Fixed asset investment data showed negative growth in 2025 for only the second time in decades. Property investment has fallen consistently since 2022. But official GDP investment data shows no signs of declining. The National Bureau of Statistics stopped publishing sectoral breakdowns of fixed asset investment in 2018. It discontinued a price series in 2021 and a land sales series in 2023. Beijing has restricted researcher access rather than addressing longstanding questions about data quality. China says it disagrees with the IMF's C rating. The government argued its production-side GDP approach is appropriate. Why does it matter? China is too large and too interconnected with the global economy for unreliable data to be a purely domestic issue. The lack of transparency creates problems for everyone trying to make decisions based on understanding China's economic trajectory. As Eswar Prasad, a professor at Cornell University and former IMF official, told FT: China is one of the two biggest economies in the world. "It would be nice to know what is really going on."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Posted by msmash

Boston Dynamics' Spot robot is now deployed by more than 60 bomb squads and SWAT teams across the US and Canada. The 75-pound four-legged machine starts at around $100,000 and has been used in armed standoffs, hostage rescues and hazardous materials incidents since its commercial debut five years ago. The Massachusetts State Police operates two Spot units purchased in 2020 and 2022. Each cost about $250,000 including add-ons funded through state grants. Last year one of the robots helped corner a suspect who had taken his mother hostage at knifepoint in Hyannis. Houston operates three units and Las Vegas has one. ICE recently spent around $78,000 on a similar robot from Canadian manufacturer Icor Technology that can also deploy smoke bombs. Civil liberties groups have raised concerns about normalizing militarized policing. The NYPD suspended its limited Spot program in 2021 after public backlash over cost and surveillance concerns before later reinstating it and purchasing two units. The Electronic Frontier Foundation says there should be state and federal laws providing guidance on appropriate use of such technology. About 2,000 Spot units now operate globally.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Posted by Grant St. Clair

I want to preface this by saying this isn't a sponsored post — I don't do those — but I do think this is cool as hell.

While I may generally prefer the original PlayStation over its distant cousin, there's no denying that the Nintendo 64 remains one of the most iconic video game consoles of all time. — Read the rest

The post This $250 Nintendo 64 clone plays real cartridges in 4K appeared first on Boing Boing.

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Posted by Grant St. Clair

Hideo Kojima

Gaming auteur Hideo Kojima has long described himself by saying "70% of my body is made of movies," which shows in the cinematic approach he's taken to constructing his games since the 80s. Kojima may need to bump that figure up, though, given that a third Death Stranding adaptation has just been announced (after the theatrical movie and the stylish anime).  — Read the rest

The post "Death Stranding" gets animated series with all-new characters appeared first on Boing Boing.

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Posted by Jennifer Sandlin

Screenshot: Juxtapoz / Instagram

I'm a big fan of Jakob Grosse-Ophoff's kinetic sculptures, which tap into human movement and experience in ways that are sometimes humorous, sometimes beautiful, sometimes extremely disturbing, and always captivating. His sculpture "The Driller," which Popkin featured here at Boing Boing at the beginning of the year, falls into the funny category. — Read the rest

The post These kinetic sculptures feature mundane, sad, beautiful, and desperate human movements on endless loop appeared first on Boing Boing.

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Posted by Jason Weisberger

Image: Philip Yabut/shutterstock.com

In her own words, Congressperson Nancy Mace has "no friends," only a dog. Proving that bad people do suffer the consequences, but dogs will love anyone who feeds them.

An "Island of One," Mace has very publicly aired accusations against former lovers from the floor of Congress, and screamed down police for not treating her as specially as she'd like at the airport. — Read the rest

The post Congressperson Nancy Mace, who loves to play the victim, has no friends appeared first on Boing Boing.

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Posted by msmash

An anonymous reader shares a report: Federal health officials have linked two massive US measles outbreaks, confirming that the country is about two months away from losing its measles elimination status, according to a report by The New York Times. The Times obtained a recording of a call during which officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed to state health departments that the ongoing measles outbreak at the border of Arizona and Utah is a continuation of the explosive outbreak in West Texas that began in mid- to late-January. That is, the two massive outbreaks are being caused by the same subtype of measles virus. This is a significant link that hasn't previously been reported despite persistent questions from journalists and concerns from health experts, particularly in light of Canada losing its elimination status last week. The loss of an elimination status means that measles will once again be considered endemic to the US, an embarrassing public health backslide for a vaccine-preventable disease.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Posted by Rob Beschizza

Vegemite

Vegemite is a thick brown slime derived from leftover brewers' yeast. Similar to Marmite, and especially popular in Australia, it is famed for the intensity of its flavor and how completely repulsive it is to those yet to acquire the taste. — Read the rest

The post Australian prisoner asserts human right to Vegemite appeared first on Boing Boing.

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Posted by Ruben Bolling

🚨 ONLY ONE DAY LEFT! Kickstarter ends tomorrow, and with it your chance to get Volume 1 and Volume 2 of The Complete Tom the Dancing Bug Library! Link is right here. (Plus a bonus comic book: Trump You!)

Please join the team that makes it possible for your friendly neighborhood comic strip Tom the Dancing Bug to exist in this world! — Read the rest

The post Tom the Dancing Bug: The Five Stages of MAGA Scandal Grief appeared first on Boing Boing.

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Posted by msmash

Tsinghua University collected 4,986 AI and machine learning patents between 2005 and the end of 2024. The Beijing institution has received more than 900 patents last year alone. The total exceeds the combined patent count from MIT, Stanford, Princeton and Harvard during the same period. China now accounts for more than half of all active patent families globally in AI and machine learning fields, according to data analytics service LexisNexis. The university also has more AI research papers among the 100 most cited than any other school at last count. The US still holds the most influential AI patents and the top performing models. Harvard and MIT consistently rank ahead of Tsinghua in patent influence. American institutions produced 40 notable AI models in 2024 compared to 15 from Chinese organizations, according to Stanford's AI Index Report. China's share of the world's elite AI researchers -- the top 2% -- rose from 10% in 2019 to 26% in 2022. The US share fell from 35% to 28% during the same period, according to the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Posted by msmash

Cloudflare suffered its worst network outage in six years on Tuesday, beginning at 11:20 UTC. The disruption prevented the content delivery network from routing traffic for roughly three hours. The failure, writes Cloudflare in a blog post, originated from a database permissions change deployed at 11:05 UTC. The modification altered how a database query returned information about bot detection features. The query began returning duplicate entries. A configuration file used to identify automated traffic doubled in size and spread across the network's machines. Cloudflare's traffic routing software reads this file to distinguish bots from legitimate users. The software had a built-in limit of 200 bot detection features. The enlarged file contained more than 200 entries. The software crashed when it encountered the unexpected file size. Users attempting to access websites behind Cloudflare's network received error messages. The outage affected multiple services. Turnstile security checks failed to load. The Workers KV storage service returned elevated error rates. Users could not log into Cloudflare's dashboard. Access authentication failed for most customers. Engineers initially suspected a coordinated attack. The configuration file was automatically regenerated every five minutes. Database servers produced either correct or corrupted files during a gradual system update. Services repeatedly recovered and failed as different versions of the file circulated. Teams stopped generating new files at 14:24 UTC and manually restored a working version. Most traffic resumed by 14:30 UTC. All systems returned to normal at 17:06 UTC.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Posted by Rob Beschizza

Photo: The Image Party / Shutterstock

Target, which made a big song and dance of ditching diversity, equity and inclusion programs to please President Trump, isn't faring any better with its new CEO. The third quarter saw profits "tumble" and it admitted today that the holiday season may not go well. — Read the rest

The post Things going from bad to worse at Target appeared first on Boing Boing.

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Posted by Grant St. Clair

The elevator pitch for Yahweh energy drink — Christ in a can — sounds like a South Park bit.

At first glance, the website appears to be something hastily put together for satire. The portrait of Jesus adorning every can reeks of that AI-generated gloss. — Read the rest

The post Bizarre Yahweh energy drink: The blood of Christ in a can appeared first on Boing Boing.

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