π Read this insightful post from Hacker News π π Category: π Key idea: Nov 18 2025 A βrelaxationβ project, mostly drawn on planes to and from Norway this month, where I had to travel to setup a digital art installation in Kristiansand with friends from the digital art collective Lab212. It has been drawn with one major constraint: it must fit in the inner pocket of my jacket (well, one specific jacket), except for the rods. This is a 3D-printed dobsonian telescope built around a 76mm/300mm parabolic mirror kit. While there are plenty of mini-scope models on the internet,…
β¨ Explore this awesome post from Culture | The Guardian π π Category: Broadway,US theater,Stage,Culture,Cynthia Nixon,Theatre β
Main takeaway: WWhen Jordan Harrison's play Marjorie Prime premiered in 2014, its vision of artificial consciousness may have seemed very new. An elderly woman named Marjorie, speaking to a hologram modeled after her long-dead husband, may have seemed like a wild and far-fetched idea that a computer program could somehow imitate the rhythm of a real conversation, and could fake intimate knowledge of a person's life. What a strange and repulsive idea.Only 11 years later (and eight years after a little-seen film adaptation),…
π Check out this insightful post from TechCrunch π π Category: Startups,Commerce,Fundraising,NFX,digital gift cards,On ME π Main takeaway: On Me, a digital gift card startup founded by former Google employees, aims to redefine the gift card industry with a mobile-first gifting platform that allows users to purchase digital gift cards categorized by interests instead of being limited to specific retailers. The company said Thursday it has raised $6 million in a seed funding round, which it will use to expand gift categories to include things like horseback riding lessons, wine tastings and theme park trips. Image credits:on On Me touts…
π₯ Check out this must-read post from Hacker News π π Category: π‘ Main takeaway: Stoolap is an embedded SQL database with MVCC transactions, written entirely in Rust. It supports both in-memory and persistent storage modes with full ACID compliance. # Add to Cargo.toml [dependencies] stoolap = "0.1" Or build from source: git clone https://github.com/stoolap/stoolap.git cd stoolap cargo build --release use stoolap::api::Database; fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> { let db = Database::open_in_memory()?; db.execute("CREATE TABLE users (id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, name TEXT)", ())?; db.execute("INSERT INTO users VALUES (1, 'Alice')", ())?; for row in db.query("SELECT * FROM users", ())? π¬ Ok(())…
π₯ Check out this awesome post from Culture | The Guardian π π Category: Television,Television & radio,Culture,Cancer β
Key idea: Stand Up to Cancer: Launch7.30pm on Channel 4 Davina McCall is launching a series of programs focused on the fight against cancer - including a Gogglebox special at 9.10pm with Kieran Culkin, Jaz Charton, Josh Hartnett, Tamsin Egerton, Nick Mohammed and Joe Marler. Before that, there's a documentary at 8pm from inside the cancer clinic at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge, following patients and their families on their journeys through testing, diagnosis and treatment. It aims to provide insight into the…
π₯ Read this must-read post from TechCrunch π π Category: AI,runway,video generation,world models,runway gwm-1,runway gen 4.5 π Hereβs what youβll learn: The race to launch global models has begun as AI-powered image and video generation company Runway joins a growing number of startups and major technology companies by launching its first model. The model, called GWM-1, works by making frame-by-frame predictions, creating a simulation with an understanding of physics and how the world actually behaves over time, the company said. A world model is an artificial intelligence system that learns an internal simulation of how the world works so that…
π₯ Read this trending post from Hacker News π π Category: π Main takeaway: For years, when it came to building something βmodernβ on the web, the almost automatic choice fell on React, Angular, Vue, and the entire Single Page Application (SPA) ecosystem. These frameworks became the safe choice, almost a de facto standard. But lately, a significant shift is happening in the front-end landscape. Many teams β including some large ones with enterprise projects β are moving toward HTML-first frameworks like htmx and other tools that take a more traditional, server-driven approach. And honestly, it makes perfect sense. π―…
π₯ Discover this trending post from Culture | The Guardian π π Category: Fiction in translation,Fiction,Books,Culture β
Key idea: TThe time loop story, in which characters repeatedly experience the same time period, has become synonymous with the 1993 film Groundhog Day, but the idea has much older roots. In P. D. Ouspensky's 1915 novel The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin, a weakened Osokin is given the opportunity to live his life again, only to find himself making the same mistakes. Like the insufferable Phil Connors in Groundhog Day, Osokin can't change anything without changing himself.Solvej Balle's highly acclaimed series on…
π₯ Read this trending post from Hacker News π π Category: π Hereβs what youβll learn: 07 Nov, 2025 Preamble: The whole affair is Googleβs fault and not Bear Blogβs. Huge thanks to HermanβBear Blogβs founder and devβfor his patience and help. A month after I started my first Bear blog at blog.james-zhan.com, my blog was entirely de-indexed by Google for no apparent reason: I have since migrated to journal.james-zhan.com (you are on it right now) and redirected all links from blog.james-zhan.com accordingly, but to this day, I donβt understand what happened, and so Iβm putting this post out there…
π Explore this insightful post from Culture | The Guardian π π Category: James Cameron,Avatar,Film,Culture,Tom Cruise,Margot Robbie,TimothΓ©e Chalamet,Spider-Man: No Way Home,Deadpool & Wolverine,Film industry π Key idea: IIf there's anyone who still knows how to fill a movie theater, it's James Cameron. After breaking the world box office record in 1997 with Titanic, and then again 12 years later with Avatar, his work has become the pinnacle of the big-screen spectacle.His latest offering, Avatar: Fire and Ash, arrives under radically different circumstances. With several years between us and the pandemic, it's clear that the theatrical box office likely won't go…
