This is a picture of an old timey cash register, and thanks to the weirdness of tech and the weirdness of money, there could be actual money in it. Literal money that you can take out of the picture and spend. Thanks to an app launched last month, you can now furtively smuggle money inside […]
Sally
Read Part 1 of this story Eventually, Milon Tusk escaped the smart home of the unhappily deceased Dieter Peel. This process had not been straightforward. Everything inside the fortified compound was voice-controlled, including windows and doors. He had tried imitating Peel’s voice, jimmying the locks, and at one low point, throwing a chair at the […]
It looks like the Basilisk definitely got him, so it’s worth resurfacing the explainer I wrote earlier this year. If you’re like most people, you haven’t heard of Roko’s Basilisk. If you’re like most of the people who have heard of Roko’s Basilisk, there’s a good chance you started to look into it, encountered […]
Welcome to Snark Week 2018! Not all cute-but-scary animals are biological. Allow me to expand the remit of Snark Week to include the dreaded CryptoKitty. Adorable and fluffy? Absolutely. Existentially dangerous? Most certainly. This creature packs a triple punch. Once critically endangered, it is now trying to claw its way out of jeopardy – on […]
Even if you develop hives at the sight of the words “bitcoin” and “blockchain”, you probably couldn’t help noticing the shouty news the past week. Bitcoin is down! Bitcoin is slightly up! Way down! Little bit up again. As LWON went to press, Bitcoin was either on the verge of another runaway valuation that would climb […]
May 28 – June 1 2018 This week, LWON guest contributor Robin Meija takes a look under the hood of the Puerto Rico death toll numbers – and finds something disturbing in the statistics On a lighter note, do you like insane apocryphal philosophy and AI? Then you’ll love my story about Descartes’ robot daughter. […]
You’ve heard of René Descartes. 17th century French philosopher; cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am); first principles of enlightenment philosophy and science and all that. You might be less familiar with Descartes’ robot daughter Francine. The tale of her birth and gruesome death makes for a wild historical(ish) ride in its own right, but […]
It started with the maggots. One hot Australian January morning, unlucky beachcombers had discovered millions of the fleshy nubs orgiastically crawling over each other and everything else on Newport Beach. No one knew where they had come from, and the beach-storming maggots left without an explanation. But when they returned, it was for good. They […]