By Walt HickeyHave a great weekend!
DictionnaireFor the first time in 40 years, the 40 people of the French Academy have produced the official Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française, the ninth such edition of a definitive French dictionary that seeks to define what exactly is French. The first edition was commissioned by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635, and since then it’s been a defining struggle to wrangle the francophones into a singular, tome-derived tongue. They added 21,000 new words compared to the 1935 eighth edition, which at first blush is a lot of words, but then you realize that the words they’ve been arguing over are things like “soda” and “sauna.” MonkeysIt has come to this: Of the 43 monkeys that escaped from a medical research facility on November 6, all but eight of them have been recaptured, beguiled by creature comforts such as peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and coaxed back into the cages. Just this sole group remains, with the fewer the monkeys, the greater the share of honour; why, I would not wish one single macaque more. I am not covetous for gold, nor peanut butter, nor do I care for blankets with bells on them and the worker who conspicuously avoids making direct eye contact during the feeding times. But if it be a sin to covet honour, these are the most offensive monkeys alive. Proclaim it throughout the woods, in the immediate vicinity of downtown Yemassee, that if any rhesus wants that peanut butter, go for it. These few, these seemingly doing fine in the low country few; for she today who avoids getting tricked back into a medical research facility with ground nuts and dried fruit with me shall be my sister, be she ne’er so medically experimented on. And rhesus macaques inside Alpha Genesis now abed shall think themselves accursed they were not here, mostly just messing around in the woods aimlessly with no discernible plan, when any coos who avoided the peanut butter are with us, upon this day. PoisonArtists are understandably ticked off that AI systems have been trained on their work without their consent or licensing, and in many cases can procure imitations of that work. In their quest to push back on the industrial image scraping, some allied with programmers who also took issue with the standard practices of large models hoovering up data, resulting in designs for two daring countermeasures against the nonconsensual scrapes. One is a Glaze software that’s been downloaded 6 million times since launching in March 2023, which adds pixel adjustments essentially invisible to the human eye that can prevent some algorithms from being able to attune to an artist’s specific style. The other is an even more audacious chunk of code, Nightshade, downloaded 1.6 million times and which adds in an invisible layer to the images deliberately designed to sabotage the training of new models if enough of the data gets into each of them. It’s led to a new arms race where the AI crowd has had to employ their own countermeasures, an escalating battle which certainly puts a new face on the Generative Adversarial Network I’ve heard so much about. Melissa Heikkilä, MIT Technology Review
Lord of the RingsEmbracer, a gaming entertainment company perhaps best known for spending $395 million to buy up the rights to the intellectual property of J.R.R. Tolkien in 2022, are reportedly having trouble actually making money from the property. According to their latest quarterly statement, Middle-earth Enterprises had a slow quarter, what with no new games out, but is eagerly awaiting the anime film The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, which comes out in cinemas next month. Overall the company reported a 14 percent decline in growth and a 33 percent decline in operating profit, and before they overreact by just completely monetizing the Tolkien IP for all it’s worth, a story comes to mind of those who delved too greedily and too deep.
IonosphereA fascinating and somewhat terrifying proof-of-principle study conducted by a team at Google and published in Nature found that by using real-time data from 40 million mobile phones, Google researchers were able to actually do a pretty good job of mapping conditions in the ionosphere, which is an ionized part of the upper atmosphere that can cause interference in GPS and location technology, especially when things like solar storms make things more chaotic. The researchers found that they were indeed able to fill in the map of the ionosphere based on the aggregated frequency data of millions of phone signals, and that the additional information they obtained could cut down on GPS errors by anywhere from 10 percent to 20 percent. ToysThe toy industry is doing great all things considered, with sales up 37 percent over sales in 2019. The growth is coming from some interesting niches, with building sets in general and LEGO Botanicals in particular scoring growth across dollars, units and average selling price over that time span. Other big hits in the business include Hello Kitty, Monster Jam and NBA trading cards. The shrinking categories include dolls and action figures — if kids want to immerse themselves by pretending to be someone else, they’re just going to do it in video games at this point — and outdoor toys, as our national crisis of “needing to log off and touch grass” has gone parabolically generational.
BearsFour people were arrested after filing insurance claims for what is very clearly a person in a bear suit mauling three of their luxury cars, video evidence that makes their claimed bear attacks strain credulity. The four residents were charged with insurance fraud and conspiracy, and the ursine hustle netted them $141,839 in insurance payments. It’s all the more galling because while they attempted to pin the destruction on a helpless bear and besmirch the good name of the grizzlies, let’s be real here: If they only took it a single step further and went to Progressive insisting that Bigfoot, yes, the mighty Sasquatch, had personally messed with their Nissan Stanza, these guys would be in commercials with Flo at this point. They just simply weren’t thinking ambitiously enough. This week in the Sunday edition, I spoke to Eben Novy-Williams and Jacob Feldman, reporters at Sportico and authors of the brand-new Club Sportico. I love this new site; I’m a huge fan of Sportico and their more conversational, down-to-earth chats, and was a day 1 subscriber. If you like sports and the business around it, you should check ‘em out! We spoke about the future of sports, the nationalization of sport fandoms, and changes in the broader media landscape. Club Sportico can be found at club.sportico.com:
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