calliope

Of course! And you can’t forget the classic casino or arcade games.

There’s a coin-pusher roguelike and a claw game roguelike as well.

I can personally remember seeing “Gonads and Strife” in 2001, and “Winnie the Pooh: Satan Worship” in 2000!

Just to add to the list of ancient internet videos.

I don’t think I really get this one. The Disqus link provided some clues (new-age songs talking about turning and circles?) but I didn’t realize circles were a trope of the 60s.

This guy’s so crazy he holds the peeler by the blade!

Can you afford the extra hours? Comfort-wise, time-wise, or job-wise?

If I can help it, I’m avoiding the brutal plains route, as someone who has driven across the country more times than I would like to admit for things other than fun. I’ll spend a decent few hours of my life to avoid driving through the Nebraska or Kansas plains again.

The efficient route is most likely going to be the most boring and desolate, kind of by definition. It will have straight roads and slow elevation builds for efficiency’s sake.

If I had the option to drive southwest through Missouri or southwest through Kansas, I am picking Missouri.

I also find Oklahoma to be a bit more interesting than Kansas, but the Texas panhandle can’t really be helped.

One of the most interesting road trips I’ve ever taken was through New Mexico! From Amarillo, Texas I went southwest to Roswell, then went west. I’m not sure if it was the time of year I went or what, but it was absolutely amazing. Way more interesting than the slow build of a lot of the other plains areas.

Did it add time to my trip? Yes. But it’s been over ten years and I still think about some of the interesting scenery I saw.

A hand-cranked device for beating eggs.

Like an old hand mixer.

I think it’s the implication that what they’re eating is literally just ground up whatever they could find.

So he’s just throwing everything in a vat and eggbeating it, including entire frogs.

There’s also possibly another joke where if you’re beating potatoes for mashed potatoes, you might apologize for a lump in a similar way. “Egg beater must have missed it!” But in this case it’s an entire frog.

small enough to fit in the palm of your hand

In case any one else’s first question was “how tiny?”

I’m pretty sure I remember the scene too, actually! That’s probably why I’m so adamant that the original poster is confused or bending the truth for dramatic purposes.

I think most people from the U.S. would understand the context like I did… because Watson reacts to the gun being in the desk.

If I’m remembering it correctly, Watson pauses or something when he sees a gun in the drawer. At the time I wasn’t exactly sure what kind of show it was going to be, or what the context of the gun might be. But him pausing gave me information! It’s a TV show made when they provided information visually instead of also saying it out loud.

Even if someone wasn’t thinking about the laws or culture of the country the media was made, the context needed to understand is provided right in the episode.

But it’s more fun for OP to spin that up into “People from the U.S. are so used to guns…”

Nope!

But the “desk gun” has been a trope in fiction for at least 40 years, which I think is what the original poster is confusing with reality. It’s ironic given their talk of “media literacy.”

What they seem to mean is that Hollywood movies and U.S. TV series use guns in different ways, and it became clear to them when they saw Sherlock.

I’m actually not sure if they consciously know the difference, because a significant number of people take media as a representative shorthand for reality and it’s not.

ya’ll are brainless morons merely voting down that which you understand.

Say again?

Scratch is a visual programming language that is intended to be easy to learn for younger people.

You can read more about the language on Wikipedia here and you can play around with the language here.

I feel like we’ve reached a new low when the news cycle is focusing so heavily on commencement speakers.

Meta employees reported Wednesday that in the company’s offices on the day mass layoffs hit thousands of their colleagues, fliers were taped to walls urging workers to sign a petition in support of stopping the company’s new artificial intelligence data tracking program

Imagine still working at Facebook

I’m using Kagi’s Orion browser at the moment.

The arrogance of Tech Crunch to say “Something went wrong. Disable your adblocker.” Nothing went wrong.

Here’s as much of the text as I can paste of their overly-long article:

The era of the “ten blue links” is officially over.

At its Google I/O conference on Tuesday, Google unveiled an AI-powered overhaul of Search centered around a reimagined “intelligent search box” — what the company describes as the biggest change to this entry point to the web since the search box debuted more than 25 years ago.

Instead of returning a simple list of links, Google Search will drop users into AI-powered interactive experiences at times. Google is also introducing tools that can dispatch “information agents” to gather information on a user’s behalf, along with tools that let users build personalized mini apps tailored to their needs.

The resulting experience will no longer look much like how people envision Google Search, which has long been defined by ranked links to websites that have the information you need.

With the revamped Search experience, the new search box simply expands to accommodate longer, more conversational queries, rather than making you decide what type of search experience or mode you want to choose at the start of your query. It will also have a new AI-powered query suggestion system that goes beyond autocomplete to help people craft more complex and nuanced queries, Google says.

Google’s AI Overviews will also allow users to ask follow-up questions in AI Mode, beginning Tuesday, the company noted.

Google is also introducing agentic capabilities and AI-powered interactive features into the search experience. This means people will spend even less time clicking the traditional blue links that Google Search used to return.

Starting this summer, people will be able to create, customize, and manage multiple new “information agents” within Google Search. These agents can work in the background 24/7 to track changes on the web and alert you to new information. For instance, you could have an agent track market movements based on customer parameters, Google suggests.

While the underlying technology here is powered by AI, which makes it more capable, the idea itself is not a new one. In 2003, Google launched Google Alerts, a change-detection service that emailed users when new web results matched their search terms. The web was smaller and more manageable then, of course, so this became a part of many information workers’ tool sets. (That service still exists in some form but is no longer the way most web users go about acquiring new information.)

Information-gathering agents are an evolution of Google Alerts. Beyond spotting changes, they can make sense of them, too.

“You could send an alert to track market movements in a particular sector with very specific parameters, and the agent will map out a monitoring plan for you, including the tools and the data it needs to access — like our real-time finance data,” Google’s head of Search, Liz Reid, explained in a press briefing. “And it will then keep track of those changes and let you know when the conditions are met, and provide a synthesized update with links and information you can dive into further,” she added.

This shift means that “searching the web” will increasingly be performed by AI agents rather than humans. Instead, people will focus more on acting on the information those agents provide instead of manually clicking links.

Links will become an afterthought with the coming changes to the Search results experience, which builds on Google’s earlier launches of AI search features, like its short summaries known as AI Overviews and its conversational search, AI Mode.

AI Overviews are now used by more than 2.5 billion monthly users; meanwhile, its conversational search mode, launched last year, now tops 1 billion monthly users. (ChatGPT, for comparison, has 900 million weekly active users, as of earlier this year. This suggests that ChatGPT is now seeing more frequent engagement, with users coming back repeatedly throughout the week, while Google has more total unique people touching its AI features over the course of a month.)

Now, thanks to a combination of Gemini and Google Antigravity, the company’s agentic development platform, Search results will begin to look more like interactive web pages.

“Search can build custom experiences just for your individual questions, from dynamic layouts, interactive visuals to persistent and stateful project spaces that you can return to again and again,” says Reid. One of the ways Google is integrating these new capabilities is with “generative UI” (user interface), where it builds custom widgets and visualizations on the fly in answer to users’ search questions.

You can imagine, for example, how a question about black holes in space could lead to an interactive visual that brings the concept to life, Reid said, adding that users can then ask follow-up questions and see Google respond with brand-new visuals in real time.

Google says the new system was built in partnership with the Google DeepMind team and uses Gemini Flash 3.5. It will roll out to everyone who uses Google, free of charge, this summer.

In addition, Google will allow users to tap into Antigravity to build their own customizable, stateful experiences — think “mini apps” — directly in Search using natural-language commands. Again, this isn’t so much about information retrieval as it is about action. For instance, you could build a meal-planning app using information from your own calendar to help you decide what to prep and when to eat, or a fitness app created for your specific goals.

Combined, these changes will likely further decimate Google referrals to publishers, which have already been suffering from declining referrals due to AI Overviews. This has put some ad-dependent media operations out of business, and now things will likely get worse.

There’s little time left for publishers to adapt. The new search box is arriving this week, and generative UI is arriving this summer. Both are free. The mini-app-building feature and information agents will roll out first to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers this summer.

But Google’s long-term plan is to make its AI technology more broadly accessible, including its personal AI agent Spark, which will eventually be free, as will many of the AI features.

“Part of the reason we focus on delivering frontier models — highly capable, but also very efficient, fast, and at a lower price — is because we want to bring it to as many people as possible, and so I think that’s an area where we will shine,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a press briefing ahead of I/O.

Fuck TechCrunch.

Bowlero, which has been rebranding as Lucky Strike Entertainment, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

It’s important to note that they’re rebranding with a different name.

So like next week?

This is funny, given that I remember what a big deal people made about it.

Making PC ports was their strategy for a whole five years! They didn’t even make it an entire console generation.

Imagine growing a conscience and still working at Meta. In 2026.

I don’t see them quitting, just complaining in an email. So brave.