Hello internet friends!

It is the second day of Christmas and there is still an email from me. Hail Mary!

I do get some “Dude, stop it with the robot sex links” feedback, but… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ For a slight chuckle I will gladly look past that. Sex robots will ‘come a lot sooner than you think’, scientist claims – and as so many people on Twitter said: that looks like a design flaw. (Haha? Sorry.)

This is the last email for this year and I’m weirdly proud that I made it this far into the year without having met anyone in ~real life~ who talked about “hygge” and still don’t know how to pronounce it.

Do you have a friend who creates stuff? Maybe writes a mediocre newsletter? Well, Andrew W.K. thinks you should encourage them.
Hey, let’s try it?

iddqd and idkfa made so many things so much easier for people who were not very good with computer games. These days? Not so much. Here’s a short history of cheat codes in video games.
A real life cheat code seems to wearing a hi-vis west. Who knew.

Underwater news!
Any article that starts with a scuba-diving philosopher is either terrible or great. This one about octopus intelligence is not terrible.
Meanwhile they’re not the only smart animals down there in the water. We should not underestimate fish.

Toodles!

Hello internet friends,

it is a pretty fun idea to 3D-print the The Legend of Zelda map. It is even more fun to read that the person who did it used Minecraft as the 3D tool, because of course he did.

You know what’s creepy? This thing here. – it looks like a coffee maker but somehow it has a hologram of a half-naked anime lady in it. Maybe we should really start talking about the ethics of robotic companions.

It’s always pretty fun to explore a city with a healthy combination of planning and seredipity. So hey, why not do the same with Kabul?

Pebble was the first smartwatch company and somehow it managed to survive until a few weeks ago. Now that it is gone, Fitbit went ahead and bought their assets – and here is how the whole thing looked from the inside.

It’s a bit too simplified, but hey – why not read this article on how spice trade roughly 4000 years ago was the precursor to globalization? I did and enjoyed it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If you do internet-stuff, why not go and have a look at this very good book. (Well, book-like website.) You’ll probably learn something.

Toodles!

Hello internet friends,

good news! We finally have tangible proof that dinosaurs were big ducks. I mean, we already knew deep in our hearts, but it’s nice to be able to point at some actual feathers and say: “See!”

So, by now we’ve all watched Westworld, right? (Right?)
I mean, whew, what a season finale – who’d have thought it’s all a dream and he was just taking a shower? Anyway. If you can’t wait for the next season or until we finally have proper real robots, why not travel to South Dakota and visit Cowboy Town?

Space! Ever since we humans decided that we want to go there, it’s littered with random space junk. (Like everywhere we go.) Now a bunch of Japanese scientists had a smart idea: make a big-ass net and collect that stuff. Sounds like a good plan to me.

We’re big fans of Lego here at the Irregularity HQ (wow, way to make it sound pretentious. There’s just me. There’s no HQ. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) and so of course this article hits a nerve: Lego Is the Perfect Toy.

This orchid might not be an orchid. In fact it’s a mantis. Fascinating and slightly creepy.

Toodles.

Hello internet friends,

do you have what it takes to be an Instagram influencer? Well, if not, this article might have some ideas what you’ll need. #inspirational

This morning I learned about lights-out manufacturing which is pretty much what it sounds like – a process of running a factory without any humans – which would need light. So… lights out.
(Having learned Latin in high school I cringe at the idea of calling -facturing without manus manufacturing, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
I have learned this on a MetaFilter post which linked to this article on the future of what we used to call work.
idk, I guess if we can manage to get around that we can start to think more about The Unbusy Manifesto.

One of the things that increasingly get automated is driving – and one of the companies that put in a lot of work to make trucks self-driving is Otto, a subsidiary of Uber. Uber is already not all that well-known for being extremely ethical so it might be quite interesting to learn how Otto managed to “test” their trucks on public roads without proper paperwork.

Remember MakerBot? Somehow most people still don’t have a handy little 3D printer at home and if you want to know why, well – it’s your lucky day.

If there’s proper public transport and good ramen, I don’t think how anything would be wrong with this idea. (Honestly, those are two important factors for a high quality of life anyway.)

Toodles!