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TIL, An artist named Harold Sangouard custom builds video game arcade cabinets hand-chiseled from marble. They weigh hundreds of pounds and start at $100,000. https://www.harow.fr/arcadia/

ComputerLand Radio Commercials, 1985 https://archive.org/details/ComputerLand_Radio_Commercials/ComputerLand+Accounting+Radio.wav

System design interview questions: The answer is generated by AI, and the speakers are both AI bots. https://open.spotify.com/show/3q322aCceMNYvYW7KmtMc6

A visualization of standardized date/time formats
https://ijmacd.github.io/rfc3339-iso8601/

Beware the medieval fighting snails! 🐌
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231221-the-mystery-of-the-medieval-fighting-snails

"The survey, which drew responses from 5,699 published authors, found that in 2022, their median gross pre-tax income from their books was $2,000. When combined with other writing-related income, the total annual median income was $5,000." https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/93301-author-incomes-post-small-gains.html

Dinner today: Ottolenghi's Coffee and chilli chicken koftas with onions.
Really good, and a change of pace. The ingredient list make it sound as though this is a spicy dish, but it isn't.

https://ottolenghi.co.uk/pages/recipes/coffee-chilli-rubbed-chicken-koftas-grilled-onions

A $10k stipend is available for anyone moving to Cumberland, MD https://www.ci.cumberland.md.us/1787/Choose-Cumberland-Relocation-Program

This is the most Boston story ever
https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2024/08/19/brewster-woman-reportedly-gives-birth-in-cape-cod-traffic-dad-cuts-umbilical-cord-at-dunkin/#:~:text=Workers%20rushed%20outside%20to%20help,wedding%20ring%20while%20delivering%20Summer.

Well that sucks. https://www.salon.com/2024/08/24/famous-ballpark-used-in-a-league-of-their-own-destroyed-by-massive/

You know this would happen to me.
Italian burglar caught after sitting down with book https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg4kpv3p4zo

1960s chatbot ELIZA beat OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 in a recent Turing test study https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/12/real-humans-appeared-human-63-of-the-time-in-recent-turing-test-ai-study/

+10x engineers may be mythical, but -10x engineers exist. https://taylor.town/-10x

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It’s been five decades of mazes, monsters, and even movies https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2024/01/50-years-of-dungeons-dragons-10-big-moments/

The parent company of Jack Daniel’s on Wednesday announced it is ending its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) goals.

I’m trying to make sense of the intent of this statement:
“With these new dynamics at play, we must adjust our work to ensure it continues to drive business results while appropriately recognizing the current environment in which we find ourselves,” Brown-Forman’s Executive Leadership team said.

https://katu.com/news/nation-world/jack-daniels-parent-company-scrapping-dei-goals-will-tie-incentives-to-performance-brown-forman-corporation-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-robby-starbuck

This site is a quick way to check whether a job advert has the kind of subtle linguistic gender coding that has a discouraging effect. https://gender-decoder.katmatfield.com

TIL John Lennon worked a summer job at Liverpool airport as a baggage handler. It gives new meaning to "Imagine no possessions."

I know that the FBI has a lot of police dogs but you never had a police cat. My cat, Butch, should be the first Police cat. He is very tough and not scared of anything - even dogs. If you had a police cat like Butch, you would fool all the crooks because they wouldn’t suspect that a cat is working for the FBI. If you want to try Butch, write to me.

A young girl named Saraann
Letter to the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover
1930

—Kids’ Letters to the F.B.I., by Bill Adler