I need to save the world, but I can’t be bothered about that right now. I am on a mission to adopt 27 more cats. I’m in a village, with eyes on my next prospect: a portly calico cat who is only identified in-game as “loafy cat.” I plan to name it Potato—when I catch…
Workers at the Social Security Administration have been told to share information about in-person appointments with agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, WIRED has learned. “If ICE comes in and asks if someone has an upcoming appointment, we will let them know the date and time,” an employee with direct knowledge of the directive says….
Spend any time at all researching outdoor gear, whether it’s a new tent or a new rain jacket, and you’ll quickly find yourself awash in a confusing array of jargon. Silnylon, polyurethane, X-Pac, cuben fiber, ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene (UHMWPE)—what are these things? What none of them are is perfect. Each has its own weight,…
I first encountered LetPot as a brand earlier this year, while testing its LPH-SE Senior hydroponic growing system for my guide to the best indoor gardening systems. Positioned as alternatives to the long-beloved OG Aerogarden tabletop hydroponic systems, LetPot’s countertop gardens (which are popular enough to have their own subreddit) allow you to grow any…
Want a watch strap that’s as comfortable as fabric, as light as rubber, as strong as a metal bracelet and as tactile as a Milanese mesh? Any watch fan looking to tick all of the above boxes would normally expect to be a dab hand with a spring bar removal tool to experience all the…
We need one more thing—how about Newton’s second law? This says the acceleration depends on the net force (Fnet) and the mass (m) of an object. It’s usually written as Fnet = m × a, but we can rearrange it like this: a = Fnet/m. Combining this with our gravitational force, we get something pretty…
Encrypted Spaces is, in some sense, the next generation of the Signal protocol, but for more complex and fully featured tools that go beyond messaging and calls, says Matt Green, a cryptography-focused professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins. “They’ve built a system that’s kind of an extension of what end-to-end encryption can be, where…
Thinking Machines Lab, an artificial intelligence company started by exiles from OpenAI, has released its first model, called Inkling. The startup’s new model is open-weight, which means that researchers and startups will be able to download and modify it. In a a blog post, the company says Inkling was trained from scratch to make sense…
If you were trying to learn how to get other people to do what you want, you might use some of the techniques found in a book like Influence: The Power of Persuasion. Now, a preprint study out of the University of Pennsylvania suggests that those same psychological persuasion techniques can frequently “convince” some LLMs…
But should you choose a battery snow blower instead of a gas snow blower? “Battery snow blowers are really nipping at the heels of comparably sized gas models in terms of performance, and they offer advantages that gas snow blowers can’t match,” says Dave Trezza, who oversees CR’s snow blower tests. Battery-powered machines start instantly with…