I like doing this with my local paper but from a hundred+ years ago.
It's funny to read that the electric street car opening day was delayed because they built the tracks at the wrong gauge for the street cars. Beaurocratic mismanagement in the 1890's.
You can see if a motherboard has twice the necessary components, or if a robot arm just looks wrong, but if your algorithm to process 1000 records takes a thousand times longer than it should (but still finishes in 100 milliseconds) no one notices.
Until it has to process stuff in real-time that is.
A robot arm is exactly the place you see software acting up. If your algorithm is consistently slow it's fine, the moment it's inconsistent things dont line up and problems happen.
I just got back from backwoods camping, each site has a wooden chest/thunderbox/toilet out in the open woods near the site. I'm not sure if the thunder is the heavy wooden lid closing or the noises that come from it. Some are out of sight of the campsite but ours was only 75ft away, fortunately the lid blocked your view if it was in use.
Wikipedia says gutta-percha was a household word as it was a popular material to make items out of. Interesting to see the word distribution in Google books, it was super popular but seems to have died off quickly.
At some point we started calling it latex instead. There's still plenty of stuff made from natural latex. The harvesting of latex from Hevea brasiliensis is almost exactly the same as harvesting latex from Palaquium gutta (gutta-percha)
EDIT: I see they are actually 1,4-polyisoprene but gutta-percha is in a trans configuration while H. brasiliensis latex is in a cis configuration. Not sure if that amounts to any difference in properties https://s10.lite.msu.edu/res/msu/botonl/b_online/e20/20c.htm
Do you REALLY believe that there was a hundred-fold spike in the use of the term gutta-percha in the 5 years between 1869 and 1874, or would you willing to consider that you are looking at spurious data?
Consider a similar new material/technology development --- certainly from 1969--1974 there was presumably a similar spike in the use of the word "computer", which was similarly transformative.
LLM's can do anything, but the decision tree for what you can do in life is almost infinite. LLM's still need a coherent designer to make progress towards a goal.
The societal impact of that UI design decision will be interesting to watch play out. People are so used to trusting the first Google search result that it now being AI that's sometimes wrong or hallucinated.
But as they stated, Google has already had ads inline with the search results, and it's been like that for well over a decade. (Long ago, ads used to only be on the sidebar)
Frankly, the AI section at the top seems like something Google would have been very reluctant to add since it saves the user from scrolling through the ad listings, and it was only added to compete with newer AI search services.
The bad guys are driving their train when a cop train shows up in the mirrors behind their train.
Cop walks up to the window and asks for their license and registration please. Another shootout occurs followed by a multi-track multi-train police chase, but everyone needs to stay on their respective train tracks.
I thought the Poles needed to be either all on the left-hand plane, or within the unit disk, for stability? (I haven't had my coffee yet, so maybe I'm remembering wrong).
I saw a video of some alpine explorer who recorded a video of himself to be uploaded later. He was on some stupid long 500 mile trek through the mountains when the police texted him. They were paving the parking lot where he'd left his car and requesting that it be moved, so he was hiking towards better signal so that he could start the engine and someone local could move it a few feet.
I'm backwoods camping next week, and we have 25 people spread out over three sites. I was thinking it would be funny to bring some old rotary dial phones and some sort of way of hooking them up, and then just have that as the intercom between sites for when dinner is ready or whatever.
It's next week, so unlikely to happen and I'm not sure what technology I would need to make it all work. Something like Lora plus a way to make the phones work.
Chaining together a few WiFi routers and running a local IRC server with ergo could work well (so get everyone on the same WLAN even if no Internet). There is also Briar chat on mobile. Maybe Mumble for voice could work. I'd look for routers on Craigslist or eBay that are under $20 each and have OpenWrt support. Have had good luck with the Netgear R6220 in the past, but there could be other good options as well.
My entire community use it. We set channel and CTSS to our area code so people can remember it. I also have intercoms that use it.
Outside of the legal realm there are also ham radios that are either easy to frequency unlock or are pre-unlocked to do FRS+DMR for encryption though I would never do this outside of a dummy load.
Less fun but you can also run OpenBTS or Yate to get your own GSM network. Probably illegal but nobody's gonna care in the woods.
Back in the day we would "find" spools of phone cable and string them between houses. If you found that much cable you could definitely wire up a few miles of woods.
Regular walkie talkies + VOX + headset re-assembled into the phone handset ? Make the phone hook a switch to cut the mic (err, like it originally did, I guess). It's not elegant but it could be a quick evening's work.
A couple years ago I stayed at an AirBnB and there was an old rotary phone in the kitchen. Unfortunately, I found it was merely placed there as an antique curio and wasn't hitched up with service. I felt a little cheated honestly.
It's funny to read that the electric street car opening day was delayed because they built the tracks at the wrong gauge for the street cars. Beaurocratic mismanagement in the 1890's.