“The other day, I looked out my door cam and saw an 81-year-old man slowly and painstakingly carrying my heavy luggage that had been lost on a recent flight up a steep flight of stairs,” writes Erin Howell, who set up a GoFundMe to help the man. “He looked absolutely exhausted, and his steps were heavy with effort.”
The man, Donald Johnson, has had to go back to work delivering luggage so he can pay for his wife’s cancer treatments. He has been forced into this grueling work because it is the “only job that will hire me.”
81-year-old Texas man working to return lost luggage to fund wife’s cancer bills sparks community outpouring [The Independent]
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince has an intriguing proposal for making content creation for the web a viable business in the AI era: Require AI bots to pay when they index a site and deliver results to users. That would require a gateway, and Cloudflare is, of course, in great position to be that gateway, Prince says.
Prince is articulate, intelligent and charming. But his proposal would be just a new generation of working for the algorithm, the same as people now trying to optimize their work for TikTok and YouTube, and the Google search algorithm.
Can Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince save the web from AI? [The Vergecast with Nilay Patel]
On the Verge’s Version History podcast, Oregon Trail designer Philip Bouchard walks through the history of the brutal edutainment adventure. I am too old to have played the game in school, but we had a similar resource game where you had to provision armies during the Civil War.
The history of Tewodros II, the mad 19th Century Emperor of Abyssinnia (present-day Ethiopia), who imprisoned dozens of British emissaries, setting off one of the most ambitious military expeditions of the British Empire. therestishistory.com/episodes/…
Minnie is physically doing well, but stoically suffering when she wears the collar. I give her a break from it every now and then because she is not scratching at the eye. At least not yet.
A friend said Minnie will adjust to the collar and by tomorrow “she’ll reach the ‘just smash into things anyway’ phase.”
She bumps into things now. I’m probably imagining that I can hear her mutter “fuck” when she does.
Talking to animals is AI’s next ethical minefield: Researchers are using AI to decipher animal calls and communications, presenting ethical dilemmas, according to Bloomberg. (subscription required).
Researchers doing the work say that “if humans better understand the interior world of other species, they are less likely to shrug at climate change, endorse industrial farming or participate in habitat loss.”
“Yet human innovation also has a long track record of using technology against animals, says César Rodríguez-Garavito, director of the More-Than-Human Life (MOTH) Program at New York University. Twentieth century whalers used advances in sonar to drive panicked whales to the surface to be killed. Poachers have copied the tribal practice of mimicking bird calls during hunting, using automated and looped recordings to lure birds into traps…..
“‘AI has potential for greater harm at scale,’ says Rodríguez-Garavito. In a 2025 report, he and his co-authors presented a dystopian vision of how ’nonhuman animal communication technologies (NACTs)’ could expose animals to mobs of humans wanting to chat, leverage them for military purposes like sea mine detection or even be used to capture and kill them.”
We need to redefine a productive economy as one where we make more things we need more of, rather than one where we just make more things. Cory Doctorow: “Inefficiency is bad, actually”