🦄 Sonic Drive-In Has Announced New Unicorn Dreams Slush & Straw /// Bleeding Cool

Fine, yes… it’s true… I’m a child. But I want to try this so bad.

🧛 How Did ‘Sinners’ Really Do This Weekend? /// The Town

I’ve been out on podcasts the last couple of weeks, dedicated my ears for music, but I put a few on at night for my wife and I to fall asleep to, and this was superb. I loved the pushback here.

⛰️ Mountianhead/// Trailer

Jesse Armstrong, creator of Succession, is back with his first feature film, which is oddly going straight to HBO. But it looks perfect. It’s like Succession but instead of going after right wing media, he’s going after tech billionaires.

🤼 The Smashing Machine /// Trailer

The fact we are getting one movie from each of the Safdie brothers this year is incredible. And the fact The Rock is in one of them, shocks me to this day. It looks like he’s actually playing someone different from the same character he plays in every movie; although I guess playing a UFC fighter isn’t that much different than what he did in the WWE… still he actually looks incredible.

🤖 Sam Altman Admits That Saying “Please” and “Thank You” to ChatGPT Is Wasting Millions of Dollars in Computing Power /// Futurism

“Using polite language sets a tone for the response,” Beavers notes. The argument can certainly be made; what we consider “artificial intelligence” might more accurately be described as “prediction machines,” like your phone’s predictive text, but with more autonomy to spit out complete sentences in response to questions or instructions.

First, there has never been a person/thing in my life that deserves a “thank you” more than my espresso machine and second, if saying please and thank you costs OpenAI a lot more money so they burn through it quicker, I’m struggling to see the down side…

📺 This Massive Screen for Live Sports Puts You in the Best Seat in the Stadium /// Wired

Cosm can put you courtside for NBA games, both at center court and on either baseline. The NHL program feels a touch more immersive than that, even, particularly a corner view that’s technically from outside the glass, but truly makes you feel like you’re standing on the rink itself.

All I want to do in life is watch basketball games in one of these places with an ice cold beer.

🕍 Nathan Fielder Reveals Why Paramount+ Removed ‘Nathan for You’ Episode /// THR

I think about learning from our history a lot. The fact Germany pushed to remove an episode because it put their past in a bad light and then that policy spread around the world? Despicable. Especially considering the brand does charitable work to this day.

🪐 Scientists Believe They’ve Witnessed ‘Planetary Suicide’ for the First Time /// Wired

They believe a Jupiter-sized planet, orbiting at the same distance as Mercury does from the Sun, gradually approached its star until it was destroyed by the star’s outer layers.

The universe is pretty crazy isn’t it?

💸 Kickstarter Introduces ‘Tariff Manager Tool’ to Add Charges to Already Fully Funded Projects /// 404

“We now face a $14.50 tariff tax for every $10 we spent on manufacturing with our trusted long-term partner in China. For Stonemaier Games, that amounts to upcoming tariff payments of nearly $1.5 million.”

Playing catch up on links again… It’s quite obvious the impact bad economic policy will be for the average American citizen, but with the news about Amazon backing down from labeling price increases from tariffs do to Trump calling Bezos is a clear sign they know it’s bad policy, but don’t care.

📹 The Hidden Geniuses Behind A$AP Rocky’s Wildest Music Video /// Offline Media

Friend of the Variable and the mastermind behind The Outer comic on foofaraw launched a new video podcast looking at video from a post-production perspective and this episode was superb.

💥 The Movie Mistake Mystery from “Revenge of the Sith” /// FX Rant

Really, really fun look at visual “mistakes” in movies.

🥪 Giving a Small Sandwich Shop a BIG Rebrand…For Free ///SuprOrdinary

Some absolutely stunning filmmaking. Wish there were more short videos of this quality for fictional stories.

🧑‍🏫 How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me, a beginner /// annie’s blog

I almost gave up but then I realized: If I connect the backside Snarfus stagnator to the backside shamrock Klingon troglodyte emulater, it’s good! Everything beep-boops and ding-dongs and I get the Actual Topic of the Tutorial, which lets me do the Very Simple Thing the way I want after all! Pretty cool.

Couldn’t capture my feelings better about some of this stuff if I tried.

🗞️ Business Insider Founder Henry Blodget Launches Regenerator /// Ad Week

With Regenerator, Blodget aims to provide a “rolling analysis” of broad, timely subjects, such as the trade war, stock market fluctuation, future of Google, and durability of the artificial intelligence hype cycle.

I’m not subscribing quite yet, but I’m keeping my eyes to see if this becomes something interesting to check out.

🍷 The Pour-igin of Species /// Pudding

Since my wife works on wine, I had to mention this. I don’t think you should ever pick a wine based on the animal, but if you do, I guess you can follow this. Still an awesome visual site as always from these folks.

🎧 Crucial Tracks the app, the intro post /// End on End

So that got me thinking — what if I combined these ideas with my love of blogging and created an app where anyone can share their Crucial Tracks with the world? And the Crucial Tracks app was born.

I already mentioned this once, but I’ve been really digging Crucial Tracks already and love the idea of these niche communities.

🤖 Company apologizes after AI support agent invents policy that causes user uproar /// Ars Technica

Switching between machines instantly logged them out, breaking a common workflow for programmers who use multiple devices. When the user contacted Cursor support, an agent named “Sam” told them it was expected behavior under a new policy. But no such policy existed, and Sam was a bot. The AI model made the policy up, sparking a wave of complaints and cancellation threats.

I’m probably beating a dead horse at this point, but things like this are the reason jobs can’t be passed to AI. In the end, these kinds of mistakes, some of which the company will never even know about, end up damaging and costing more then they save.

📹 Poker Face S2 /// Trailer

New trailer for Poker Face season two looks incredible. Absolutely can’t wait, although I’m going to have to pay for Peacock again, I guess… anyways, new season premiers on May 8th.

📻 Crucial Tracks music journal

New web app from friend of the Variable, Jason Dettbarn of Crucial Tracks. For a few years now, Jason has done a song-a-day playlist on Apple Music—this app lets you do just that as a nifty music journal. He threw v1 together in a week, but it’s already super slick and works great with new features planned soon to allow you to add songs to your Apple Music playlist or share directly to socials. You can see my public profile here.

🛌 Why Hitler Slept Through D-Day /// Westenberg

Because by that point, Hitler wasn’t running a government. He was running a cult of sycophants and suck ups, hanging on his every whim and tantrum, too scared to face the man and too weak to stand up to him. His staff were no longer commanders. They were cowards who had learned that the most dangerous thing you could do in the Third Reich was tell the truth.

Can’t put my finger on it, but this sounds quite familiar.

🤖 OpenAI is building a social network /// The Verge

While the project is still in early stages, we’re told there’s an internal prototype focused on ChatGPT’s image generation that has a social feed.

Oh goody! An AI social app, where AI bots post AI slop, to be consumed by other AI bots, to train the AI models. Peak creativity if you ask me. Can’t wait to see all the “art” these wonderful “artists” make for us all.

🗞️ Trump Cuts Permanent Press Pool Spot for All Wire Services After Court Orders AP Access Restored /// The Wrap

Wire service publications like the AP, Reuters and Bloomberg, provide news to smaller newspapers, radio, and television stations across the nation. Their efficiency allows a wider audience to be aware of the conversations taking place in the Oval Office and for consumers to hear directly from the president.

We are 100% in a constitutional crisis as this administration disobeys this court order along with the supreme courts 9-0 decision.

🐺 Does Colossal Biosciences’ dire wolf creation justify its $10B+ valuation? /// TechCrunch

Given the common startup tendency to overstate capabilities, it wasn’t easy to take Lamm’s claims at face value, particularly since Colossal’s ambitious de-extinction projects for the woolly mammoth and Tasmanian tiger were not slated for completion until 2028.

Spoiler alert: no. While there may be some interesting conservation applications here, I feel like the money and science could be put to much better use elsewhere.

🃏 Middle-Aged Man Trading Cards Go Viral in Rural Japan Town /// Tokyo Weekender

While the cards — all made entirely by hand — are currently in high demand and often out of stock, they are only available for sale at the Saidosho Community Center.

These are so freakin’ cool. And the fact it seems to be helping the community by getting kids to turn out to events and volunteer is amazing.

🏒 It’s Never Too Early To Get Ready For Gavin McKenna /// Defector

Blackhawks will probably suck again next year, so maybe we can pair Bedard and McKenna like the old Toews and Kane duo.