The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.
Greggs, a bakery chain in the UK, and the bank Monzo recently had an online conversation about the possibility jointly creating an ATM that, instead of distributing money, distributes sausage rolls. ITV News reports that this project launched yesterday in Newcastle and had people lining up to make withdrawals.
-via No Time to Dan
Things Don’t Always Get Better Aurelien. Progress is a recent idea, in historical terms.
FASTER, PLEASE: Immune Response Thought to Aid Cancer Could Be an Unexpected Cure
Banks are where the money is, but people don't often rob them because 1. it's wrong, 2. there are security measures, and 3. if you could pull it off, the long arm of the law will find you, and the consequences will be severe. But every once in a great while, someone does pull it off and gets away with it.
A bank robbery in Krugersdorp, South Africa, in 1977 seems like something you'd see in a movie. The perpetrators rented a building next door to the bank, and dug a tunnel to the bank vault. Noisy construction equipment outside covered up the sound of the digging equipment inside. The extra noise also tended to trip the bank's alarm system, so bank employees turned it off. All of this came to light after the money was gone, and neither it nor the thieves were ever found.
Read the details of this story and of five other famous unsolved bank robberies at Mental Floss. But keep in mind that just because these schemes worked once, that doesn't mean they will work again.
Design Boom introduces us to Mamonaku Kohi, a Japanese-styled cafe in Quezon City, the Philippines. It's not a place where you can park yourself for a couple of hours, sip your drink, and enjoy free WiFi in an air conditioned environment. The service point is literally a roughly-cut hole in the concrete wall.
It's far too easy to pick up an infestation of bedbugs while staying in a hotel and then bringing the critters back home with you. That's why travel writer Lydia Mansel advocates for placing your luggage in the hotel room's bathtub as soon as you arrive.
Travel + Leisure magazine explains that bedbugs prefer to live in fabric surfaces, so the most straightforward solution is to reduce contact between your luggage and fabrics, such as the carpet.
You can also leave a note on your luggage to ask the housekeeping staff to leave your luggage in its otherwise puzzling location.
A river is pushing up Mount Everest’s peakScienceDaily
The Last Hominin Standing Nautlius
THE 21st CENTURY IS NOT TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: Students created a way to access personal info via AI and smart glasses.
In a shocking turn of events, someone was able to use a new high-powered tech product for evil. Two Harvard students paired the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses with facial recognition software to rapidly identify strangers and compile their personal information from the internet to highlight the privacy concerns that are getting unboxed with easily accessible consumer tech.
In a video posted to X, AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio explained how they built I-XRAY. The program uses the glasses to capture images of random people on campus and at a train station, identify them through a publicly accessible facial recognition search site like PimEyes, and then use a large language model (LLM) to trawl the web and compile the person’s information. Nguyen and Ardayfio could access people’s addresses, the names of their parents, and photos in mere minutes, and even approached unsuspecting people using the info they collected to make them think they had met before.
The creators said they would not release the code for this program but created it to highlight how it’s possible to build invasive tech with recent advancements like smart glasses and LLMs.
They may not be releasing the code themselves, but how hard would it be for someone to reverse engineer the process, now that the cat is out of the bag?
Apartment repair laws create extra burden for owners
Investor Arthur Panos learned in September that he, along with other owners of the four apartments in a building in Sydney’s inner west, would have to fix the waterproofing of the largely problem-free property. The bill? $500,000.
The NSW Design and Building Practitioners Act 2020 imposes obligations on apartment owners to follow tougher repair requirements, such as appointing a licensed practitioner for repairs that cost more than $5000.
