Featured Links - April 7, 2025

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

A floor-cleaning robot

•  Starliner’s flight to the space station was far wilder than most of us thought. "Hey, this is a very precarious situation we're in." This is probably the closest the space program has come to a disaster since Columbia was lost.
• Rewilding Death in the Appalachian Mountains. "A growing conservation burial movement is challenging the funeral industry’s environmental footprint while healing the land."
• A Note on Trade Deficits and Manufacturing, How trade deficits really work, from a real economist.
• Loomered. "Laura Loomer, an online right wing troll once driven from Trump’s side, has reemerged with a vengeance." The inmates have taken over the asylum.
• How to disable ACR on your TV (and why doing it makes such a big difference for privacy). "Smarter TV operating systems bring new privacy risks, with one major concern being automatic content recognition (ACR) - a feature that monitors your viewing habits."
• Inside arXiv—the Most Transformative Platform in All of Science. "Modern science wouldn’t exist without the online research repository known as arXiv. Three decades in, its creator still can’t let it go."
• Human bodies begin breaking down at two very precise ages. "A comprehensive study reveals some eye-opening insights about aging, focusing on exactly “when” things start to shift and how our bodies begin to break down, both inside and out."
• I visited the sprawling 'metroburb' where 'Severance' is filmed. "It's a 2 million-square-foot town under one roof."
• Digital hygiene. A good overview from AI researcher Andrei Karpathy. If you implement even some of what he suggests, you will be more secure online.
• Your data is unwell. "Sharing electronic medical records in Canada is a hassle – and, for some, a health risk. Tech companies and governments are looking for a fix to our patchwork of digital systems."
• COVID didn’t end. Its story just stopped being told. "That Canadians aren’t being supported through known complications of infection is a crisis of the moment, of 2025 – not 2020." The situation is much the same, or worse, in the US. 
• How I wrote the notes app of my dreams (no coding required). "The new phenomenon known as vibecoding lets you describe an app and have AI build it to your specifications. The results astounded me."