Ninjazzon

Before we dive into the crux of it all, can we just stop for a moment appreciate the fact that appreciation societies—whether fun or real ones—exist and are a positive thing in general? Keep it up!

With that said, we present to you an admiration society for a curiosity of a concept that we’ve already discussed numerous times, but can’t get enough of—and that is signs. The Sign Appreciation Society collects and shares all manner of signage for the internet to enjoy.

Scroll on to see the best of the best signs appreciated in the group as well as our chat with the society's founder.

A set of smart vending machines at the University of Waterloo is expected to be removed from campus after students raised privacy concerns about their software.

The machines have M&M artwork on them and sell chocolate and other candy. They are located throughout campus, including in the Modern Languages building and Hagey Hall.

Earlier this month, a student noticed an error message on one of the machines in the Modern Languages building. It appeared to indicate there was a problem with a facial recognition application.

"We wouldn't have known if it weren't for the application error. There's no warning here," said River Stanley, a fourth-year student, who investigated the machines for an article in the university publication, mathNEWS.

A judge has dismissed a complaint from a parent and guardian of a girl, now 15, who was sexually assaulted when she was 12 years old after Snapchat recommended that she connect with convicted sex offenders.

According to the court filing, the abuse that the girl, C.O., experienced on Snapchat happened soon after she signed up for the app in 2019. Through its "Quick Add" feature, Snapchat "directed her" to connect with "a registered sex offender using the profile name JASONMORGAN5660." After a little more than a week on the app, C.O. was bombarded with inappropriate images and subjected to sextortion and threats before the adult user pressured her to meet up, then raped her. Cops arrested the adult user the next day, resulting in his incarceration, but his Snapchat account remained active for three years despite reports of harassment, the complaint alleged.

Houston-based Intuitive Machines landed its Odysseus robot near the lunar south pole.

It took some minutes for controllers to establish that the craft was down, but eventually a signal was received.

"What we can confirm, without a doubt, is our equipment is on the surface of the Moon and we are transmitting," flight director Tim Crain announced.

Staff at the company cheered and clapped at the news.

It was an important moment, not just for the commercial exploitation of space but for the US space programme in general.

June 1, 1952, was Whitsunday, and provided the young Michael Ventris with a convenient break from his duties as an architect. At the end of the day he would write his 20th Work Note on Minoan Language Research, with the somewhat disbelieving title, “Are the Knossos and Pylos Tablets Written in Greek?” Responsibility was disclaimed: this was only “a frivolous digression”, that would “sooner or later come to an impasse, or dissipate itself in absurdities.” It became instead one of the great intellectual achievements of the 20th century.

The first Linear B tablets had been discovered at Knossos on the island of Crete. Kephala Hill, as it was then known, was one of the few true ‘tells’ in the Greek world and preserved rich layers of inhabitation dating back to the younger stone age (7,000 BC). The archaeological significance of the site had been clear already in the late 19th century, its first excavator being the fatefully named Minos Kalokairinos. He found great storage jars, pithoi, from which the locals began to call the site Ta Pitaria. These had been placed in hallways of great stone blocks, many carved with curious but distinctive signs.

I’ve read over 1,000 nonfiction books in my life, and these 33 are the most powerful of them all. I can honestly say they changed my life, who’s to say they won’t change yours too?

Don’t just take my word for it though. Read on for my summary of all 33 books and see for yourself how your next read might just change your life.

Gemma is Google’s new “family of lightweight, state-of-the-art open models” aimed at AI developers and researchers.

Gemma was developed by Google DeepMind and other teams across the company, and is “built from the same research and technology used to create the Gemini models,” including technical and infrastructure components. Name-wise, it’s Latin for “precious stone.”

It’s available in Gemma 2B and Gemma 7B sizes today with accompanying pre-trained and instruction-tuned variants. For the former, Google has filtered out “certain personal information and other sensitive data from training sets.” It has undergone “manual red-teaming, automated adversarial testing, and assessments of model capabilities for dangerous activities.”

Google regularly launches updates to its algorithm to continuously improve search results quality. Think of these updates as a refresh of the system where rankings change: some websites see an improvement while others see a decline.

We know that at the end of the day, Google will reward us if our readers find our articles useful.

Or that’s what we thought.

You might have noticed that no matter what you google, there’s always a selection of the same publishers showing up at the top of the results.

Scientists have found a giant wall underneath the Baltic Sea — and they're pretty sure humans made it.

In a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the German research team who discovered the megastructure, which they've called the Blinkerwall, say they believe it was constructed for hunting on land.

As the paper penned by geoscience researchers led by Kiel University notes, some parts of the Baltic Sea basin only submerged in the mid-Holocene era, dating back between 5,000 and 7,000 years.

With sediment dating estimates putting the Blinkerwall's age at between 10,000 and 11,000 years ago during the Stone Age, scientists say the uniformity of this lengthy structure — which runs for 971 meters, or roughly 60 percent of a mile — makes it seem more likely to have been made by humans than by the movements of glaciers or tsunamis. If they're right, it could be the "oldest man-made megastructure in Europe," the paper declares.

While flagship smartphones boast impressive features, spending $1,000 is not a prerequisite for a satisfying Android experience nowadays. If you’re in need of a new smartphone and have a budget of approximately $200, there are numerous excellent options available. Surprisingly, some of the best Android phones under $200 come equipped with features like 5,000mAh batteries, multi-lens camera setups, and the promise of extended software updates.

We thoroughly evaluate various Android phones to ensure optimal performance without encountering unexpected issues down the line. If we were to recommend one Android smartphone in the sub-$200 price range, it would be the latest addition to Samsung’s lineup, the Galaxy A15 5G. Boasting a 6.5-inch Super AMOLED screen, a sizable battery with 25W fast charging support, and more, it offers a compelling package. Alternatively, consider Motorola’s Moto G Play (2024) for a straightforward yet functional device.

Water molecules have been detected on the surface of an asteroid for the first time, revealing new clues about the distribution of water in our solar system.

Scientists studied four silicate-rich asteroids using data gathered by the now-retired Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a telescope-outfitted plane operated by NASA and the German Aerospace Center.

Observations by SOFIA's Faint Object InfraRed Camera (FORCAST) instrument showed that two of the asteroids — named Iris and Massalia — exhibit a specific wavelength of light that indicated the presence of water molecules at their surface, a new study reports.

OpenAI unveils Sora, a near-photorealistic text-to-video model with unprecedented coherency.