Because It’s Friday: The Chatbot That Wasn’t
In 2022, Jake Moffatt needed to fly to his grandmother’s funeral. He asked Air Canada’s website chatbot about bereavement fares, and it told him he could book now and apply for the discount within 90 days. He did exactly that, and Air Canada said no, because the real policy required the request before travel. The […]
Because it’s Friday: An Ode to XGBoost
Every few years the machine learning world falls hard for something new. Transformers, diffusion models, agents, whatever is currently setting the group chat on fire. Meanwhile, in the background, the same algorithm from 2014 keeps winning Kaggle competitions and shipping to production, doing the unglamorous work of guessing which customers will churn and which loans […]
Because it’s Friday: Paul the Octopus
In 2010, the most accurate World Cup forecaster on the planet was an octopus named Paul. He lived at the Sea Life aquarium in Oberhausen, Germany, and his method was rigorous: before each match, his keepers lowered two boxes of mussels into his tank, one marked with each team’s flag, and whichever box he opened […]
Because it’s Friday: The First World Cup Final
The first World Cup final, played in Montevideo on July 30, 1930, couldn’t even agree on a ball. Uruguay and Argentina each insisted on using their own, so FIFA split the difference: Argentina’s ball for the first half, Uruguay’s for the second. Argentina led at halftime. Uruguay won the second half. Draw your own conclusions. […]
Because it’s Friday: Claude Has Feelings About This
Anthropic’s interpretability team just published a paper on why LLMs sometimes act like they have emotions. The answer turned out to be: because they do, sort of. They found 171 internal emotion vectors inside Claude, measurable patterns of neural activation corresponding to things like happy, afraid, brooding, and desperate. These are mechanisms that causally drive […]
Because it’s Friday: The Science of Optimal Laziness
In 2022, two researchers published a paper modeling the mathematically ideal amount of effort to exert when you don’t want to do something. It even has an objective function. They called it “A Reference-Based Theory of Motivation and Effort Allocation”, which is a very motivated way to describe not wanting to try. The model balances […]
Because it’s Friday: On Missing Data Sets
Mimi Onuoha is an artist and researcher who keeps a running list of data that should exist but doesn’t: poverty statistics that exclude people who are incarcerated, people excluded from public housing because of criminal records, Muslim communities surveilled by the FBI. She also built a physical library of the same, shelves holding what’s been […]
Because it’s Friday: Your AI Slop Bores Me
A 17-year-old in Puducherry, India built a fake AI chatbot in March 2026. It’s a text box where real humans answer other real humans’ prompts while pretending to be AI. It went viral on Hacker News, hit 25 million unique visitors in a month, and is currently sitting at 50 million total hits. The game […]
Because it’s Friday: A Million Random Digits
In 1955, the RAND Corporation published a book called “A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates.” This is exactly what it sounds like. One million random digits, printed in a book, for people who needed them. Before hardware random number generators existed, if your statistical work required true randomness, you either generated it yourself […]
Because it’s Friday: The Music Video Where Physics Wrote the Song
The universe arranges itself into patterns, completely invisible, right in front of us. Every so often someone finds a way to make it visible. There is a music video on YouTube that is also a physics demonstration, and it is one of the most beautiful things on the internet. It’s called Cymatics, by a New […]
Because it’s Friday: Wrong in Real Time
A nonprofit research group called METR (Model Evaluation & Threat Research) ran a randomized controlled trial earlier this year to measure what AI coding tools actually do to developer productivity. Sixteen experienced developers, working on real open-source projects they’d contributed to for years, completed 246 tasks – some with AI tools, some without, randomly assigned. […]
Because it’s Friday: The Mozzarella Phase
A group of Italian physicists got tired of their cacio e pepe turning clumpy when cooking for big groups, so they did what any reasonable scientist would do: they mapped the phase diagram of the cheese sauce. The paper, published in Physics of Fluids and titled “Phase behavior of Cacio e Pepe sauce,” won the […]
Because it’s Friday: Spurious Scholar
Tyler Vigen’s Spurious Correlations has been a beloved corner of the internet since 2014, pairing line charts of things like Nicolas Cage film appearances and swimming pool drownings to illustrate, with great affection, why correlation is not causation. The site now has over 25,000 variables to mine for accidental patterns, which is already more than […]
Because it’s Friday: The Animal Fart Database
Somewhere between a Twitter joke and a peer-reviewed research tool lives #DoesItFart, a crowdsourced spreadsheet maintained by biologists cataloging which animals pass gas and which don’t. It started in 2017 when zoologist Dani Rabaiotti couldn’t answer her teenage brother’s question about snakes, tweeted at a snake expert, and then a third scientist decided this should […]