Boing Boing

Boing Boing

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Boing Boing, May 19, 2026
AI fakery, sinking Cybertrucks, ancient mystery blobs
 • Boing Boing
Sci-Hub and Libgen descend from a Soviet tradition of smuggled science
Today’s enormous shadow libraries — Sci-Hub, Library Genesis, and the rest — trace back to Soviet samizdat, the underground practice of typing forbidden…
 • Ellsworth Toohey
Occupy Wall Street co-founder built an AI organizing mentor that runs offline
Most AI assistants send your conversations to someone else’s server.
 • Ellsworth Toohey
In 1997, NOAA recorded a sound louder than any known animal
In the summer of 1997, NOAA’s underwater microphone network — a Cold War-era array of hydrophones originally built to track Soviet submarines and later…
 • Ellsworth Toohey
Granta published a likely AI-written story as a prize finalist
Ethan Mollick, the Wharton professor who studies AI adoption, ran “The Serpent in the Grove“ through Pangram — an AI-detection tool that claims 99…
 • Ellsworth Toohey
Tesla Cybertruck owner, intending to test “wade mode,” learns about “sink mode”
“Numerous water safety violations” is a spectacular phrase when discussing a pickup truck.
 • Jason Weisberger
Greenlanders offer Trump envoy the universally understood finger gesture for “no to annexation”
In what appears to have been a pilot program for “colonialism, but make it weirdly condescending,” Trump emissary Jeff Landry reportedly tried to win…
 • Jason Weisberger
The 1960 blob that gave all mystery blobs their name
In August 1960, something washed ashore on a remote beach in western Tasmania, about two miles north of the Interview River.
 • Ellsworth Toohey
AI’s giant rural job machine mostly appears to manufacture hype
The AI boom has discovered rural America, where struggling towns are being promised salvation in the form of enormous data centers, industrial temples…
 • Jason Weisberger
The UK has formally declared Badger Badger Badger worthy of preservation
This is either a triumph of digital preservation or compelling evidence that even the archivists have given up.
 • Jason Weisberger
Fake courtesy machine automates the modern art of insincere politeness
There’s something weirdly comforting about a machine that openly admits what most modern social interaction quietly is: repetitive, performative…
 • Jason Weisberger
Dave Baker’s “Halloween Boy” resurrects pulp adventure comics
Dave Baker‘s Halloween Boy Vol.
 • Gareth Branwyn
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