AI, as you well know by now, is the future of everything – including, Microsoft has recently taken to informing users, malware installation. No, this is not a joke or a bit, but rather a glimmering new wing in the hallowed halls of “What are we even doing here?”

This week, Microsoft updated its support page on “Experimental Agentic Features” – user-like AI sidekicks that interact “with your apps and your files, using vision and advanced reasoning to click, type and scroll like a human would” – with the following warning:

Agentic AI has powerful capabilities today – for example, it can complete many complex tasks in response to user prompts, transforming how users interact with their PCs. As these capabilities are introduced, AI models still face functional limitations in terms of how they behave and occasionally may hallucinate and produce unexpected outputs. Additionally, agentic AI applications introduce novel security risks, such as cross-prompt injection (XPIA), where malicious content embedded in UI elements or documents can override agent instructions, leading to unintended actions like data exfiltration or malware installation.

So basically, the not-actually-intelligent, agency-free “agent” making decisions about your apps and files on your behalf might accidentally give away your data or plague your PC with malware. Cool! Microsoft says that humans will need to approve all decisions made by AI agents, but a) that’s a far from fool-proof stopgap, and b) then what’s the point of letting an AI agent take the wheel in the first place?

Lumping this tendency in with hallucinations makes sense on multiple levels: Once again, a company has uncovered what should be considered a fatal flaw, but which it has evidently decided is little more than an annoying glitch – an aberration rather than something hard-coded and essential about how generative AI functions. And again, this sure sounds like yet another instance in which AI is liable to cause more problems than it solves.  

On the upside, Windows 11’s agentic workspace is toggled off by default. On the downside, there’s no guarantee that will last, especially as Microsoft continues to foist AI upon every element of its business imaginable. Meanwhile, the AI bubble is looking worryingly shimmery, like the gentlest of jostles could blow the whole thing wide open. If all of Wall Street breathes a sigh of relief following a lone company’s earnings report, that’s probably not a great sign for the structural integrity of… everything else.

But for now, a silver lining: it took many years and billions of dollars, but Microsoft finally invented a calculator that’s wrong sometimes and can install malware on our computers.

Secret Panel HERE 🌼 tapas.io/episode/3729169

Want to experience sleeping in one of the most iconic rooms in children's literature? Head to the Sheraton Boston Hotel and check out its new Goodnight Moon suite. The gorgeous suite recreates Margaret Wise Brown's classic 1947 children's book Goodnight Moon, illustrated by Clement Hurd. — Read the rest

The post You can now sleep in the actual Goodnight Moon bedroom appeared first on Boing Boing.

As part of a city-wide urban greening program, Taipei turned an abandoned football stadium into a community garden. Here’s an overview of the terraced garden that’s taken over Zhongshan Soccer Stadium from James Stewart on Instagram. A couple of screenshots from the video:

So cool! (thx, alaina)

Tags: cities · Taiwan

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It all started a few weeks ago, when I wrote that article about decorator colors. Toward the end of that piece, almost as an afterthought, I mentioned that I used to have a vintage display of ceramic underglaze colors. I sold it back in 2018, but I still had this photo of it:

That photo — and, specifically, the shape of the color samples — resonated with reader Kurt Rozek. He sent me a note that said, “I’m not sure if there’s a use for those doohickeys, but I swear they’re like the cap you put over the bolt that attaches the toilet bowl to the floor.”

Kurt was referring, of course, to those little nubs on each side of the base of most toilets. They serve two purposes: to protect the bolt from corrosion, and to serve as an aesthetic fig leaf that covers up the exposed hardware. And sure enough, just like Kurt said, the bolt caps on my own bathroom toilet (and on yours too, I bet) really do look a lot like the underglaze color samples:

Toilet bolt caps are such a classically inconspicuous topic that I’m surprised I’ve never written about them until now. It’s not clear exactly when they were invented, but the first patent for them appears to have been granted in 1951, to an inventor named George Summers. In his patent application, he stated, “My invention … consists of a cap for bolts, nuts and the like, an object of which is to provide a plastic cover for the unsightly exposed ends of such hardware.” A few paragraphs later, he added, “A further object of this invention is to provide such a cap formed of a color to match bathroom or other fittings.”

Although Summers’s patent application refers to a “plastic cover,” early bolt caps were often porcelain, just like the underglaze color samples. In fact, you can still find porcelain caps being sold by vintage dealers.

Since that initial patent, there are have been several innovations in toilet bolt caps. The first is the shift from porcelain to plastic, which is now the most common material. Second: Although Summers’s patent drawings showed the caps screwing onto the bolt, for many decades most caps either snapped on or were simply placed over the bolt and thus could easily be dislodged by pets and toddlers. So in 2013, a Pennsylvania couple named Gary and Ruth Frazer created “twister caps,” which are produced with internal thread patterns so they can be screwed onto the bolts.

But the biggest change in bolt caps — one that I knew nothing about until I started working on this article — is the advent of figural or novelty cap designs. Here are two typical examples:

It’s not clear, at least to me, when these novelty caps began appearing, but they turn the entire ethos of this product category on its head. The whole point of bolt caps had been for them to blend in and essentially become invisible (or at least inconspicuous). But these novelty designs are intended to attract attention — a counterintuitive approach for a floor-level bathroom detail.

I soon learned that there are many dozens of these designs available just on Amazon (and probably even more at other retail outlets). They break down into several major sub-categories, so I’ve created a series of photo galleries for you to peruse. For each gallery, you can click on a thumbnail photo to see full-size images:

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