Page 7 - Endless Thread News Today

A leaked change to its licensing rules angered fans as the game's company tries to find new ways to make money off of the intellectual property.

In this episode of Endless Thread, co-hosts Amory Sivertson and Ben Brock Johnson honor the legacy of internet activist Aaron Swartz with two people familiar with his life and work: documentary filmmaker Brian Knappenberger and Cindy Cohn of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Swartz died by suicide ten years ago this week, on January 11, 2013, at the age of 26. 

“What are the dimensions of an adult llama?” asked a Redditor called Mrs. Sam Handwich in the "No Stupid Questions" community. "I've been hired to make a tuxedo for a llama and I don't have its measurements," she added. The Endless Thread team gets to the bottom of this now-famous Reddit post.

The unsent letter. We all have one, half-composed in our heads or fully-formed as an email draft.  Whatever form these letters take, they go unsent because they might be better left unsent, or because we wouldn’t know how to send them. In this favorite episode from the archives, we discuss a place online where these letters find an audience.

Our most recent episode on 'Goosebumps The Musical' featured R.L. Stine, author of the wildly popular 'Goosebumps' book series, which turned 30 this year. In this bonus, we share more of that conversation, including why Stine didn’t want to write the series initially.

“Goosebumps” book fans and musical theater fans, unite! In this episode, Amory and producer Quincy introduce you to “Goosebumps The Musical” and find out what it might take to get it to Broadway (hint: you can help!)

Can a machine think like a human? Can it be conscious? For decades the answer was clear: nope. But artificial intelligence today is challenging that notion. Endless Thread visits Google to see just how close the field is to creating bots with minds of their own.

If you've ever used a dating app, chances are you've encountered a bot, most likely a fake account or a scammer. But this week on Endless Thread, we investigate at a new type of bot that is helping users optimize their love lives — a digital dating coach installed in your phone's keyboard that always knows just what to say.

Next up in our bots series, we bring you the tale of Tay, a Microsoft AI chatbot that has lived on in infamy. Tay was originially modeled to be the bot-girl-next-door. But after only sixteen hours on Twitter, Tay was shut down. In this episode, we uncover how the bot became a cautionary tale for AI developers.

A man in a Max Headroom mask hacked into TV broadcast systems in Chicago in November 1987, and the perpetrators were never found.