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North Oaks, Minnesota is the only city in the United States that is not on Google Maps Street View. YouTube documentarian Chris Parr, who grew up not too far from North Oaks, set out to change that earlier this year. For a brief few days, he literally put North Oaks on the map. And then it was gone again.

"It's known by Minnesotans as a place where executives and CEOs live," Parr told 404 Media. "Famously Walter Mondale is from North Oaks, but also like United Healthcare executives and Target executives."

North Oaks has managed to largely stay unmapped on Street View because of the way the city handles its streets. In almost every city and town in the United States, property owners give an easement to their local government for the roads in front of their homes (or don't have any claim to the roads at all). In North Oaks, homeowners' property extends into the middle of the street, meaning there is literally no "public" property in the city, and the roads are maintained by the North Oaks Homeowners' Association (NOHOA): "the City owns no roads, land, or buildings." [...]

"Technically, if you launch your drone from public property, which anyone can do if you're a registered drone pilot, you can fly it straight up and above private property," Parr said. And so Parr stood at "six or seven different spots" directly outside the boundary of North Oaks and flew his drone around. "I just pulled my car over onto the shoulder and popped my drone up and flew it over," he added. [...]

"According to North Oak's ordinances, you can go like, visit a friend, or if you're a contractor working on a house, you can go into the city, but you have to be an invited guest," Parr said. "I made a Craigslist post asking for somebody to invite me and I got an absolute ton of responses."

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In a feature the dating app says is set to roll out in the U.S. later this spring, Tinder plans to access users' camera rolls to pick photos and determine what they're into.

"It's up to you to figure out what you're comfortable sharing back with Tinder," Tinder Head of Product Mark Kantor told 404 Media. Still, users can't pick individual photos they want analyzed or ignored. [...]

Tinder has already leaned heavily into AI. Kantor told 404 Media that artificial intelligence is writing more than half the app's code these days.

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Afroman found not liable in bizarre Ohio defamation case

Afroman did not defame Ohio cops in a satirical music video that featured footage of them fruitlessly raiding the rapper's house, a jury found on Wednesday. [...]

The hip hop star wrote the satirical song "Lemon Pound Cake" and made a music video with real footage of the raid taken from his home surveillance cameras to raise money for property damage caused during the search, he has said.

Seven cops with the sheriff's office then sued him in March 2023, alleging the music video defamed them, invaded their constitutional privacy, and was an intentional infliction of emotional distress.

The video features footage of the cops busting down his door, and of one officer eyeing his "mama's lemon poundcake" with his gun drawn. [...]

An attorney for the police, meanwhile, demanded a total of $3.9 million in damages -- divided among the seven officers involved.

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People used to have to assemble screen savers by hand!

▶︎

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This is some boss-level forensic accounting demonstrating that Facebook secretly wrote and is shepherding the various "age verification" bills.

Age Verification Lobbying: Dark Money, Model Legislation & Institutional Capture:

How corporate lobbying, think tank infrastructure, competing model legislation, and obscured funding networks are shaping age verification policy across 45 states and Congress.

This investigation documents a national lobbying operation spanning corporate spending, think tank infrastructure, dark money networks, and competing model legislation templates. Meta spent a record $26.3 million on federal lobbying in 2025, deployed 86+ lobbyists across 45 states, and covertly funded a group called the Digital Childhood Alliance (DCA) to advocate for the App Store Accountability Act (ASAA). But the operation extends beyond Meta. [...]

This investigation traced funding flows across five confirmed channels, analyzed $2.0 billion in dark money grants, searched 59,736 DAF recipients, parsed LD-2 filings, and mapped campaign contributions across four states to document the operation.

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AI job losses free up time for unemployed mobs to burn down tech CEO's houses

"Getting laid off without warning from my copywriting job has done wonders for my work-life-bloodthirsty mob balance," reports Taylor Grayden, 35, of Vancouver. "Back when I had a job I never would've had the free time to organize an unruly rabble and march towards the beach house of (Open AI CEO) Sam Altman. But now I'm getting so much more violent retribution accomplished in a day." [...]

"I felt so lost after I was let go at my analytics firm so my whole department could be replaced by Claude AI," explains Sarah Brightwell, 42, of Kingston, ON. "But then I started learning how to use AI as a tool -- specifically for planning a multi-week siege of the sprawling compound of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei."

"Granted, the attack plans Claude spit out were full of hallucinations, but it got the ball rolling for me to organize my fellow unemployed humans and get marching," Brightwell adds, tightening the bolts on her homemade trebuchet. "After all, AI can't throw a molotov cocktail!" [...]

"Sure, we probably could have avoided this if we'd accompanied our artificial intelligence products with any kind of workable universal basic income system," explains Altman from one of his currently-burning $12.8 million San Francisco homes. "But I'd still rather die with all this money."

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Last night at DNA Lounge, a room full of people chanted "No AI" along with Anton Corazza's song of the same name. The kids might be alright!

Rustage has entered the chat:

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Swiss remake of The Wages of Fear:

The reality is reassuringly mundane. Antimatter emitters are readily available at supermarkets in the form of bananas, which emit antiparticles through the radioactive decay of potassium. Sadly, they have limited value for understanding the universe. The device on Cern's truck will carry about 1,000 antimatter particles, weighing about a billionth of a trillionth of a gram. Should the containment fail, and the antimatter make contact with normal matter, the resulting pulse of energy would be so feeble, the load doesn't even warrant a radioactive label.

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Since we had dozens of video game demo stations at our various GDC events this week, I snuck an XScreenSaver kiosk into the mix. I'm not sure anyone noticed it.