All posts tagged: Wrapped

Hermès Now Sells ,250+ MagSafe Chargers Wrapped in Calfskin Leather

Hermès Now Sells $1,250+ MagSafe Chargers Wrapped in Calfskin Leather

Published by skeptic

Luxury brand Hermès has a new series of MagSafe-compatible chargers for the iPhone and Apple Watch, with prices that are higher than the cost of an iPhone 17 Pro Max. The $1,250 Paddock Solo Charger is a magnetic charger that works with a single device, while the $1,750 Paddock Duo can charge an Apple Watch and iPhone at the same time. The $1,750 Paddock Yoyo is also a dual charger, but it has a USB-C cable that wraps around the charger for travel purposes. Hermès also has bundles that pair the chargers with a Grand Paddock or Petit Paddock case, with prices ranging from $3,725 to $5,150. Each of the charging products has an H logo over the magnetic charging spot for alignment purposes, and they’ve been “meticulously encased in Swift calfskin” with saddle stitching. While these chargers cost thousands of dollars, Hermès took a cue from Apple and did not bundle them with a power adapter. Each charger requires a 20W or higher power adapter, but the company does throw in a free 3.3-foot …

No, North Carolina’s wild horses were not wrapped in insulation

No, North Carolina’s wild horses were not wrapped in insulation

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. We recently saw a Facebook post featuring a series of images of people on a cold beach bundling up horses with what looked like duct tape and insulation material. The post, tagged at Corolla Wild Horse Beach in Corolla, North Carolina, has about 10,000 reactions and 5,800 comments, and has been shared 2,000 times on social media.   Corolla is in the Outer Banks, an island chain in North Carolina that in addition to an angsty teen adventure drama of the same name, hosts wild horses—the Colonial Spanish Mustangs. The area was also bracing for record-breaking snow and freezing temperatures.  “Today, the nonprofit organization Outer Banks People helped prepare the wild horses for low temperatures and possible snow. To keep them warm during extreme cold, we carefully wrapped them in recycled insulation materials,” reads the Facebook post. “At this time, we are accepting donations of insulation and duct tape to continue supporting our efforts. Every contribution helps keep our local …

AI Wrapped: The 14 AI terms you couldn’t avoid in 2025

AI Wrapped: The 14 AI terms you couldn’t avoid in 2025

Published by skeptic

The key to R1’s success was distillation, a technique that makes AI models more efficient. It works by getting a bigger model to tutor a smaller model: You run the teacher model on a lot of examples and record the answers, and reward the student model as it copies those responses as closely as possible, so that it gains a compressed version of the teacher’s knowledge.  —Caiwei Chen 10. Sycophancy As people across the world spend increasing amounts of time interacting with chatbots like ChatGPT, chatbot makers are struggling to work out the kind of tone and “personality” the models should adopt. Back in April, OpenAI admitted it’d struck the wrong balance between helpful and sniveling, saying a new update had rendered GPT-4o too sycophantic. Having it suck up to you isn’t just irritating—it can mislead users by reinforcing their incorrect beliefs and spreading misinformation. So consider this your reminder to take everything—yes, everything—LLMs produce with a pinch of salt. —Rhiannon Williams 11. Slop If there is one AI-related term that has fully escaped the nerd enclosures and entered …

Spotify Wrapped reminds us even our leisure time is being surveilled and sold

Spotify Wrapped reminds us even our leisure time is being surveilled and sold

Published by skeptic

Each year as Spotify Wrapped drops, social media timelines fill with neon slides declaring who we “really” are. We trade our top artists and most-played songs like postcards from a year already fading. It feels communal, a party game to end the year of listening. But this cheerful ritual shows how deeply surveillance has woven itself into our leisure – and, how readily we accept it. It’s what the social psychologist and philosopher Shoshana Zuboff describes in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism the “claiming of human experience as free raw material” for predictive data. Wrapped does more than reflect our taste. It turns private listening into public connection, and connection into content. What looks like play can instead be seen as work. And what feels like recognition of our uniqueness is a reflection of how well we have conformed to the algorithm. No one’s 20s and 30s look the same. You might be saving for a mortgage or just struggling to pay rent. You could be swiping dating apps, or trying to understand …

Your Spotify Wrapped Listening Age Explained: Why Your Phone Thinks You’re Old

Your Spotify Wrapped Listening Age Explained: Why Your Phone Thinks You’re Old

Published by Sam Flores

One sonically 66-year-old was placed a whopping 44 years beyond their physical age. They speculated that frequent plays of Elton John, Billy Joel, David Bowie, and others had led to rapid aging. “I’m not mad at it,” they said, “I definitely have a small Midwestern baby boomer walking around part of my brain.” And then there’s the category we’ll call the Smug Youngs, such as the esteemed colleague sharing: “I am the dancing queen, young and sweet, only 17,” adding that they felt “not infantilized but appropriately celebrated for my youthful spirit.” Another, comfortably over drinking age in human years: “I am 21; someone buy me a Long Island iced tea.” Two staffers found that their listening age was plus or minus one year of their human age. Their Slack access has been mysteriously revoked. Spotify shared a few key pieces of data with Vanity Fair: The youngest possible listening age is 16, and the oldest is 100. (Kudos to actor Louis Partridge, who shared his own 100-year-old result on Instagram Stories with a bewildered …