Everything posted this week — 3 links.

why I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea and what I think everyone should know about it

Nearly all people in history existed with some integration with their neighbours and knowledge of the broader world. It’s shocking to learn of a group that lived on their own for 50,000 years, and sealed off from everyone else for the last 10,000, nearly completely divergent from the rest of humanity.

An overview of the book First Contact which documents 1930s discovery of one million isolated highland Papua New Guineans. Definitely reading this book.

Your car is selling your data

The issue has even risen to the level of MAGA World. Last July, Donald Trump’s Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy, sent a letter to Congress outlining the administration’s policy priorities for the upcoming surface transportation reauthorization bill. Tucked in the letter was a new concept called “the Freedom Car,” which Duffy described as Americans’ right to “drive disconnected and non-automated” vehicles. The proposal would ban the government from requiring that vehicles be equipped with automated driving systems or have the capability to transmit data wirelessly — which, to my knowledge, no one is trying to do.

Andrew J. Hawkins on automakers collecting and selling driver data.

arnegiacomo/fugleramme: E-ink bird frame for Raspberry Pi - real-time bird detection by audio, fully local AI, rendered as real, hand-cut 1800s bird illustrations.

BirdNET-Go listens on a mic and handles the classifier. Fugleramme polls its api, matches each species to an illustration, then packs them onto a page, and redraws only when the birds change

Fugleramme displays real-time detected birds on e-ink using 1800s illustrations.