404 Media

2025-08-06 15:01:07

Million-Year-Old Evidence of Epic Journey Near ‘Hobbit’ Island Discovered by Scientists

Scientists have discovered million-year-old artifacts made by a mysterious group of early humans on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, according to a breakthrough study published on Wednesday in Nature.

The extraordinary find pushes the archaeological record of Sulawesi back by about 800,000 years, and confirms that hominins, the broader family to which humans belong, crossed treacherous ocean passages to reach the island, where they crafted simple tools.

The tool-makers may have been related to a group of archaic humans—nicknamed “hobbits” for their short stature—that lived on nearby Flores Island. But while the hobbits left behind skeletal remains, no fossils from the Sulawesi group have been unearthed. The tools, found at a site called Calio in South Sulawesi, are the only record of their existence for now.

“The discovery of these ancient stone tools at Calio is another important piece of the puzzle in our understanding of the movements of early hominins from the edge of the Asian landmass into the isolated zone of islands known as Wallacea,” said Adam Brumm, a professor of archaeology at Griffith University and a co-author of the new study, in an email.

“A major question remaining is the identity of the archaic humans of Sulawesi,” he added, noting that they might be Homo erectus, or descendents of this influential early human species that migrated from Africa to Asia. ”But until we have their fossils, who they were will remain a mystery.”
Stone tools dated to over 1.04 million-years-old, scale bars are 10mm. Image: M W Moore
The discovery was made by Budianto “Budi” Hakim, an Indonesian archaeologist who has spent decades searching for traces of archaic humans in Sulawesi. Hakim spotted one of the artifacts while scouring the region’s sandstone outcrops, prompting an excavation that unearthed a total of seven flaked tools crafted from chert rock. The remains of extinct elephants and pigs were also found in the sedimentary layers at the site, hinting at an ancient origin.

The team used two independent methods to date the tools, both of which placed their age at a minimum of 1.04 million years old, making the artifacts the earliest evidence for hominin occupation of Sulawesi by far.

“Budi has been searching for this evidence for much of his life, so it is very exciting indeed,” said Brumm. “But it is not so surprising that we now have evidence for hominins on Sulawesi by one million years ago; we have long suspected that there had been a very deep history of human occupation of this island based on the discovery (in 2010) of stone tools on Flores to the south that date to at least a million years ago. Sulawesi was probably where the first hominins to set foot on Flores actually came from, so it made sense to us that the human presence on Sulawesi would go back at least as far as a million years, if not considerably earlier.”

“And personally, it did not surprise me that Budi unearthed this new find,” he continued. “He is a renowned figure in Indonesian archaeology and undoubtedly has the ‘golden touch.’”

The tools are sharp-edged flakes that were probably cut from larger rocks obtained from a nearby river channel. Like many tools made by hominins across time and regions, they would have been useful for cutting and scraping materials, though their exact purpose is unknown.
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The tools “can’t tell us very much about the behaviour or cognitive capacities of these early humans, other than that they were tool-makers who clearly understood how to choose stones with suitable properties and to fracture them in a controlled way to produce a supply of usable tools,” explained Brumm. “Over the past 2.5 million years, many different hominin species (including our own, Homo sapiens) have made stone tools that are essentially indistinguishable from the Sulawesi tools.”

In addition to their mysterious identity, it is unclear how these early humans crossed ocean waters to reach these island shores, given that the shortest distance between the Asian mainland and Sulawesi would have been 30 miles, at minimum.

“This is too far to swim (in any case the ocean currents are too strong),” Brumm explained. “It is also very unlikely these archaic hominins had the cognitive ability to develop watercraft that were capable of making sea voyages, or indeed of the advanced planning required to gather resources and set sail over the horizon to an unseen land.”

“Most likely, they crossed to Sulawesi from the Asian mainland in the same way rodents and monkeys are suspected to have done; that is, by accident, perhaps as castaways on natural ‘rafts’ of floating vegetation,” he concluded.

It’s incredible to imagine these early humans getting caught up in tides or currents, perhaps stranded at sea for days, only to serendipitously wash up on a vast island that would become home to untold generations. Hakim, Brumm, and their colleagues hope to find more evidence of this long-lost population in the coming years, but for now, the stone tools offer a rare window into the lives of these accidental seafarers and their descendants.

Hominins on Sulawesi during the Early Pleistocene - Nature

Early Pleistocene artefacts at Calio suggest that Sulawesi was populated by hominins at around the same time as Flores, if not earlier.

^Nature

404 Media

2025-08-06 13:42:13

Watch This Guy’s Interactive Wooden Pixel Machine Make Art in Real Time

Sitting in my office in NYC, I sent a CNC machine in a guy’s workshop in Wisconsin a 40 by 25 pixel drawing and watched it flip hand painted wooden blocks across a grid, one by one, until the glorious smiling 404 Media logo appeared—then watched it slowly erase, like a giant Etch A Sketch, moving on to the next drawing.

Designer Ben Holmen created the Kilopixel, a giant grid made of 1,000 wooden blocks that a robot arm slowly turns to form user-submitted designs. “Compared to our modern displays with millions of pixels changing 60 times a second, a wooden display that changes a single pixel 10 times a minute is an incredibly inefficient way to create an image,” Holmen wrote on his blog detailing the project.

Choosing what to make the pixels from was its own hurdle: Holmen wrote that he tried ping pong balls, Styrofoam balls, bouncy balls, wooden balls, 3D printed balls, golf balls, foam balls, “anything approximately spherical and about 1-1.5in in diameter.” Some of these were too expensive; others didn’t hold up well to paint or drilling. Holmen settled on painted wooden blocks, each serving as one 40mm pixel. To be sure each block was exactly the right size, he built 25 shelves and drilled 40 holes into each, threading the blocks onto the shelves using metal wires. “This was painstaking and time consuming - I broke it down into multiple sessions over several weeks,” he wrote. “But it did create a very predictable grid of pixels and guaranteed that each pixel moved completely independently of the surrounding pixels.
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From there, he used a CNC machine, which moves on the X, Y, and Z axes: across the grid, up and down, and the flipping finger that pokes inward to turn the pixel-blocks. Holmen wrote that he connected a Raspberry Pi to the CNC controller, which queries an API to get the next pixel in the design, activates the “pixel poker,” and reads a light sensor to determine whether the pixel face is painted black or raw wood.

Two webcams stream the Kilopixel to Youtube, with a view of the whole grid and a view of the poker turning the blocks one by one. “The camera, USB hub, and light are hung from the ceilingwith a respectful amount of jank for the streaming phase of this project,” Holmen wrote. Anyone with a Bluesky account can connect their account and submit a pixel drawing for the machine to create, and people can upvote submissions they want to see next. Once it’s finished, the system uploads a timelapse of the painting to the site and posts it to Bluesky, tagging the submitter.

Drawn by @[url=did:plc:pt47oe625rv5cnrkgvntwbiq]Sam Cole[/url], completed in 44m39 Draw your own at kilopx.com
— kilopixel (@kilopx.com) 2025-08-05T20:33:14.719821Z

I'm recording timelapses for every submission - this took 41 minutes in real time. Soon you'll be able to submit your own images to be drawn on my kilopixel! Can't wait to share this with the world and see what y'all come up with
— Ben Holmen (@benholmen.com) 2025-07-21T04:59:32.203Z

This entire process took him six years. I asked Holmen in an email what it cost him: “Probably around $1000 and hundreds of hours of my time,” he told me.

And the project isn’t over: It still requires some babysitting. Sometime early Tuesday morning, the rig got misaligned while working on an elaborate pixellated American Gothic, with the flipper-finger grasping at the air between blocks instead of turning them. Holmen had to manually reset it in the morning, entering the feed to tinker with the grid.

He said he plans to run it 24/7, but that it might not go flawlessly at first. “I've had to restart the controller script twice in 10 hours, and restart the YouTube stream once,” he said on Monday, before the overnight error. “I am planning to run it for a few days or weeks depending on interest, then I'll move on to a different control concept. I don't want to babysit a finicky device all the time.”
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When I checked Kilopixel’s submissions on Monday, someone had drawn the Hacker News logo—a sure sign that a hug of death was coming. I asked Holmen if he’s had issues with overload. “Just one—I undersized my web server for the attention it got,” he told me on Monday evening. “It's been #1 on Hacker News for about 10 hours, which is a lot of traffic. kilopx.com has received about 13,000 unique visitors today, which I'm very pleased with. The article has received about 70,000 unique visitors so far.”

The Kilopixel experiment might also be setting a time-to-penis record: In the six hours it’s been online as of writing this, I haven’t seen anyone try to make the robot draw a dick, yet. Holmen mentioned “defensive features” built into the web app in his blog for mitigating abuse, but so far people have behaved themselves. “I expect the best and worst out of people on the internet. I built an easy way for admins to delete gross or low effort submissions and enlisted a couple of trusted friends to keep an eye on the queue with me,” Holmen told me. “I'm certain there are ways to work around things, or submit enough to make cleanup a chore, but I decided to not lock things down prematurely and just respond as things evolve.”

Time to Penis / TTP

Time to Penis, abbreviated to TTP, is a video game development metric and slang term for the time it takes players to generate a penis-shaped object via any available means.

^{Philipp (Know Your Meme)}

404 Media

2025-08-06 13:00:23

Podcast: Google Is Exposing Peoples’ ChatGPT Secrets

We start this week with Joseph’s story about nearly 100,000 ChatGPT conversations being indexed by Google. There’s some sensitive stuff in there. After the break, Emanuel tells us about Wikipedia’s new way of dealing with AI slop. In the subscribers-only section, Sam explains how we got to where we are with Steam and Itch.io; that history goes way back.
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Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.

• Nearly 100,000 ChatGPT Conversations Were Searchable on Google
• Wikipedia Editors Adopt ‘Speedy Deletion’ Policy for AI Slop Articles
• The Anti-Porn Crusade That Censored Steam and Itch.io Started 30 Years Ago

The 404 Media Podcast

Tech News Podcast · Updated Weekly · Welcome to the podcast from 404 Media where Joseph, Sam, Emanuel, and Jason catch you up on the stories we published this week. 404 Media is a journalist-owned digital media company exploring the way …

^{Apple Podcasts}

404 Media

2025-08-05 15:45:17

ICE Is About To Go on a Social Media and TV Ad Recruiting Blitz

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is urgently looking for a company to help it “dominate” digital media channels with advertisements in an attempt to recruit 14,050 more personnel, according to U.S. government contracting records reviewed by 404 Media. The move, which ICE wants to touch everything from social media ads to those played on popular streaming services like Hulu and HBO Max, is especially targeted towards Gen Z, according to the documents.

The push for recruitment advertising is the latest sign that ICE is trying to aggressively expand after receiving a new budget allocation of tens of billions of dollars, and comes alongside the agency building a nationwide network of migrant tent camps. If the recruitment drive is successful, it would nearly double ICE’s number of personnel.

💡
Do you work at ICE? Did you used to? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.

“ICE has an immediate need to begin recruitment efforts and requires specialized commercial advertising experience, established infrastructure, and qualified personnel to activate without delay,” the request for information (RFI) posted online reads. An RFI is often the first step in the government purchasing technology or services, in which it asks relevant companies to submit details on what they can offer the agency and for how much. The RFI adds “This effort ties to a broader national launch and awareness saturation initiative aimed at dominating both digital and traditional media channels with urgent, compelling recruitment messages.”

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ICE Is About To Go on a Social Media and TV Ad Recruiting Blitz

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-08-05 14:29:27

Nearly 100,000 ChatGPT Conversations Were Searchable on Google

A researcher has scraped nearly 100,000 conversations from ChatGPT that users had set to share publicly and Google then indexed, creating a snapshot of all the sorts of things people are using OpenAI’s chatbot for, and inadvertently exposing. 404 Media’s testing has found the dataset includes everything from the sensitive to the benign: alleged texts of non-disclosure agreements, discussions of confidential contracts, people trying to use ChatGPT to understand their relationship issues, and lots of people asking ChatGPT to write LinkedIn posts.

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Nearly 100,000 ChatGPT Conversations Were Searchable on Google

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}