TC Sottek

That’s the vote tally at the United Nations to adopt a new world map, the “Equal Earth projection”, that corrects distortions in the centuries-old and well-known Mercator projection. The Mercator map was prized during the era of European imperialism. (This is also a subject in a great episode of The West Wing.) The proposed new map more accurately portrays the relative size of continents.

OpenAI’s Sam Altman apologized earlier today for a “messy” rollout of GPT-6 Astra that left paying users locked out of the new model. Altman says the tool is now available to “all Pro, Enterprise, and Business Premium users.”

He probably thinks he’s invincible at this point, but Trump is actually now wading into a place that may even (sadly) be more dangerous for him than living in the Epstein files. Data centers, like Flock cameras, are remarkably unpopular among Americans of all stripes. He always manages to wiggle out of consequences, but this will be a compelling new test of how far people will go to drink his Kool-Aid.

As Netflix turns into a video podcast warehouse, HBO is planting its own flag with an original titan of radio. The Howard Stern Show arrives with weekly episodes on HBO Max September 17th. The series will be adapted from Stern’s SiriusXM program.

Even if it’s Trump, stepping away from your company’s all-hands to take a call from the president makes sense. But it’s very funny, as Wired reports, that NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang was still mic’d up when he stepped away, letting some staffers hear Trump’s voice on the call.

EA’s Iron Man game, first announced back in 2022, just had some internal video leaked on ResetEra. The video shows Tony Stark effortlessly zipping through New York City in a way that instantly recalls the well-received Spider-Man series. It’s nice that the studio in charge basically confirmed the leak in a social media post:

In an executive order signed today, President Trump established a commission to create a new academy to “educate and develop the next generation of leaders across the space domain.” Scant details so far, but it appears the academy would feed recruits and talent into both the Space Force and NASA.

I’m surprised it took this long for Nvidia to make its own PAC — something that seems like table stakes for any huge company trying to influence the US government. Well, now it’s here, according to Bloomberg. The PAC will take in voluntary contributions from employees, which is a classic way of giving big money in a distributed manner given caps on election contributions.