Author: wildgreenquest@gmail.com

Published June 19, 2026 04:15AMOverland Expo West has two important resources: gear and people. It’s a showcase for new and innovative products, but also a gathering of folks who have lots of experience on the road. This year we went looking for veteran overlanders, people we’re calling “Overland OGs,” to get their best gear and travel tips. It wasn’t hard to find overlanders who’ve spent five, 10, or even 40 years out adventuring. Here’s their best advice. Many overlanders advise to build your rig out slowly and work with the gear you’ve got. (Photo: Courtesy Yogaslackers) Keep it Simple: Start…

In the past few years, job listings have increasingly touted remote or partially remote work alongside other perks like gym memberships and childcare benefits. The assumption is baked in: employees prefer remote work. It implies that companies that care about employee well-being give them the freedom to work from home. But the tide is shifting. I heard a term recently that made me chuckle: FOMOW. Fear of missing out at work. Professionals, and Gen Z in particular, are feeling the drawbacks of not going to the office. Nearly half of Gen Z and 30% of millennials reported that office working…

You may or may not have heard this phrase before: “the backbone of AI.” What does it mean? What is the “backbone” of an AI system?I found this from Copilot:“In modern artificial intelligence, the backbone typically refers to the core neural network architecture responsible for extracting meaningful features from raw input data. This concept is especially common in computer vision, where a backbone is a pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) used as the feature extractor for more complex tasks like object detection, segmentation, or image captioning.”That’s one way to describe it, and I’ve often said that the convolutional neural network…

The AI talent wars are raging on. Two years after Google paid $2.7 billion to poach leading AI researcher Noam Shazeer and part of his team at Character.AI, Shazeer is leaving the company to join OpenAI.  Shazeer worked at Google as the vice president of engineering and co-lead of Gemini, where he was credited for helping close the gap between the capabilities of Gemini and ChatGPT. “I’m excited to share that I’ll be joining OpenAI and look forward to working with the exceptional team there,” Shazeer said in an X post. “It was a difficult decision to move on,” he…

Answers for today’s NYT Mini Crossword are just ahead.The New York TimesLooking for yesterday’s NYT Mini answers? You can find them right here:ForbesToday’s NYT Mini Hints And Answers For Thursday, June 18By Kris HoltWondering what it means to distort data? Not sure what signs of things to come are? Don’t worry, because I’m here to help you with hints and the answers for today’s NYT Mini crossword.The NYT Mini is a quick version of the newspaper’s larger, long-running crossword. Most days, there are between three and five clues in each direction on a five-by-five Mini grid, but the puzzles are…

In a January 2025 podcast episode, Open AI CEO Sam Altman was asked what the most important skill would be in the age of AI. His answer was—in simplest terms—the ability to ask creative questions. Last summer, Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, wrote that, for all the fear about AI, he genuinely believes that “creativity will remain the real currency.” And in an August Business Insider feature, Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost said that people will need to become “creative orchestrators” if they want to succeed in an AI-driven workplace. If you listen to enough AI experts, you’ll inevitably hear…

EA is listening to feedback and it seems many EA UFC 6 players share my thoughts on the visual presentation with Flow State. In a blog dropped on Thursday, June 18, EA announced plans to give gamers the option to turn off the current cinematic, visual presentation of Flow State. There are more changes on the way. Let’s talk EA UFC 6.Key Facts at a GlanceEA released a community update on June 18, addressing Early Access feedback as UFC 6 reaches full launch on June 19.Flow State: a setting to turn off its visual and audio presentation is targeted for…

The World Cup is officially up and running, bringing fans from across the world together for the globe’s largest sporting event. But in Mexico, fans are cheering more than the players. Following the inaugural match between Mexico and South Africa in Mexico City, fans took to the streets to celebrate the victory of “el Tri”—Mexico’s national team— on national soil. Among the crowds walking around the city, a duck wearing a Mexican jersey was caught on camera, tugging at the heartstrings of people online. “Honestly, it’s better than the official mascot jajajaja half-court goal from the Mexicans,” a user said…

Published June 18, 2026 04:12PMOn May 29, writer, performer, and cultural worker Bobby LeFebre took the stage at the Outside Summit in Denver to deliver “The Cathedral,” an original poem written for the gathering, which marked the second day of the Outside Days Industry Conference, which preceded the weekend Outside Days festival. LeFebre, who was the Poet Laureate of Colorado from 2019 to 2023, evoked the wild as a place of beauty, belonging, humility, and renewal. He also asked us to consider what we lose when the convenience of the “glowing little worlds we carry in our pockets” keeps us…

WASHINGTON, DC – JUNE 14: Ilia Topuria of Spain reacts to the end of the round in the UFC lightweight championship fight during the UFC Freedom 250 event on the South Lawn at the White House on June 14, 2026 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC)Zuffa LLCIlia Topuria suffered major injuries to his face in his shocking loss to Justin Gaethje at UFC Freedom 250. As a result, Topuria was handed a mandatory 180-day medical suspension following the loss. The defeat and mandated rest period likely means Topuria is done competing for the year, but he has made…