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A daily gleaning of curiosities, lateral puzzles and pleasing coincidences, kept up since 2005 without fuss.
Opens in a new tab. We do not control this site and it may have changed since we catalogued it.
Futility Closet sits in Curious Facts under Learn, filed as a minute.
About this category: Records, comparisons, scale demonstrations and weird knowledge. The category most likely to produce a sentence beginning "did you know".
Yes. Futility Closet is free to use and needs no account.
No. You can use Futility Closet without signing up for anything.
Yes. Futility Closet works on phones as well as desktop browsers.
Yes, we file it as safe for work. It also works muted.
We file it as "A minute": One quick round, then you can leave.
The official register of the longest, fastest and most improbable things people have done entirely on purpose.
Popular science headlines with the volume turned up, handy for the fact you half-remember reading somewhere.
Jason Kottke has been posting the interesting bits of the web since 1998, with no algorithm involved at any point.
Enter your birthday and watch a live tally of the heartbeats, blinks and steps you have got through so far.
Seven levels of talking a language model into revealing a password it was told to protect. The best hands-on lesson in prompt injection going.
Walks you through rebuilding classic algorithmic pieces — tiled lines, Joy Division, cubic disarray — one step at a time.
A genetic algorithm evolves two-dimensional cars across rough terrain while you watch generations fail forward.
Plain page of every emoji, grouped and clickable, for the machines that have no emoji keyboard worth using.
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