Numlock News: March 11, 2024 • Reactle, Kung Fu Panda, Vending

Mar 11, 2024

Muad'Dib

Kung Fu Panda 4 won the weekend at the box office with $58.3 million domestically, the best opening for that franchise since the original opened to $62 million and a huge shot in the arm for the family box office. Meanwhile, Dune: Part Two has continued to perform well and beat expectations, with $46 million in its second weekend, bringing its North American gross to $110 million and $210 million internationally.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

Vending

America is host to 3 million vending machines, which reap $18.2 billion in revenue and an average monthly haul of $525 per machine. Given the low start-up costs of buying a used machine and then hustling to stock it, vending has become an attractive investment for young entrepreneurs just trying to get their start. The vending business is dominated by small players and lots of part-timers, and social media has fueled interest in the side hustle. In many ways, the most hedged possible portfolio would probably include a bunch of stock in Ozempic manufacturer Novo Nordisk and like twenty vending machines, right?

Joe Pinsker, The Wall Street Journal

TSA

The TSA’s prototype self-screening lanes in the Las Vegas airport have been a success after a six-month trial among fliers in TSA PreCheck, and if it gets rolled out nationwide, it could be huge for accelerating transit through a convoluted, Kafkaesque and grating security process. The lines flow faster, and it reduces the number of TSA officers responsible for a given security line from about a dozen all the way down to eight TSA officers, also minimizing the number of invasive pat-downs and searches.

Ryan Erik King, Jalopnik

Sued-le

The New York Times, a gaming and cookbook corporation that somewhat incidentally produces a popular reactionary newspaper, has filed at least three DMCA takedown requests to people who have set up their own version of Wordle on GitHub. Specifically of interest is a DMCA notice filed against Chase Wackerfuss, who created Reactle, a Wordle clone written up in JavaScript and posted to GitHub that allowed other game designers to create their spin on the game format. The company bought Wordle for a reported seven-figure sum, adding to their rich library of games that incidentally fund a local daily. So far there have been 1,900 forks of the Reactle code repository.

Jason Koebler, 404 Media

Oppenheimer

The film Oppenheimer won big at the Oscars, winning seven categories including best picture, actor, supporting actor, director, editing, and cinematography and score, a majority of their 13 nominations. Other cool wins include a second victory for Hayao Miyazaki in the animated feature category and four wins for Poor Things, the kind of weird and fun movie that too often scares the crap out of the Academy.

Kimberly Nordyke, The Hollywood Reporter

Papers

A new analysis finds that publishers of academic research do a poor job of ensuring the continuity of science in the event of any issues with their own databases, with the vast majority failing to ensure that there are copies available in a number of other sources. Less than 1 percent of the 204 publishers of 7 million papers had put a majority of the papers they’re custodians of in multiple archives, and less than 10 percent have over half their content in at least two archives. Among individual publications, less than 60 percent were in at least one archive, and more than a quarter were not in any archives whatsoever.

John Timmer, Ars Technica

Retailers

A new study of businesses in New York City has found that after the chaos in retail real estate that followed the pandemic, companies leasing space for the first time leased 455,000 square feet of Manhattan’s annual leasing volume, good for 18 percent of the island’s annual volume. It’s a sign that new, nonincumbent companies are still finding opportunities that they may have been boxed out of before, and the looser market is presenting opportunities that the city previously could not provide.

Francisco Velasquez, Quartz

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