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A Journey on South Africa’s Blue Train

Chaos surrounded us. Informal porters rolling luggage carts zigzagged between cars. Commuters spilled from the bus terminal onto the sidewalk, where they sat on suitcases and duffel bags. Minibus taxis zoomed through the congestion, pedestrians be damned. Our car crawled past a barbed-wire fence and reached a sliding gate, where all that separated my wife…

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Sentient open-source AI search outperforms GPT-4o and Perplexity

Sentient, an artificial intelligence development platform backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, has released an open-source AI search framework that it says outperforms leading closed-source competitors. The company announced the public release of Open Deep Search (ODS) on April 2, describing it as a high-performance, developer-friendly alternative to platforms like Perplexity AI and OpenAI’s GPT-4o….

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How to Restore Your Old Wood Furniture

So far in our D.I.Y. series, we’ve hung things on walls, patched the holes we’ve made, and fixed squeaky floors. It’s time to have a little fun. This month, we’ll bring some old furniture back to life. You probably have a piece of furniture that’s in need of a little T.L.C. — a family heirloom,…

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