An AirTag rematch, and a simple video about clapping.

• Kyle Hill films inside Chernobyl's new confinement structure. I got to film at Chernobyl many years ago, when I was just starting out, and I don't like those videos now: they seem so amateur, brief and low-quality that they feel like wasted opportunities. Kyle's video takes the viewer along on a journey in a way that I don't think I could manage even now: it's well worth a watch. (Thanks to Karl for sending this in.)
   
• I passed by the new Hudson Yards district in New York recently, and it reminded me of a great video by mortician Caitlin Doughty about Thomas Heatherwick's awful Vessel sculpture, and the ethics of architecture. (Contains discussions of suicide.) I feel like I'm underselling this video: it covers a lot of interesting subjects in its half hour. And it also meant I remembered about the "Stop Heatherwick Now" badges from 2014.
   
• The Verge created a great documentary, Rocketland, in the genre of "time spent with a weird group". The weird group in question are the folks who've uprooted their lives to live next to SpaceX's Texas launchpad. It's an interesting look at a group, framed in a raises uncomfortable questions, but lets the audience reach their own conclusions.
   
• And something much more fun and light: building a Lego-powered submarine. No narration: just sounds, time-lapse and stop-motion. I'd describe this as just "pleasing". And having the little boat-captain figure in there is a lovely touch.

• I have mixed feelings about The Follower, a project that finds Instagram pictures taken within range of public webcams, and finds the context. Is it creepy and provocative? Yes, absolutely. But also: this isn't new. To me, the creepiness comes from the artist's choice to store the feed and publish the results, not from the existence of the otherwise-forgotten data itself.
  
  And as a side note, I do wonder how much "AI" is really involved here. If I were making this, I'd just search manually based on the location and time of posting, and run the final results through computer vision software to make it look like it all was done automagically. I'm not saying that's how it's done here — but with only a few examples shown, that would get the same effect for a fraction of the effort.
   
• Google Street View, but from 1985, and government-funded. "Highway photologs" were made by special vans in parts of the US, and because it's government data, it's public domain and can be pulled by Freedom of Information Act request. It's well worth exploring the other pages on the site, too: "Beautiful Public Data" is just starting, but it looks very promising. 
   
• Prompt injection attacks against AI bots: both a new threat model, and also a great source of comedy.

And finally: apparently civil servant chic is a current Chinese trend, and I guess it's no weirder than anything out of the English-speaking TikTok world.

Next week: the start of a run of videos from mainland Europe! Hopefully. I haven't uploaded the first one yet as I write this...

All the best,

— Tom