๐จWOW!!!
Students at a Georgia High School pranked their principal by staging a "fake fight" at school and calling the Principal to break it up...
...as he rushes in to pull the students apart, they all started singing him Happy Birthday
He's so revealed and happy.
helllll yes I loved this response from Matthew Lillard at today's "Scream" NYCC panel about how his and Skeet Ulrich's characters are gay icons
Matthew: People approach us all the time like, "You are my queer awakening." And I just want to say that, for us, I think that it's super powerful that our relationship to these characters has nothing to do with being gay, but if it means something to a kid out there somewhere who's like, "Oh, I feel seen in this relationship," that it's important for us to hold that space for these queer icons. We were not doing queer on the day, but we're here for it 30 years later
Skeet: [puts his arm around Matthew] We're doing it now!
Itโs really messed up how he gets to leave with a half a billion dollars and live the rest of his life comfortably while thousands of his employees will likely be unemployed within the coming months.
Shazam could name any song back in 2002, on flip phones, with zero AI. You dialed the number 2580, held your phone up to the speaker, and hung up. 15 seconds later, a text came back with the song name. That same core trick still runs the app today.
The inventor was Avery Wang, a Stanford PhD in audio signal processing. His problem was brutal. Match a short clip recorded on a 2002 cell phone mic, in a noisy bar, against a database of a million songs, in seconds, over a phone call.
His solution treated music as geometry instead of sound.
The algorithm converts audio into a spectrogram, a picture of the song, then throws almost all of it away. It keeps only the peaks, the loudest frequency points at each moment in time. Bar chatter and blown-out speakers can wreck most of a recording. The peaks survive. Shazam only ever needed the peaks.
Those surviving points form what Wang called a constellation map, because it looks like a star field. Pairs of peaks get converted into hash numbers, and identifying a song becomes a dictionary lookup rather than an audio comparison. That made it fast enough to search a million tracks on 2002 hardware.
Wang published the full method openly in 2003 in a paper called "An Industrial-Strength Audio Search Algorithm." Anyone could read exactly how the magic worked. The moat was the database and the deals with carriers, never the secret.
Apple bought the company in 2018 for a reported $400 million. People have tagged over 100 billion songs since the very first one, Jeepster by T. Rex, during the beta in April 2002.
One deterministic signal-processing trick, written before most people had heard the phrase machine learning, and it's still so good that in 2026 everyone assumes it must be AI.
If you grew up in my era, you didnโt skip the HBO movie opener. You watched that little neighborhood come alive, blasted into space, and somehow knew whatever came next was going to be GOOD.
That music still hits.