Marina Temkin / TechCrunch:
Marissa Mayer's new startup Dazzle, which is building next-gen AI personal assistants, raised an $8M seed at a $35M valuation and plans to exit stealth in 2026  —  The former Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer, refuses to sit on the sidelines of the generative AI revolution.

Christopher Goffard, reporting for the Los Angeles Times (News+ link):

When police questioned Marvin Margolis following the murder of Elizabeth Short — who became known as the Black Dahlia — he lied about how well he had known her. The 22-year-old Short had been found mutilated in a weedy lot in South Los Angeles, severed neatly in half with what detectives thought was surgical skill.

Margolis was on the list of suspects. He was a sullen 21-year-old premed student at USC, a shell-shocked World War II veteran who had expressed an eagerness to practice surgery. He was “a resentful individual who shows ample evidence of open aggression,” a military psychiatrist had concluded.

At first, Margolis did not tell detectives that he had lived with Short for 12 days at a Hollywood Boulevard apartment, three months before her January 1947 murder. [...]

A generation later and hundreds of miles north, a killer who called himself the Zodiac terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area with five seemingly random murders from 1968 to 1969, taunting police and media for years with letters and cryptograms.

The toughest to decipher was the letter he sent in April 1970 to the San Francisco Chronicle, with the words “My name is —” followed by a 13-character string of letters and symbols. It came to be called the Z13 cipher, and its brevity has stymied generations of PhDs and puzzle prodigies.

Alex Baber, a 50-year-old West Virginia man who dropped out of high school and taught himself codebreaking, now says he has cracked the Zodiac killer’s identity — and in the process solved the Black Dahlia case as well.

“It’s irrefutable,” said Baber, obsessive, hyperfocused and cocksure in manner, his memory encyclopedic and his speech a firehose of dates, locations and surprising linkages.

What a story. The circumstantial evidence pointing to Margolis seems pretty strong. What I can’t find is an explanation of Baber’s solution to the Z13 cypher. The “irrefutable” description hinges on that. There’s a new podcast, “Killer in the Code”, from author Michael Connelly that details Baber’s supposed solution tying both cases to the same guy. All the publicity about this today stems from the debut of that podcast yesterday.

You don’t need to deal with long mall lines or crowded parking lots just to wrap up your holiday shopping, but you probably already knew this. Some of the best deals are online, and even though Christmas is now a day or two away, a lot of Verge-approved gifts should still arrive on time if […]

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Exodus, a new space-faring RPG coming from Archetype Entertainment, features a sprawling sci-fi canon written by Hamilton, Tchaikovsky, and more.