In the heart of Bucharest, where historic buildings stand shoulder-to-shoulder and every square foot of land is precious, a narrow plot on Bazilescu Street has been transformed into an unexpected jewel in the urban city. Known simply as The Chapel, this tiny coffee shop by Vinklu, led by architect Stefan Pavaluta, demonstrates how a challenging site can become an opportunity for innovation.

The Chapel sits on a residual plot so slender that most would have dismissed it as unusable. Instead, Vinklu embraced the site’s limitations, turning them into defining features. Rising as a sharp triangular prism, the building maximizes its modest footprint while achieving an unexpectedly dramatic vertical presence. The lot’s extreme narrowness forced bold design moves, resulting in a structure that feels both daring and delicate.

Nearly the entire facade is wrapped in high-performance, triple-glazed glass, allowing daylight to flood the space. By day, the building acts as a prism, refracting and reflecting its surroundings; by night, it glows like a lantern, becoming a luminous marker within the urban environment. The interplay of transparency and illumination makes The Chapel not only a space for contemplation but also a work of public art.

Given the site’s tight constraints, much of the structure was fabricated off-site. This method minimized construction waste, reduced disruption to the neighborhood, and allowed the building to take shape quickly. The lightweight steel frame supports the glass walls, balancing strength with transparency.

Rather than competing with the adjacent mature tree out front, the design incorporates it as a natural canopy, providing shade and grounding the project in its environment. The tree enhances The Chapel’s connection to nature, offering visitors an indoor/outdoor feel within the bustling city.

Inside, light-toned wood softens the effect of the glass exterior, creating a warm and intimate atmosphere. The height of the acute triangular roofline exaggerates the sense of scale, making the interior feel far larger than its footprint suggests. Despite measuring only 463 square feet, the space feels open and welcoming. The design fosters a sense of intimacy – ideal for tiny gatherings or a quiet cup of coffee alone.

What sets The Chapel apart is its ability to do so much with so little. It proves that small-scale interventions can have a massive impact on how people experience the city. By transforming an overlooked urban lot into a destination, Vinklu has created a new narrative for how we can inhabit tight spaces.

To learn more about The Chapel and Vinklu, visit vinklu.com.

Photography by Vlad Patru.

A data broker owned by the country’s major airlines, including American Airlines, United, and Delta, is selling access to five billion plane ticketing records to the government for warrantless searching and monitoring of peoples’ movements, including by the FBI, Secret Service, ICE, and many other agencies, according to a new contract and other records reviewed by 404 Media.

The contract provides new insight into the scale of the sale of passengers’ data by the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), the airlines-owned data broker. The contract shows ARC’s data includes information related to more than 270 carriers and is sourced through more than 12,800 travel agencies. ARC has previously told the government to not reveal to the public where this passenger data came from, which includes peoples’ names, full flight itineraries, and financial details.

So hieß das früher, Musikfreunde.

Kumpels for real.

(Direktlink)

Medical research means dealing with ethics boards — who keep asking all these pointed questions on how you’re going to use people’s most personal data.

What if we just … fake the data? Sorry, synthesise the data. Feed some real data to machine learning, churn out statistically similar synthetic numbers, then write up this fake data! Just as if you did science!

Remember: it’s not technically data fraud if you list it in your methodology!

Journal articles have pushed the idea of synthetic data for a few decades now. It isn’t actually very popular. But also, they keep pushing it.

You can only dodge the ethics board like this if your institution lets you. Nature spoke to a few institutions who do let researchers use AI-faked data so they don’t have to think about ethics. [Nature]

Here’s the use case for synthetic data:

protecting patient privacy, being more easily able to share data between sites and speeding up research.

The data is literally fake — but they get so many more papers out!

Synthetic data also solves data scarcity — there just isn’t enough real data in the world for all the researchers with papers to write.

So we turn a small real dataset into a huge fake dataset. Then we send the huge fake ethics-laundered datasets around the world! So everyone is using derivatives of the same small original dataset! With any noise in the original treated as the finest A-grade data that tells you things!

Sometimes the synthetic data fans admit this might cause issues: [Nature]

bias amplification, low interpretability, and an absence of robust methods for auditing data quality.

Are you sure the real data set you started with was good? That it doesn’t turn out to be wrong or horribly biased for some reason? Did you actually capture the statistics of the original — or did you oversimplify because you were in a hurry?

None of that matters! You already decided ethics was for dodging!

The other use for synthetic medical data is … training medical machine learning models. [ScienceDirect]

The first model fakes the data, then the second model trains on the fake data. Any problems in the synthetic data set are amplified further. Then the second model — based on fake data — is used to treat real patients. This is, of course, all fine.

The abstract of that paper makes this amazing claim for synthetic data:

unbiased data with sufficient sample size and statistical power.

You’re talking about a fake data set synthesized from a real data set. Even if you’ve duplicated its character completely, you can’t synthesize the statistical power to tell you things about the world which wasn’t in the original. You can’t do a statistical CSI “enhance!”

But sure, you can fake more data to write down a bigger N.

Synthetic data is not widely used in medical research yet because most researchers still actually give a hoot. It’s still at the hype stage — like this effusive bilge in BMJ Evidence Based Medicine in July, about the incredible potential of faking the evidence base for your medicine. Their main use case is: [BMJ EBM]

overcoming technical and regulatory barriers to assembling sufficiently large datasets for modern AI methods is paramount.

At least they’re doing just machine learning, not generative AI. So far.

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I don't know if you can build ethics out of expected value, but I know that if I'm on a deserted island with someone who DOES think that, I'm running in the opposite direction.