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The Series So Raunchy, It Broke The Boundaries Of Acceptable TV

By Jonathan Klotz
| Published

By the early 2000’s cable networks were desperate to produce the next big series. HBO’s success with The Sopranos, Sex and the City, and Oz proved cable was the next big thing, but where the premium channels had an advantage and could show all the sex and violence they wanted, FX decided to push as far as they could with their hit 2003 series, Nip/Tuck.

The medical drama launched the career of megaproducer Ryan Murphy and, alongside The Shield, turned the Fox cable channel into a mid-2000’s rating juggernaut. Today, Nip/Tuck has broken free of a cable subscription and is streaming for free on PLEX. 

Tell Me What You Don’t Like About Yourself

Dr. Troy (Julian McMahon) and Dr. McNamara (Dylan Walsh) in Nip/Tuck

Nip/Tuck follows two plastic surgeons, the family man Dr. Sean McNamara (Dylan Walsh, a “that guy” actor you’ve seen in nearly everything) and the playboy Dr. Christian Troy (the late Julian McMahon after he left Charmed), as they cater to the rich of Miami. Episodes usually started with “Tell me what you don’t like about yourself” as the patient of the week went through everything they wanted changed. Every season also had overarching stories, from Season’s crime boss attempting to get out of the country to a multi-season serial killer arc that turned the show from a cable hit into a phenomenon. 

Seasons 2 and 3 follow “The Carver,” a black-clad masked villain named for carving up their victim’s faces after the attack. “Who is The Carver?” was a popular topic in the early days of social media, including a MySpace page dedicated to the killer that featured exclusive audio logs and videos. Today, that’s basic Social Media Marketing 101, but in 2004, this was mindblowing immersion. 

The actual Carver storyline is, in retrospect, hilariously awful, because again, this is a Ryan Murphy series, and over 20 years later, everyone’s used to his bizarre, off-the-wall twists for the sake of having a twist. Nip/Tuck was the first time Murphy was allowed to indulge, before Glee, American Horror Story, and 911 exposed his bad creative habits. It wasn’t only watching Christian land every woman who crosses his path into bed that pushed up against what was allowed to air, but also the gory plastic surgery scenes and language, which both shocked and excited audiences in the early 2000s. 

A Bonkers Series Decades Ahead Of Its Time

The Carver

Nip/Tuck skyrocketed in ratings with Season 2 and 3, reaching upwards of 6 million viewers each week. Back then, the weekly airings were perfect for Murphy’s twist-filled writing style that comes off as annoying in the era of binge-watching. Later seasons relocated the show’s setting to Los Angeles and made it feel a little less unique and special as a result, which shows in the ratings falling back down to 3 million, then 2 million for Season 6. These days, those numbers would still be good enough be one of the top shows on cable. 

It’s a medical drama, it’s a black comedy, and it’s a satire; Nip/Tuck doesn’t fit neatly into any genre. If you go back and binge the series, you’ll see the building blocks for today’s modern cable dramas. Ryan Murphy’s vision was so far ahead of its time that, despite airing on FX, his first major hit feels like it’s from last week and not 23 years ago. 


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Everything we expect from Samsung’s July event (Fold 8, watches, and glasses!)

Samsung’s next big event could reveal foldables, smartwatches, and its first Android XR glasses.

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AI just disproved a major math problem. A mathematician explains.

While the rest of the world was watching the World Cup on Sunday evening, mathematician Levent Alpöge casually announced on X that he had used Anthropic’s Fable 5 to disprove the Jacobian conjecture.

The Jacobian conjecture is a long-standing open problem in algebraic geometry that’s bedeviled highly accomplished mathematicians for almost 90 years. It was included in “Smale’s problems,” a list of unresolved math problems put forward by mathematician Stephen Smale in 1998.

But that proved no obstacle for Fable 5, Anthropic’s latest frontier AI model. (You may remember Fable 5 as the public version of Claude Mythos Preview, the AI model that Anthropic says has such advanced cybersecurity capabilities that it was too dangerous for public release.)

Alpöge is part of Harvard’s Society of Fellows, and his Linkedin profile notes an affiliation with Anthropic. We’ve reached out to Anthropic with questions about Alpöge’s work.

Meanwhile, for those of us who don’t understand polynomial functions from n-dimensional space, the question is: Does this represent a major breakthrough in artificial intelligence, or mathematics, or neither?

“This did not cause me to update my priors about what AI can and can’t do,” professor and mathematician Andrew Blumberg told Mashable. “This is exactly the kind of thing I would expect AI to be able to do. If there was a counterexample that was concise and easy to state that people haven’t found because it’s a pain to search through all this stuff, AI will find it.”

Blumberg, who has a joint appointment in mathematics and computer science at Columbia University, is involved in the First Proof project, an effort to test the capabilities of frontier large language models in solving research-level mathematics. So, it’s safe to say he understands mathematics and AI better than most of us.


‘You want to learn something from the answer’

Providing a counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture is still a significant achievement for AI in mathematics, Blumberg notes. But he also says there’s a big difference between providing a positive proof for a major math problem and providing a single counterexample that disproves it. Here’s the metaphor Blumberg used to explain.

“Suppose that Moses came down from the mountain with tablets, and on the tablet was written, ‘Cancer can be cured.’ Would you care? You don’t just want the answer to the question. You want to learn something from the answer. And the reason Smale thought this problem was important is because he thought that if we solved it, we would understand more things about the about the way nature is structured.”

In other words, Blumberg says, “this counterexample tells us essentially nothing. It’s just, you know, there are a lot of polynomials, and it’s hard for people to check them all, but it’s not hard for machines.”

The Jacobian conjecture isn’t the only math problem AI has tackled in recent months. OpenAI announced in May an “internal model” had disproved the Erdős unit distance conjecture, a central conjecture in discrete geometry.

However, in that case, the result was more productive, Blumberg says. That’s because OpenAI didn’t just provide a counterexample — but a disproof of the problem itself.

“The disproof there already has led to interesting things because experts in the area unpacked what was going on in the disproof and then used it to do other things,” Blumberg says.

And that’s not necessarily the case with the Jacobian conjecture counterexample, he adds — while conceding he’s not expert enough to see if there’s something special about the structure of the counterexample that we can learn from. “But it’s not in and of itself interesting.”


Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.


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macOS 27 Beta has a secret Siri AI interface. How to try it.

You’ve waited long enough for Apple’s relaunch of Siri as an AI assistant, and now you can finally try out the Siri AI beta for iOS. But, psst, don’t tell anyone, but there’s even more Siri AI for you to try out with a secret Siri AI interface on Mac.

A Reddit user on the r/MacOSBeta subreddit has discovered a “hidden lightweight UI” for Siri AI in the macOS 27 Golden Gate beta. This feature basically provides users with an array of AI tools, presented in a pop-up menu whenever text is highlighted.

The Siri AI pop-up interface includes AI tools such as Rewrite, Proofread, “How does this sound?,” and “Edit with Siri.” There are also menu options for summarization and providing bullet points from the selected text.

Siri AI can also provide a selection of specific tools dependent on the context of what’s selected. For example, highlighting a phone number provides a pop-up to “Add to contacts” or when selecting an address the pop-up offers an “Open in Maps” option. There are tools for creating calendar events, composing messages and emails, and tracking flights and packages as well.

Why is the feature hidden? Well, as MacRumors points out, the Siri AI interface in macOS 27 developer beta 3 and public beta 1 is simply an unfinished product. Certain features don’t yet work how they’re supposed to. Some options don’t work at all. Clearly, Apple has yet to make it available because it’s simply not ready.

However, Reddit users say there is a way to turn the interface on in the macOS Golden Gate Beta. According to Redditor pdfu, if users running the macOS 27 beta simply need to open up the Terminal and input a few lines of code.

Please note: We do not recommend running terminal instructions or changing important OS files unless you fully understand what you’re doing. We have not tested these terminal instructions, so proceed at your own risk.

sudo mkdir -p /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain && sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/WritingTools LightweightUI_macOS -dict Enabled -bool true

After that, the Reddit threat instructs users to restart their computer and the Siri AI interface will be enabled.

If you’ve had enough of the unfinished interface, you can turn it back off by once again opening Terminal and the following input:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/WritingTools LightweightUI_macOS -dict Enabled -bool false

It’s unclear if the Siri AI interface will launch with the official version of the new macOS. However, it’s certainly interesting to see Apple further brand its Siri AI relaunch as an all-in-one AI tool across the company’s products.

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