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Interesting detail with the latest update to Apple’s app for learning and tinkering with Swift: it’s now named Playground, singular, not Playgrounds, plural. I’m not going to argue that much should be made of the name change, but I like it. The app is the playground — a place for playing with Swift — not a factory for making playgrounds.

Link: apps.apple.com/us/app/swift-playground/id1496833156?mt=12

Parker Ortolani: Mastodon clients have become the new UI playground in the same way that Twitter clients used to be. But what I can’t wrap my head around is the business decision of developers to lean into Mastodon clients versus Bluesky ones. Fortunately some progress s...

Editors note from The New Republic: As The New Republic reported on Friday, The Los Angeles Times — currently in a race to the bottom with The Washington Post to determine which of the two venerable institutions can sell out to Donald Trump the hardest — found itself in ...

Alex Heath, writing at The Verge: Moments after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s all-hands comments to employees were widely leaked, a company executive warned in an internal memo that leakers will be fired. “We take leaks seriously and will take action,” Meta’s chief informa...

New Tron movie coming, music by Nine Inch Nails. “Tron: Ares follows a highly sophisticated program, Ares, who is sent from the digital world into the real world on a dangerous mission, marking humankind’s first encounter with A.I. beings.”

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Designed by Kazuya Ishikawa, the clever Salaryman Eraser features a Japanese businessman who goes bald as you use the eraser. The same company also makes an eraser that turns into Mt Fuji through repeated use.

Tags: design · Kazuya Ishikawa

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Annie Linskey and Rebecca Ballhaus, reporting for The Wall Street Journal: “It looks like a bribe and a signal to every company that corruption is the name of the game,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) said in a statement. “After Meta pays to play, what does Mark Zucke...

New Square Feature Allows Customers To Tip With Bible Quote. “We have also heard our customers and are working to provide Christian cross and praying-hands emojis as well.”

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The Bawdy Graffiti of Pompeii and Herculaneum. This was was written on the wall of a bar/brothel: “Weep, you girls. My penis has given you up. Now it penetrates men’s behinds. Goodbye, wondrous femininity!”

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The New Comfort Movie Canon: The 10 Best Feel-Good Films of the Last 10 Years. Includes Flow (which I watched the other day and is brilliant), The French Dispatch, Little Women, and Logan Lucky.

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The Video Game History Foundation has launched a digital library of documents, magazines, and transcripts related to video games that’s free for everyone to access. Some of you might be interested in the collection of materials related to the development and promotion of gam...

NBC News, “Meta Agrees to Pay $25 Million to Settle Trump Lawsuit”:

Meta said Wednesday it would pay $25 million to settle a four-year-old lawsuit from President Donald Trump over the social media company’s decision to suspend Trump’s accounts after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, filed a notice of the settlement in federal court in San Francisco, where the lawsuit was pending. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone separately confirmed the terms: a $25 million payment from the company, with $22 million going toward a fund for Trump’s presidential library and the balance dedicated to legal fees and other plaintiffs in the case.

I really can’t wait to see that Trump Presidential Library.

Link: nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/meta-agrees-pay-25-million…

Via David Smith on Mastodon, who writes: The recent work I’ve been doing has required a lot of sharing files between testing devices (and my Mac). AirDrop should be the ideal tool for this but I’ve recently found it to be unreliable. Instead I’ve been using LocalSend wh...

A web version of Pitfall. I used to play this a lot on my cousins’ Intellivision and yep, it’s still as difficult & annoying as I remember it!

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Author Mary Childs shares some of her “stress-designed” drafts: On Trying (and Really Failing) to Design My Own Book Cover. “It’s a miracle any cover is ever good.”

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Brian Eno believes that singing is the key to a good life.

Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness. And then there are what I would call “civilizational benefits.” When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That’s one of the great feelings — to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.

(via subtraction)

[This is a vintage post originally from Nov 2008.]

Tags: Brian Eno · music · timeless posts

20 years ago, Seoul tore down an elevated highway and built a park in its place. “The restored waterway has been a triumph.” It attracts millions of visitors, improves air quality, manages floods, cools the city, and hosts plants & wildlife.

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We eat apples in the summer and enjoy bananas in the winter. When we do this, we go against the natural order of life which is towards death and decay. What gives? This week, Latif Nasser spoke with Nicola Twilley, the author of Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food,...

Andrea Pitzer lost her mother to Amway. “In many ways, Amway adherents embraced a fusion of conspiratorial thinking and populism that would remain a central thread of America’s political story.”

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