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Purged gov’t employees, while scrambling to find work & health insurance, face MAGA relatives who are cheering their firing. “Some members of her mostly conservative family have unfriended her on social media. Others are giving her the silent treatment.”

I woke up Saturday wondering how observers of Ramadan time their fasting in polar regions, where sunrise & sunset don’t exist for months on end. “Muslims in the Arctic are generally advised by religious authorities to adopt one of three solutions…”

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A forthcoming novel from Patricia Lockwood: Will There Ever Be Another You. Really looking forward to this one — her No One Is Talking About This is a favorite of mine from the past few years.

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Craig Hockenberry returns to the show. Topics include Apple’s new hardware this week — M3 iPad Airs, A16 regular iPads, M4 MacBook Airs, and the M4 Max and surprising M3 Ultra Mac Studios. And we go deep on The Iconfactory’s years-in-the-making new app, Tapestry — a universal timeline for the Internet.

Exclusively sponsored by:

• Google Gemini: Chat to supercharge your ideas.

Link: daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2025/03/08/ep-418

This whole 1989 profile of Albert “Cubby” Broccoli by John Culhane for the LA Times is full of enjoyable nuggets, but this fact blew my mind: Giovanni Broccoli and his brother emigrated to Long Island from Calabria at the turn of the century. According to research done i...

Pierce, David Pierce:

On this episode of The Vergecast, we talk about the future of Bond. (James Bond.) John Gruber, the author of Daring Fireball and a preeminent Bond expert, joins the show to talk about Amazon’s acquisition of MGM, its struggles with the Broccoli family over what to do with the Bond franchise, and why so many fans of the series are worried about what might happen when a company like Amazon takes over a beloved name. Will Bond turn out like Marvel, or Star Wars? Or something else entirely? We’ll see — but history suggests we shouldn’t be too optimistic.

I’m deeply pessimistic about the future of the Bond franchise, but I do love talking and thinking about it. Really enjoyed this chat.

Link: theverge.com/the-vergecast/623633/james-bond-amazon…

Simon Willison: These new Apple Intelligence features involve Siri responding to requests to access information in applications and then performing actions on the user’s behalf. This is the worst possible combination for prompt injection attacks! Any time an LLM-based s...

Zac Hall, 9to5Mac: Since last fall, Apple has been marketing the iPhone 16 and Apple Intelligence with an unreleased Siri feature. After confirming today that the more personal version of Siri isn’t coming anytime soon, Apple has pulled the ad in question. The commercia...

A game called “It is as if you were on your phone” is designed to make you look like you’re on your phone. “You’re just pretending to be on your phone! On your phone!”

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A collection of movie clips containing inaccurate binocular shots, “(i.e., two overlapping circles instead of one, as you would see in real life)” — including Rushmore, Das Boot, Ronin, Chinatown, and Superman.

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Stephen Nellis, reporting for Reuters: Some artificial intelligence improvements to Apple’s voice assistant Siri will be delayed until 2026, the company said on Friday. In a statement, Apple said it has “been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness...

From Ben Fry, a visualization of the 5,000+ covers of the New Yorker from the past 100 years. “The horizontal line/artifact comes from the way that they re-run their first cover (and more recently, a variant of it) each year on their anniversary.”

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This is the dumbest thing but it had me rolling in the aisles this morning: Star Trek TNG Theme but the theme music is coming from the Enterprise-D. It takes a bit to get going, but I laughed so hard when the ship whooshed by for the first time.

The same creator has made a number of videos in this vein, including The Imperial March but it’s coming from Vader’s chest control panel and Star Trek DS9 Theme but the theme is coming from DS9 Ops.

Tags: music · remix · Star Trek · TV · video

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This is fantastic and very much worth your time: Marcin Wichary’s deep dive into a staunchly utilitarian font called Gorton, which you see almost everywhere in American cities, especially NYC. “Gorton is everywhere in Manhattan.”

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What future for Ukraine? Your questions answered. Global News Podcast teams up with Ukrainecast for a special Q&A, in a week that has seen US military aid halted. Can Trump and Zelensky get back to talks on a peace deal?

Jackie Leonard will be joined by Ukrainecast's Vitaly Shevchenko, the BBC's Ukraine Correspondent James Waterhouse and Chief International Correspondent Lyse Doucet.

I Took My Work Outside Every Day for a Month This Winter. (“My work” = typing on a laptop.) “Even though I’m not perfectly warm, it lifts my mood to be outside. I can hear the community of songbirds holding their morning conferences, a barking dog…”

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The 100 Greatest TV Performances of the 21st Century (one per show & actor). Ian McShane (Deadwood), Elisabeth Moss (Mad Men), Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Fleabag), Anna Sawai (Shōgun), Maggie Smith (Downton Abbey), Peter Dinklage (GoT). Who’s your #1?

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High up in a pine tree in California’s Big Bear Valley, a pair of eagles guard their nest…and we can watch them live on YouTube. The nest is located in Big Bear Valley in the San Bernardino Mountains of Southern California. It is about 145 feet up in a Jeffrey Pine tree. ...

Here’s a statement I got this morning from Apple spokeswoman Jacqueline Roy, verbatim: “Siri helps our users find what they need and get things done quickly, and in just the past six months, we’ve made Siri more conversational, introduced new features like type to Siri a...