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I wrote this recently in a conversation about whether coding agents can work as a replacement for human programmers. The "agentic" coding tools we have right now work like this: A skilled individual with both deep domain understanding and deep understanding of the capabilit...

My guest today is Shirley Manson. Since 1994, she’s been the lead singer of the band Garbage, and she is a bona fide rock icon. The two of us worked together on a different podcast called The Jump, which Shirley hosted and I helped produce. It was a dream of mine to get Shirley as the host of that podcast, partly because, as you’re about to hear, she has one of the greatest voices, and I could listen to her talk about anything. And so I’m especially excited to listen to her today tell me about a song that changed her life. 

Thanks to Sonos for their support of the podcast. Check out sonos.com.

For more, visit songexploder.net/keychange.

And check out the Song Exploder episode with Garbage from 2014, featuring Shirley and her bandmate Butch Vig talking about how they made their song “Felt.” 

You may recall from my “Siri Is Super Dumb and Getting Dumber” piece back in January that the Dickinson Public Schools District in North Dakota had the rather unfortunate nickname the “Midgets”. Back in March, the school district announced they’d be retiring the nickname, after nearly a century. Last month they announced their new name: the Mavericks. I’m going to call this the best rebranding of the year.

We still have the Estherville, Iowa Midgets to cheer for. But even better: the Yuma Criminals in Arizona. Now that’s a nickname.

Link: inforum.com/news/north-dakota/dickinson-high-to-retire…

I counted all of the yurts in Mongolia using machine learning

Fascinating, detailed account by Monroe Clinton of a geospatial machine learning project. Monroe wanted to count visible yurts in Mongolia using Google Maps satellite view. The resulting project incorporates mercantile for tile calculations, Label Studio for help label the first 10,000 examples, a model trained on top of YOLO11 and a bunch of clever custom Python code to co-ordinate a brute force search across 120 CPU workers running the model.

Via Hacker News

Tags: machine-learning, geospatial, ai, python

This is episode three of Swimming with Shadows: A Radiolab Week of Sharks. Today, we take a trip across the world, from the south coast of Australia to … Wisconsin. Here, scientists are scouring shark blood to find one of nature’s hidden keys, a molecular superhero that migh...

This was my entry album into Russian Circles. And it’s still my favourite, probably because of being my first. We saw them on tour back then in Auckland, NZ. And I still remember how that end part of “309” blew me away: first that drum beat, and then this thunderous bass. So heavy! And even better live.

Bandcamp

That memvid thing that's been going around recently is a trap. It's an embedding store that records the original text that has been embedded in QR codes in a video file. That's an absurd thing to do, and the only purpose of the repo is to make people who uncritically share it look foolish. Don't fall for the trap.

Tags: jokes

The Ringer’s Bill Simmons and Chris Ryan have one question for you: Is it safe? The guys sit down in the dentist chair to revisit the 1976 crime thriller ‘Marathon Man,’ starring Dustin Hoffman, Laurence Olivier, and Roy Scheider. Producers: Craig Horlbeck, Jack Sanders, and Ronak Nair This episode is sponsored by State Farm®. A State Farm agent can help you choose the coverage you need. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.® Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After many months of previews, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Flash have reached general availability with new, memorable model IDs: gemini-2.5-pro and gemini-2.5-flash. They are joined by a new preview model with an unmemorable name: gemini-2.5-flash-lite-preview-06-17 is a new Gemini ...

Simon Willison, regarding the various rebuttals to “The Illusion of Thinking” research paper (which I linked to here) from Apple’s machine learning team: I thought this paper got way more attention than it warranted — the title “The Illusion of Thinking” captured the att...

WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum, back in 2012 (two years before Facebook acquired them for $19 billion, 13 years before this week’s introduction of ads into WhatsApp): Advertising isn’t just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption...

These screens make for a useful overview of what Apple thinks the highlight features are in each OS.

Link: 512pixels.net/2025/06/wwdc25-the-bento-boxes/

Aric Toler, a visual investigations reporter for The New York Times, on X back in April:

For about a year, I worked with a retired British academic named Alasdair Spark to solve a mystery: where did the original photo from the end of The Shining come from, and where/when was it captured?

Last week, we finally found the answer.

See also: This post from 2012 about the original photograph, from (who else?) Lee Unkrich.

Link: x.com/AricToler/status/1908610058318991581

Fred Lambert, writing for Electrek: Bloomberg has just released an embarrassingly bad report about the self-driving space, in which it claimed Tesla has an advantage over Waymo by misrepresenting data. [...] The report compares Tesla’s and Waymo’s self-driving efforts, g...

Nice piece in Fast Company by Zachary Petit:

One critical moment came in February 2010, when J. Crew featured Field Notes in its catalog, alongside the retailer’s other “personal favorites from our design heroes.” There was a Timex watch, Ray-Bans, Sperry shoes — “and out of fucking nowhere, Field Notes,” Coudal says. “And when that happened, a lot changed for us.”

Coudal says it gave the brand instant credibility — after all, if it was good enough for J. Crew, it was good enough for your store. In time, friends began sending him screenshots of Field Notes in TV shows; he and Draplin would see people jotting notes in them in bars and elsewhere; on the design web, they became an obsession. By 2014, there was even a subreddit dedicated to them titled “FieldNuts.”

Link: fastcompany.com/91352848/field-notes-cult-notebook-started…

The Steering Council (SC) approves PEP 779 [Criteria for supported status for free-threaded Python], with the effect of removing the “experimental” tag from the free-threaded build of Python 3.14 [...]

With these recommendations and the acceptance of this PEP, we as the Python developer community should broadly advertise that free-threading is a supported Python build option now and into the future, and that it will not be removed without following a proper deprecation schedule. [...]

Keep in mind that any decision to transition to Phase III, with free-threading as the default or sole build of Python is still undecided, and dependent on many factors both within CPython itself and the community. We leave that decision for the future.

— Donghee Na, discuss.python.org

Tags: gil, python

This is episode two of Swimming with Shadows: A Radiolab Week of Sharks. Jaws spawned a thousand imitators: sharks in tornados, sharks in avalanches, sharks that battle giant octopuses. Hollywood has officially turned sharks into monsters of every shape and size. And yet, so...

Automate compliance. Streamline security. Manage risk. Drata delivers the world’s most advanced Trust Management platform.

Link: drata.com/daring

Todd Spangler, Variety: Meanwhile, the Trump Mobile “47 Plan” is pricier than the unlimited plans from prepaid services operated by Verizon’s Visible, AT&T’s Cricket Wireless and T-Mobile’s Metro, which are each around $40 per month. The Trump T1 Phone, which runs G...