I had no idea Subaru actively courted lesbian car buyers with targeted ad campaigns in the early 90s; here’s a 2016 Planet Money episode about it: When Subaru Came Out.
The Pedestrians Who Abetted a Hawk’s Deadly Attack. “The hawk appears to...
The Pedestrians Who Abetted a Hawk’s Deadly Attack. “The hawk appears to have learned to interpret a traffic signal and take advantage of it, in its quest to hunt. Which is…more impressive than how most humans use a pedestrian crosswalk.”
common-pile/caselaw_access_project
common-pile/caselaw_access_project
Enormous openly licensed (I believe this is almost all public domain) training dataset of US legal cases:This dataset contains 6.7 million cases from the Caselaw Access Project and Court Listener. The Caselaw Access Project consists of nearly 40 million pages of U.S. federal and state court decisions and judges’ opinions from the last 365 years. In addition, Court Listener adds over 900 thousand cases scraped from 479 courts.
It's distributed as gzipped newline-delimited JSON.
This was gathered as part of the Common Pile and used as part of the training dataset for the Comma family of LLMs.
Via @enricoshippole
Tags: law, ai, generative-ai, llms, training-data
Photos Show the Vast Scale of China’s Solar Power Projects
Over at the Atlantic, Alan Taylor has collected a bunch of photos showing just how hard China is pushing on solar energy.
As the Trump administration’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” eliminates many clean-energy incentives in the U.S., China continues huge investments in wind an...
Rare Earth Magnet Maker MP Materials Is Having a Big Week
Spencer Kimball, reporting for CNBC one week ago:
The Defense Department will become the largest shareholder in rare
earth miner MP Materials after agreeing to buy $400 million of
its preferred stock, the company said Thursday.
MP Materials owns the only operational rar...
Fell in a hole, got out.
Fell in a hole, got out.
This is an absolutely fascinating entrepreneurial war story by Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine, describing how they went from losing $2.6 million per month in 2022 to being monthly profitable since mid 2024.
By the middle of 2022, the readers were compl...
Let Your Kid Climb That Tree. “Your fear that your kid will...
Let Your Kid Climb That Tree. “Your fear that your kid will get hurt is depriving them of something they’ll never get back.” (The bit about “kinematic movers” is really interesting.)
Bruce Springsteen on Surviving Depression and His Strategy for Living Through the...
Bruce Springsteen on Surviving Depression and His Strategy for Living Through the Visitations of the Darkness. “My depression is spewing like an oil spill all over the beautiful turquoise-green gulf of my carefully planned and controlled existence.”
More on Commodore, Apple, and the Inchoate Personal Computer Era
sixcolors.com/link/2025/07/commodore-apple-and-the-early-computer-days/
Jason Snell:
If you find yourself walking down the street in the 1980s and you
see someone coming who prefers the VIC-20 to the Apple II, cross
to the other side of the street. (That said, the VIC-20 really was
revolutionary. It was by far the most affordable home comput...
Writing Advice and Literary Wisdom from the Great E.B. White. “A blank...
Writing Advice and Literary Wisdom from the Great E.B. White. “A blank sheet of paper holds the greatest excitement there is for me — more promising than a silver cloud, prettier than a little red wagon. It holds all the hope there is, all fears.”
Song Exploder
• Hrishikesh Hirway
Key Change: Jason Schwartzman on the ‘Rushmore’ soundtrack
Jason Schwartzman, actor, songwriter, and musician, talks about how the soundtrack to 'Rushmore'—his first film—changed his life. I met Jason briefly in 2017, as he was leaving the room where I was supposed to interview the band Phoenix. I was shocked when he stopped on his way out to tell me he loved Song Exploder. Eight years later, I reached out to him to see if he’d want to be a guest on Key Change, and we ended up talking for almost two hours, just on the phone. By the time he came over to record, I felt like I’d met a kindred spirit who’d also been cataloguing his whole life through the songs he’d encountered along the way. The fact that we got to talk about one of my favorite movies, 'Rushmore,' made the experience even more meaningful and thrilling for me.
For more, visit songexploder.net/jason-schwartzman.
A great look at how Baltimore’s investment in an “ecosystem of community–oriented...
A great look at how Baltimore’s investment in an “ecosystem of community–oriented interventions” has drastically reduced violent crime in the city by treating crime as a public health crisis.
Bloc Party’s Tiny Desk Concert
Twenty years! It’s been twenty years since Bloc Party’s debut album Silent Alarm was released. To celebrate, the band stopped by the NPR office’s for a Tiny Desk Concert.
To celebrate, this Tiny Desk set begins with the super catchy and energetic pop anthem “Banquet” from Silent Alarm. The band continues with a couple songs from 2008’s Intimacy: the shimmery, glockenspiel-forward “Signs,” then “Mercury,” where we give a sneak peek of Okereke’s vocal effects rig under the Desk. Bloc Party closes with “Blue,” a sweet song on the slower side of the band’s catalog. It ends quietly, yet powerfully, as Okereke sings, “I fall asleep on your sleeve / with those three words in my dreams.”
Still bangs. (via @unlikelywords.bsky.social)
Tags: Bloc Party · music · Tiny Desk Concerts · video
A map of the best places to see the Northern Lights. “Kuril’s...
A map of the best places to see the Northern Lights. “Kuril’s analysis culminated in a map highlighting the locations with the best potential to see the northern lights.”
Shipping WebGPU on Windows in Firefox 141
Shipping WebGPU on Windows in Firefox 141
WebGPU is coming to Mac and Linux soon as well:Although Firefox 141 enables WebGPU only on Windows, we plan to ship WebGPU on Mac and Linux in the coming months, and finally on Android.
From this article I learned that it's already available in Firefox Nightly:
Note that WebGPU has been available in Firefox Nightly on all platforms other than Android for quite some time.
I tried the most recent Nightly on my Mac and now the Github Issue Generator running locally w/ SmolLM2 & WebGPU demo (previously) works! Firefox stable gives me an error message saying "Error: WebGPU is not supported in your current environment, but it is necessary to run the WebLLM engine."
The Firefox implementation is based on wgpu, an open source Rust WebGPU library.
Via Hacker News
Documenting what you're willing to support (and not)
Documenting what you're willing to support (and not)
Devious company culture hack from Rachel Kroll:At some point, I realized that if I wrote a wiki page and documented the things that we were willing to support, I could wait about six months and then it would be like it had always been there. Enough people went through the revolving doors of that place such that six months' worth of employee turnover was sufficient to make it look like a whole other company. All I had to do was write it, wait a bit, then start citing it when needed.
You can have an unreasonable amount of influence by being the person who writes stuff down.
Via Hacker News
Tags: documentation, rachel-kroll
Drew Saur’s Ode to the Commodore 64
Drew Saur, pushing back on my post slagging on the Commodore 64:
I cannot argue with your nostalgia. It is uniquely yours.
That said: The Commodore 64 as cheap-feeling and inelegant! Oh my.
I was fourteen when the Commodore 64 came out, and I want to
convey — in as bri...
CEO Tony Stubblebine shares how Medium went from the brink of shutting...
CEO Tony Stubblebine shares how Medium went from the brink of shutting down to being profitable for almost a year now. “In 2022, Medium was losing $2.6M each month. We were also losing subscribers…”
After dealing with years of “Xfinity’s bullcrap” as customers, a pair of...
After dealing with years of “Xfinity’s bullcrap” as customers, a pair of brothers built an all-fiber ISP that’s cheaper & faster to compete with them.
Daring Fireball
• Daring Fireball Department of Commerce
[Sponsor] WorkOS: Scalable, Secure Authentication
workos.com/?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=q12025
With WorkOS you can start selling to enterprises with just a few lines of code. It provides a complete User Management solution along with SSO, SCIM, and FGA. The APIs are modular and easy-to-use, allowing integrations to be completed in minutes instead of months.
Today, some of the fastest growing startups are already powered by WorkOS, including Perplexity, Vercel, and Webflow.
For SaaS apps that care deeply about design and user experience, WorkOS is the perfect fit. From high-quality documentation to self-serve onboarding for your customers, it removes all the unnecessary complexity for your engineering team.
Check out our Summer Launch Week announcements to see our latest.
Link: workos.com/?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium=RSS&utm…