apple.com/newsroom/2025/11/apple-announces-finalists-for-the-2025-app-store-awards/
Apple Newsroom:
Finalists in the Mac App of the Year category provided users with powerful tools to confidently take on new projects:
- Acorn, for being the go-to tool for pro-level photo edits.
- Essayist, for taking the stress out of sourcing and formatting academic papers.
- Under My Roof, for keeping homeowners organized and prepared.
Nice to see Flying Meat’s Acorn — one of my own favorite and most-used apps since 2007, before it even shipped — getting this sort of recognition from Apple. Back in June, Apple featured Acorn in the WWDC keynote, during the preview of Liquid Glass.
Link: apple.com/newsroom/2025/11/apple-announces-finalists-for…
NASA’s Perseverance rover scooped up a rock that might prove there was life on Mars. But the planned return of that sample to Earth is endangered by the Trump regime.
“Geothermal is underdeveloped, and its upfront costs can be high, but it’s always on and, once it’s set up, it is cheap and enduring.” Why the Time Has Finally Come for Geothermal Energy.
Two reasons why XKCD’s What If? series is so compelling:
In this case, the answer to “what’s the longest possible sunset you can experience while driving, assuming you’re obeying the speed limit and driving on paved roads?” was fairly surprising and exact and the explanation delightful.
Btw, the ending of the video is a callback to an early XKCD comic about angular momentum.
CDC officials confirm that the US is two months away from measles being considered endemic for the first time since 2000. “Elimination status is lost if the virus spreads continuously for 12 months.”
Song Exploder
• Hrishikesh Hirway
Fantastic and useful little design touch on this website that sells lighting (toggle the switch in the upper right corner).
Cloudflare's network began experiencing significant failures to deliver core network traffic [...] triggered by a change to one of our database systems' permissions which caused the database to output multiple entries into a “feature file” used by our Bot Management system. That feature file, in turn, doubled in size. The larger-than-expected feature file was then propagated to all the machines that make up our network. [...] The software had a limit on the size of the feature file that was below its doubled size. That caused the software to fail.
— Matthew Prince, Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025
Tags: scaling, postmortem, cloudflare
Special guest Dan Frommer returns to the show. Topics include the indie media business, the iPhone Pocket, the iPhone Air (including rumors about the second generation model), AI “personalities”, and five years of Apple Silicon Macs. Also, six years of Dan’s site, The New Consumer.
Sponsored by:
thebulwark.com/p/trump-is-not-have-all-the-mentals-cognitive-functioning?r=9x4vy
- Support for nested schemas in Pydantic, thanks Bill Pugh. #107
- Now tests against Python 3.14.
- Support for YouTube URLs as attachments and the
media_resolutionoption. Thanks, Duane Milne. #112- New model:
gemini-3-pro-preview. #113
The YouTube URL feature is particularly neat, taking advantage of this API feature. I used it against the Google Antigravity launch video:
llm -m gemini-3-pro-preview \
-a 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTOVIGsqCuY' \
'Summary, with detailed notes about what this thing is and how it differs from regular VS Code, then a complete detailed transcript with timestamps'
Here's the result. A spot-check of the timestamps against points in the video shows them to be exactly right.
Tags: projects, youtube, ai, generative-ai, llms, llm, gemini
Dark chocolate is very serious business. That’s why this ad for Bournville dark chocolate, which takes aim at dark chocolate snobbery, is so funny.
This one is so intense. It comes with a list of side effects.
Mine comes with a therapist.
To the uneducated palette, this tastes like burnt tire.
This one captures bitterness, astringency, and resentfulness. The taste is so grown up.
Oh, mine’s massively grown up.
This is only available under the counter of a pet store with no address.
This sugar was used by the Aztecs as currency.
Some believe this one’s haunted.
Mine’s flammable.
Tags: advertising · Bournville · chocolate · food · video