Truly Universal Outlet
The data is clear: congestion pricing in NYC has been a “huge success”. “Pollution: -22%. Revenue for mass transit: $548M.”
Radiolab
• WNYC Studios
nytimes.com/interactive/2025/12/23/us/trump-white-house-oval-office-gold-decor.html
Terrific interaction design from The New York Times. Not so terrific interior design from the president.
Link: nytimes.com/interactive/2025/12/23/us/trump-white-house…
Special guest Quinn Nelson returns for a two-topic holiday spectacular: the iPad in the wake of iPadOS 26, and Apple’s executive changes as Tim Cook seemingly nears the end of his time as CEO.
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uv has a useful uv init command for setting up new Python projects, but it comes with a bunch of different options like --app and --package and --lib and I wasn't sure how they differed.
So I created this GitHub repository which demonstrates all of those options, generated using this update-projects.sh script (thanks, Claude) which will run on a schedule via GitHub Actions to capture any changes made by future releases of uv.
Tags: projects, python, github-actions, git-scraping, uv
Reminder: NASA’s holiday yule log fireplace video is delightful — it’s a rocket engine (in a fireplace). “8.8 million pounds of total thrust…”
From Mr. Bean’s official YouTube channel, the show’s hilarious Christmas episode.
While Christmas shopping, Mr Bean purchases a bulky string of tree lights before making a shambles of a department store toy section. He later manages to acquire a free turkey and Christmas tree, and attempts to conduct a Salvation Army band. Finally, during Christmas dinner, Bean has quite a surprise in store for his long-suffering girlfriend.
Smart, fair video from Quinn Nelson on the gap that remains between iPadOS 26 and desktop OSes. I think it’s right that there is a gap there. Apple has the Macintosh, the best desktop/workstation platform in the industry. So whatever the ideal is for iPadOS, it ought to fall short of MacOS in terms of technical capabilities, and instead offer a degree of simplicity and can’t-screw-it-up-edness that the Mac can’t match. But, some of the limitations that remain in iPadOS are just frustrating. iPadOS 26 is a huge leap forward, and I think sets the stage for Apple to address those limitations.
Another great video from Quinn Nelson. If your dumb cousin who knows you’re an Apple nerd approaches you on Christmas and says “Hey what’s going on at Apple, Bloomberg says it’s rats leaving a sinking ship over there?” and you don’t feel like explaining, just tell him to watch this video. Just the perfect explanation.
theverge.com/2023/6/28/23777298/sony-ftc-microsoft-confidential-documents-marker-pen-scanner-oops
Splendid essay by Bilge Ebiri for The Yale Review, a meditation both on the films of Terrence Malick and several filmmakers he’s deeply influenced.
If this [MicroQuickJS] had been available in 2010, Redis scripting would have been JavaScript and not Lua. Lua was chosen based on the implementation requirements, not on the language ones... (small, fast, ANSI-C). I appreciate certain ideas in Lua, and people love it, but I was never able to like Lua, because it departs from a more Algol-like syntax and semantics without good reasons, for my taste. This creates friction for newcomers. I love friction when it opens new useful ideas and abstractions that are worth it, if you learn SmallTalk or FORTH and for some time you are lost, it's part of how the languages are different. But I think for Lua this is not true enough: it feels like it departs from what people know without good reasons.
— Salvatore Sanfilippo, Hacker News comment on MicroQuickJS
Tags: salvatore-sanfilippo, lua, redis, javascript