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Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Featuring bubble-style lines with colorful gradients, the wallpapers come in Mac Purple, Mac Blue, Mac Pink, and Mac Yellow. The design and the colors spell out the word “Mac.”

They got me. I’m upgrading to Tahoe now.

Link: macrumors.com/2026/03/09/macos-tahoe-26-4-beta-4-neo…

“What if we taught students to use AI critically, rather than insisting they ignore it or assume they’re using it to cheat?” asks college freshman Maximilian Milovidov. “Students will reach for these tools, whether universities ban them or not.”

New web game that takes 2 min to play (and perhaps a lifetime to master?): Outsmart. “Five rounds, first to 3 wins. In each round, the higher bet wins. You have 100 total points, so bet wisely. Can you outsmart the machine?”

The Library of Congress recently discovered a copy of a “long-lost” film made in ~1897 by George Méliès called Gugusse and the Automaton (Gugusse et l’Automate), which “had not been seen by anyone in likely more than a century” and “was the first appearance on film of what m...

GPS jamming and spoofing is becoming commonplace in war. “Ships in the region’s waters found their navigation systems had gone haywire, erroneously indicating that the vessels were at airports, a nuclear power plant and on Iranian land.”

Production query plans without production data Radim Marek describes the new pg_restore_relation_stats() and pg_restore_attribute_stats() functions that were introduced in PostgreSQL 18 in September 2025. The PostgreSQL query planner makes use of internal statistics to help ...

The fish doorbell in Utrecht is back for another season! “Did you spot a fish? Press the Fish Doorbell! Then our lock keeper can let the fish through.”

Malaria has killed humans for millennia. From DDT to bed nets, vaccines, and genetically modified mosquitoes, we’ve pushed back... but resistance and climate change threaten progress. The war isn’t over. #kurzgesagt #inanutshell #kurzgesagt_inanutshell #learnwithshorts #scie...

Naipanoi Lepapa, Ahmed Abdigadir, and Julia Lindblom, reporting for the Swedish publications Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten: It is stuffy at the top of the hotel in Nairobi, Kenya. The grey sky presses the heat against the windows. The man in front of us is nervo...

On the occasion of the release of her latest book, The Beginning Comes After the End, Rebecca Solnit sat down for an interview with David Marchese of the NY Times. Here’s the video version: This is a great interview. Marchese’s first question is about how we find the posi...

A recurring concern I've seen regarding LLMs for programming is that they will push our technology choices towards the tools that are best represented in their training data, making it harder for new, better tools to break through the noise. This was certainly the case a cou...

The NY Times went back through a century of women’s obituaries “to re-examine them with the benefit of distance — to see what was emphasized, what was minimized, what might have been left unsaid”. https://bsky.app/profile/prisonculture.bsky.social

Supporters of the Iranian regime have taken to the streets to celebrate the selection of the country's new spiritual leader, Mojtaba Khamenei. He will replace his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in US-Israeli strikes on the first day of the war. Shortly after ...

Simon Willison: There are a lot of open questions about this, both ethically and legally. These appear to be coming to a head in the venerable chardet Python library. chardet was created by Mark Pilgrim back in 2006 and released under the LGPL. Mark retired from public i...

Donald Knuth, who, adorably, effectively blogs by posting TeX-typeset PDFs:

Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I’d been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6 — Anthropic’s hybrid reasoning model that had been released three weeks earlier! It seems that I’ll have to revise my opinions about “generative AI” one of these days. What a joy it is to learn not only that my conjecture has a nice solution but also to celebrate this dramatic advance in automatic deduction and creative problem solving. I’ll try to tell the story briefly in this note.

(Via Simon Willison.)

Link: www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/claude-cycles.pdf

Help us Obi-Wan Lemay, you’re our only hope.

(Also, as noted by Joe Rossignol, Eddy Cue got an updated headshot.)

Link: apple.com/leadership/steve-lemay/

What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.

— Joseph Weizenbaum, creator of ELIZA, in 1976 (via)

Tags: ai-ethics, ai, computer-history, internet-archive

Dozens of former employees of Noma tell of abuse & violence at the hands of its chef/owner, René Redzepi. Punching, screaming, shoving, stabbing, slamming, intimidation, ridicule, blacklisting. What an asshole.