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The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has said Israel will hold off future attacks on Iranian gas fields after being asked to do so by President Trump. An Israeli attack on Iran's South Pars gas field on Wednesday, followed by Iranian attacks on Qatari gas installa...

Research: SQLite Tags Benchmark: Comparing 5 Tagging Strategies

I had Claude Code run a micro-benchmark comparing different approaches to implementing tagging in SQLite. Traditional many-to-many tables won, but FTS5 came a close second. Full table scans with LIKE queries performed better than I expected, but full table scans with JSON arrays and json_each() were much slower.

Tags: json, sqlite

Hm. Somehow, the plot was a bit unsatisfactory. But there's still lots to like: the theme song is one of my favourites by Carpenter, the gory practical effects are great, I liked the characters, the humour, the atmosphere. Good one, but (after first watch) not my most-liked Carpenter film.

👍 Recommended!

300+ issues of the UK music magazine NME from 1969-1983. The ads alone are incredible.

Jeff Johnson, linking to my “Your Frustration Is the Product” piece: My browser extension StopTheMadness Pro stops autoplaying videos and hides Sign in with Google on all sites. It also hides sticky videos and notification requests on many sites. For more extreme measur...

Javier C. Hernández, reporting for The New York Times:

He was responding to a question about why Japan and other allies had received no advance notice of the U.S.-Israeli assault on Iran.

“We didn’t tell anybody about it because we wanted surprise,” he said. “Who knows better about surprise than Japan, OK? Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor, OK? Right?”

There was some laughter from the officials and journalists gathered in the room. “You believe in surprise, I think, much more so than us,” he added.

As Trump sinks further into dementia and his presidency slides further into disarray, his administration, in a sick way, gets funnier and funnier.

Link: nytimes.com/2026/03/19/us/politics/trump-japan-pearl-harbor…

Anne Applebaum, writing for The Atlantic (gift link): Specifically, they remember that for 14 months, the American president has tariffed them, mocked their security concerns, and repeatedly insulted them. As long ago as January 2020, Trump told several European official...

“The Tenth Muse is an art discovery engine. Over 120,000 artworks from museums and institutions — searchable by feeling, mood, atmosphere, era, and medium.”

Mark Simonson:

Just by coincidence, I discovered a copy of U&lc magazine in the graphics classroom. U&lc was published by ITC, the International Typeface Corporation, a typeface publisher, and the designer and editor was the legendary Herb Lubalin. I’d never seen such beautiful typography and design. It was a motherlode for an aspiring typophile like me. [...]

I decided right then that someday, somehow, I wanted to design typefaces.

Link: marksimonson.com/notebook/view/the-day-i-discovered-type…

Adamya Sharma, reporting for Android Authority: When Google execs previously said sideloading would become a high-friction process on Android, they really weren’t kidding. The company is finally sharing what Android’s new sideloading flow will look like in practice, and ...

Typos Have Plagued Us for Centuries. There’s the 1631 Bible that says “thou shalt commit adultery” but James Joyce resisted some of his corrections: “These are not misprints but beauties of my style hitherto undreamt of.”

Paris now has a cycling network bigger than Amsterdam and “more daily trips in Paris are now made by bike than by car”.

One of the most controversial opinions I’ve long espoused, and believe today more than ever, is that it was a terrible mistake for web browsers to support JavaScript. Not that they should have picked a different language, but that they supported scripting at all. That decisi...

Follow-up: You’re welcome, world Formula 1 A brief, renewed pitch to watch this season Cameras Are not a large portion of the coverage (via Matt Rigby) Failures don’t [usually] matter (via The Racing Line) Great camera overview video The other perk of in-car foo...

Photographer and drone pilot Pio Andrea Peri captured this overhead photo of a Sicilian city called Centuripe. Perched atop hilltops, the city looks like a person from above — even on Google Maps. (via daily overview)

Tags: drones · pareidolia · photography · Pio Andrea Peri

The big news this morning: Astral to join OpenAI (on the Astral blog) and OpenAI to acquire Astral (the OpenAI announcement). Astral are the company behind uv, ruff, and ty - three increasingly load-bearing open source projects in the Python ecosystem. I have thoughts! The o...

Energy prices have surged after strikes on key gas facilities in Qatar and Iran, as the Middle East war continues to escalate. Iran has targeted Qatar's Ras Laffan complex in response to the bombing of Iranian facilities on South Pars gas field by Israel. The US Defence Secr...

Here’s a simple AppleScript I wrote this week — one that solves a minor itch I’ve had for, jeez, 20 years. Almost every item I post to Daring Fireball goes through MarsEdit, the excellent Mac blogging client from Red Sweater Software (my friend Daniel Jalkut). MarsEdit has a...