FeedCity

On Saturday, I’ll be live on stage with Brutal Unrest again.

Jessica E. Lessin, Amir Efrati, and Erin Woo, reporting for the paywalled-without-gift-links The Information: While we have reported that Apple can tweak, or fine-tune, a version of Google’s Gemini AI so that it responds to queries the way Apple wants, the agreement give...

Katie Notopoulos, my favorite Sora user, at Business Insider (paywalled, alas, but available via News+): Eventually, my friends all seemed to get bored with the app. As I do at most parties, I stuck around longer than everyone else, but eventually I, too, found that the ...

Tim Hardwick at MacRumors: macOS Tahoe 26.4 includes a new slow charger indicator that tells MacBook users when their charging setup isn’t delivering full power. As described in an updated Apple support document, a “Slow Charger” label now appears in orange text in the b...

Quantization from the ground up Sam Rose continues his streak of publishing spectacularly informative interactive essays, this time explaining how quantization of Large Language Models works. Also included is the best visual explanation I've ever seen of how floating point n...

The US military says an Israeli airstrike that killed the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's naval commander, Alireza Tangsiri, "makes the region safer". Israel's defence minister says he was directly responsible for blocking the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has not confirmed his death...

Jennifer Daniel, on her “Did Someone Say Emoji?” blog:

First came Melting Face 🫠, our collective surrender to the liquid state.

Then Dotted Line Face 🫥, the visual representation of sublimation: turning from a solid into a gas just to escape a conversation.

Now, we have Distorted Face (U+1FAEA), a moment defined by tension: where you aren’t just feeling an emotion — you are being physically altered by it.

I’ll live, but it feels a tad spiteful that Apple only adds new emoji to the current-year OS updates. So this year’s 8 new emoji are in MacOS 26.4, but not MacOS 15.7.5, despite both being released this week.

Link: jenniferdaniel.substack.com/p/new-emoji-distorted-face

Release: datasette-llm 0.1a2

• actor is now available to the llm_prompt_context plugin hook. #2

Tags: llm, datasette

A comparison of different sorting algorithms (bubble, merge, heap, timsort). You can run them one at a time or race all seven.

One more nugget from last night’s 7-0 Yankees win over the Giants: During the sixth inning of Wednesday’s Opening Night matchup between two historic franchises, the Giants and Yankees, all-time home run leader Barry Bonds joined the Netflix broadcast booth at Oracle Park...

Nice 7-0 win last night over the San Francisco Giants.

The game was on Netflix, and it was the worst baseball broadcast I can recall watching in the HD era. The picture quality was just awful, with embarrassing dynamic ad injection. Yes, there was haze, but it’s not like crappy weather in San Francisco is a surprise. The game had the first Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) challenge in MLB history, but the broadcast missed it while it happened. And Netflix’s scorebug is without question the worst I’ve ever seen — as one guy on Reddit quipped, it was somehow “too big and too small at the same time”. I’d have to stand within arm’s reach of my TV to read those player names.

If this is the level of attention Netflix is going to pay to sports broadcasts, they should stick to bumfights.

Link: mlb.com/yankees/news/max-fried-yankees-shut-out-giants-on…

Last month I posted an item (linking to a post from Rob Griffiths) explaining how to hide the prompts in System Settings to upgrade to MacOS 26 Tahoe. The technique I posted involved hand-editing a device management profile.

This video from Mr. Macintosh shows how to do the same thing, but using the free iMazing Profile Editor to create the device profile instead of hand-editing the XML Property List. If you were spooked or put off by the original technique, but want to stay on MacOS 15 Sequoia and hide all the prompts related to Tahoe, watch this video.

MacOS 15.7.5 Sequoia came out this week alongside Tahoe 26.4, and it was delightful only to see the update notice for 15.7.5 in System Settings.

Link: youtube.com/watch?v=uRg1pW8TSYk

A jury in California has concluded that Meta and Google intentionally built addictive social media platforms, in a case brought by a 20-year-old woman who said her compulsive use of social media as a child led to mental health problems. The woman, known as Kaley, has been aw...

Stephen Colbert is co-writing a Lord of the Rings movie. “The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past is set 14 years after the passing of Frodo. Sam, Merry and Pippin set out to retrace the first steps of their adventure…”

Release: datasette-files-s3 0.1a1

A backend for datasette-files that adds the ability to store and retrieve files using an S3 bucket. This release added a mechanism for fetching S3 configuration periodically from a URL, which means we can use time limited IAM credentials that are restricted to a prefix within a bucket.

Tags: s3, datasette

Thoughts on slowing the fuck down Mario Zechner created the Pi agent framework used by OpenClaw, giving considerable credibility to his opinions on current trends in agentic engineering. He's not impressed: We have basically given up all discipline and agency for a sort of ...

Release: datasette-llm 0.1a1 New release of the base plugin that makes models from LLM available for use by other Datasette plugins such as datasette-enrichments-llm. New register_llm_purposes() plugin hook and get_purposes() function for retrieving registered purpose ...

When I first read this post from my friend Paul Kafasis last week — a One Foot Tsunami instant classic — I was hoping that I could think of an example that he missed. I can’t say I did. The closest, though, is ShowBiz Pizza Place, a 1980s archrival to Chuck E. Cheese. (Inst...

Apple Developer: Analytics in App Store Connect receives its biggest update since its launch, including a refreshed user experience that makes it easier to measure the performance of your apps and games. There’s a lot that’s new, but all the data is still collected wit...