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The Death of the Basic American Car. “Today, there are so many wealthy people who can afford luxury cars that it simply isn’t that profitable for companies to produce cars for the bottom 40 percent of Americans by income.”

An AI bot created by Andon Labs is running its own retail store in San Francisco. The bot has hired a pair of human employees and “has a corporate card, a phone number, email, internet access and eyes through security cameras”.

“Gerontocracy has always thrived in undemocratic places — Communist people’s republics, Gulf monarchies — where only death could pry power from the ruling elders. American gerontocracy is exceptional for being freely elected.”

John Calhoun, on Bluesky (and also a new blog): I re-made Glider some years back for MacOS/iOS. It broke at some point (perhaps an Apple change for Retina displays?) so I pulled it from the App Store. (Claude looked at the code — found some minor coordinate issues. Than...

An interactive explainer on the physics of GPS. “The answer is in some ways simpler than you’d expect, and in other ways more complex. GPS is fundamentally a translation tool: it converts time into distance.”

This review may contain spoilers. Tap or click to view.

This is very well made and played. But in the end there was just no real story. I was close to switching this off after the first hour, during which I thought "I don't think I need a film about people in the US arguing over Covid policy and BLM stuff". It picks up speed after this, and you think "now here's what it's about", but then to be disappointed - because: no, it's not (and this happens multiple times). Nothing ever seems to really matter. Except - seemingly - the opening of that data centre, which is the second to last scene. But then, the film's too long IMHO. I don't know. But, yeah, it looks great and has fabulous acting.

JD Vance says progress was made in discussions with Iran at the weekend and the ball is in Tehran's court. But he also accuses the Iranians of "economic terrorism" over the partial closure of the Strait of Hormuz. He was speaking hours after the US began enforcing its own na...

Have you ever rewatched a movie on cocaine, Nick? Live from San Francisco, Bill, Chris, Mal, and Van record the pod of the century after revisiting Paul Verhoeven's 1992 erotic thriller ‘Basic Instinct’ starring Michael Douglas, Sharon Stone, Jeanne Tripplehorn, and George Dzundza. Producers: Craig Horlbeck, Chia Hao Tat, Eduardo Ocampo, and Matt Pevic Try ZipRecruiter FOR FREE at https://ziprecruiter.com/REWATCHABLES Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Playlist: The first pitch, he said, goes back to 2008, and it was already pretty radical by Bond standards. “I had pitched in 2008 the idea to Barbara Broccoli of a parallel franchise,” Soderbergh said. “Set in the ’60s, R-rated, violent, sexy. Fictional backstory to...

Federico Viticci: Today, I’m very happy to introduce Apple Frames 4, a major update to my shortcut for framing screenshots taken on Apple devices with official Apple product bezels. Apple Frames 4 is a complete rethinking of the shortcut that is noticeably faster, update...

Welp, turns out I wrote an entire post about the Control-scroll zoom-in-and-out feature all the way back in 2006, when it was a new feature in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Somehow, between 2006 and last year, I completely forgot about it. I don’t think it helps that the settings moved from the Mouse panel to the Zoom sub-section inside Accessibility. But I’ve used it so much in the last year, since rediscovering it, that I can’t believe I ever forgot it. Anyway, after I posted about it earlier today, a few people told me they could swear they learned about it here, long ago. They were right!

Link: daringfireball.net/2006/09/zoom_using_scroll_wheel

Media companies are increasingly blocking the Internet Archive from archiving their material (but at the same time using the site to gather data for their stories).

Every AI agent demo looks magical, but most hit a wall in enterprise deployment. It’s not model quality or latency. It’s authorization. Authentication proves an agent’s identity. Authorization defines its blast radius.

The winners in enterprise AI won’t have the most features. They’ll be the ones enterprises can safely trust. Learn how WorkOS FGA scopes that blast radius with resource-level permissions.

Read the deep dive →

Link: workos.com/blog/agents-need-authorization-not-just…

Tuomas Hämäläinen, on Mastodon:

We’re at Mac OS 26.4 and seems like the accessibility toggles should be way more considered than they are.

Here’s a comparison between “Reduce transparency” off and on. How does it make sense that turning this setting on actually reduces contrast between the background and the UI elements? Buttons and sidebars get this grey cast, which makes them almost blend in with the drop shadows.

Tahoe looks like Huawei’s rushed rip-off of what Tahoe should be.

Link: mastodon.social/@tuomas_h/116397694769738857

I’m so glad Steven Soderbergh unretired from filmmaking. His newest film, The Christophers, looks amazing. It stars Ian McKellen as a famous artist and Michaela Coel as his assistant — but of course there’s more to it. Reviewer David Sims calls it both a heist movie and “a meditation on the relationship between art and commerce”. I hope this one actually comes to Vermont so I can see it in the theater.

Coel and McKellen both have such great faces, don’t you think?

Tags: Ian McKellen · Michaela Coel · movies · The Christophers · trailers · video

The TL;DR is that Google engineering appears to have the same AI adoption footprint as John Deere, the tractor company. Most of the industry has the same internal adoption curve: 20% agentic power users, 20% outright refusers, 60% still using Cursor or equivalent chat tool. It turns out Google has this curve too. [...]

There has been an industry-wide hiring freeze for 18+ months, during which time nobody has been moving jobs. So there are no clued-in people coming in from the outside to tell Google how far behind they are, how utterly mediocre they have become as an eng org.

— Steve Yegge

Tags: steve-yegge, google, generative-ai, agentic-engineering, ai, llms

We love a slime mold around here. “From mottled gray bulbs that look like snow-covered trees to pink, coral-like tendrils, Webb chronicles a huge array of colors and shapes.”

A weekly-or-more deep dive on technical topics surrounding Mars exploration, from microbiology to rocket science and everywhere in between.