The Atlas Obscura Podcast
• SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura
One of the many objects that went down with the ship during the sinking of the Titanic was a beautiful, jewel-encrusted edition of a poetry book called the “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.” The Rubaiyat was probably the most famous work of poetry in the English-speaking world at that time…which was somewhat unusual, as the book was written by a Persian mathematician 800 years before.
For more information about Omar Khayyam and the Rubaiyat, check out the books “Persian Presence in Victorian Poetry” by Taher-Kermani Reza, “The Wine of Wisdom: The Life, Poetry and Philosophy of Omar Khayyam” by Mehdi Aminrazavi, and the BBC documentary “The Genius of Omar Khayyam.”
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“The plot of this movie aged extremely well.” A remake of The Running Man directed by Edgar Wright? Yes, please. Here’s the trailer.
Living Colour recently visited the NPR Music office for a Tiny Desk Concert. Cult of Personality might be an all-time top 10 song for me — I vividly remember their 1989 appearance on Saturday Night Live.1 They still got it!
Tags: Living Colour · music · Saturday Night Live · Tiny Desk Concerts · video
One of the best examples of LLM developer tooling I've heard is from a team that supports software from the 80s-90s. Their only source of documentation is video interviews with retired employees. So they feed them into transcription software and get summarized searchable notes out the other end.
— Kevin Webb, a couple million lines of Smalltalk
Tags: small, ai-assisted-programming, ai, llms
Sometimes a service with a free plan will decide to stop supporting it. I understand why this happens, but I'm often disappointed at the treatment of existing user's data. It's easy to imagine users forgetting about their old accounts, missing the relevant emails and then discovering too late that their data is gone.
Inspired by today's news about PlanetScale PostgreSQL I signed into PlanetScale and found I had a long-forgotten trial account there with a three-year-old database on their free tier. That free tier was retired in March 2024.
Here's the screen that greeted me in their control panel:
What a great way to handle retiring a free plan! My data is still there, and I have the option to spin up a database for 24 hours to help get it back out again.
“When I was in high school, my friends and I had a game we used to play at the mall: we would go into the Apple store and try to make it to the back wall of the store, touch it, and exit out the front without an Apple staff person talking to us.”
Citation Needed
• Molly White
Trump’s crypto empire attracts more foreign millions, the FHFA pushes crypto on mortgage lenders, and Mamdani’s mayoral primary win makes billionaires sweat
To misuse a woodworking metaphor, I think we’re experiencing a shift from hand tools to power tools.
You still need someone who understands the basics to get the good results out of the tools, but they’re not chiseling fine furniture by hand anymore, they’re throwing heaps of wood through the tablesaw instead. More productive, but more likely to lose a finger if you’re not careful.
— mrmincent, Hacker News comment on Claude Code
Tags: ai-assisted-programming, claude-code, hacker-news, generative-ai, ai, llms
The Internet Archive estimates the Wayback Machine will hit a lifetime total of 1 trillion archived web pages later this year in October.
Daring Fireball
• Daring Fireball Department of Commerce
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