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XKCD: Kite Incident. “I don’t know. Lemme look up a map of where the jet stream goes.”

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These prices — which I presume are a back-to-school season promotion — are even lower than those during the weeklong “Prime Day” earlier this month, and you don’t need to be a Prime subscriber to get them:

• The pretty-good base configuration (16 GB RAM, 256 GB storage) is just $800.
• The configuration with 16 GB RAM and 512 GB is $1,000, the normal price for the base model.
• You can splurge and get 24 GB RAM with 512 GB storage for just $1,200.

These are make-me-rich affiliate links, as is this link for AirPods Pro 2 for just $200, $50 off.

Link: amzn.to/4fdd0gN

Oooh, George Saunders’ next novel comes out in January. “Vigil transports us, careening, through the wild final evening of an epic, complicated life.”

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Last Sunday, I’ve been out photographing with Florian again. Photos here and here.

An article about The Quintessential Urban Design of ‘Sesame Street’ with a bunch of photos? This is extremely up my alley. One of the show’s big influences when it began was Jane Jacobs’ landmark book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which informed the set des...

Science Is Winning the Tour de France. Data, nutrition, equipment, and training are propelling riders to performances that best the dopers of yesteryear. “In other words, Armstrong on dope then would be an also-ran next to Pogačar today.”

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Sean Lyndersay, general manager of Edge at Microsoft: For decades, the way we’ve used browsers has remained linear: open a tab (or 20), search for something, read a page, repeat. It’s a model that’s worked well, but it hasn’t fundamentally changed. Until now. As AI begin...

Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch: Google on Monday announced an update to its Chrome web browser that will introduce AI-generated store reviews to U.S. shoppers with the aim of helping to determine the best places to make a purchase. The feature, which will be availab...

An analysis of every word that’s visible on NYC’s streets (from 18 years of Google Street View Data). “The data is astonishing; it feels like sifting through the city’s source code. For example, here’s all 111,290 matches for ‘pizza’, on a map.”

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I wrote about the new GLM-4.5 model family yesterday - new open weight (MIT licensed) models from Z.ai in China which their benchmarks claim score highly in coding even against models such as Claude Sonnet 4. The models are pretty big - the smaller GLM-4.5 Air model is still...

This beautiful beach made of sand and worn down coral is covered in the wreckage of tanks once used by the U.S. military for target practice. 
 

All this week, the Atlas Obscura Podcast is hitting the sand, and taking a tour of the world’s most unusual beaches. 

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The Ringer’s Bill Simmons and Wesley Morris drive 14 hours from Texas to Wyoming to rewatch Ang Lee’s 2005 masterpiece ‘Brokeback Mountain’ starring Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams, and Anne Hathaway.

Producers: Craig Horlbeck, Ronak Nair, and Chris Wohlers

Book your next business trip at holidayinn.com
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Emanuel Maiberg and Joseph Cox, reporting again for 404 Media: Despite Tea’s initial statement that “the incident involved a legacy data storage system containing information from over two years ago,” the second issue impacting a separate database is much more recent, af...

Season 4 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is going to feature an episode where all the characters are Muppetized (with puppets created by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop). I love this show.

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We’re rolling out new weekly rate limits for Claude Pro and Max in late August. We estimate they’ll apply to less than 5% of subscribers based on current usage. [...]

Some of the biggest Claude Code fans are running it continuously in the background, 24/7.

These uses are remarkable and we want to enable them. But a few outlying cases are very costly to support. For example, one user consumed tens of thousands in model usage on a $200 plan.

— Anthropic

Tags: anthropic, claude-code, llm-pricing, generative-ai, ai, llms

A list of the top 100 “most innovative, influential, and informative” podcasts of all time. The list includes 99% Invisible, The Big Dig, Code Switch, Heavyweight, In Our Time, Radiolab, Slow Burn, and You’re Wrong About.

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Meet Jackson Goldstone. He’s 6 years old, lives in British Columbia, and is already ripping it up on his bike. Here’s a video of him taking the long way around on his way to kindergarten: Wow, if he keeps riding and improving, I wonder how good this kid could be? Ok, I’m ...

Is starvation in Gaza really Israel’s fault? The facts are clear. “Israeli officials have, for months — indeed, since the start of the war — not only admitted to working to restrict the aid that makes its way to Gaza, but bragged about doing so.”

One of the best indie weather apps just got a major overhaul for 2025, and it’s worth checking out.

Hello Weather is well known for its simple, friendly design, but the new update rounds it out with more depth and customization.

You’ll get beautiful new visuals for wind, UV, future forecasts, and more, all powered by the finest data on Earth. With its excellent widgets, Watch app, and notifications, you’ll always stay up to date.

Hello Weather also respects your privacy, with no tracking or ads in sight. It’s a customer-focused app, made with care.

Download Hello Weather and start a 7-day free trial.

Link: helloweather.com/