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CDC officials confirm that the US is two months away from measles being considered endemic for the first time since 2000. “Elimination status is lost if the virus spreads continuously for 12 months.”

My guest today is Demi Adejuyigbe. One of the things that makes Demi so special is how hard it is to summarize him in an intro like this, because he has so many talents and applies them in so many different ways. He is a standup comedian, with a brand new one-hour special ou...

Fantastic and useful little design touch on this website that sells lighting (toggle the switch in the upper right corner).

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The Saudification of America Is Under Way. “Jamal Khashoggi’s plight and murder was a warning sign for the US, of the impending loss of freedom and censorship that would sweep the country.”

Cloudflare's network began experiencing significant failures to deliver core network traffic [...] triggered by a change to one of our database systems' permissions which caused the database to output multiple entries into a “feature file” used by our Bot Management system. That feature file, in turn, doubled in size. The larger-than-expected feature file was then propagated to all the machines that make up our network. [...] The software had a limit on the size of the feature file that was below its doubled size. That caused the software to fail.

— Matthew Prince, Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025

Tags: scaling, postmortem, cloudflare

In 1905, a Bulgarian named Stamen Grigorov made a discovery. Inspired by a wave of researchers studying the secret to long life, he decided to put under the microscope a food that he ate daily: yogurt. Today, the Bulgarian bacteria he found is memorialized in a one-of-a-kind museum in his hometown. 

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Special guest Dan Frommer returns to the show. Topics include the indie media business, the iPhone Pocket, the iPhone Air (including rumors about the second generation model), AI “personalities”, and five years of Apple Silicon Macs. Also, six years of Dan’s site, The New Consumer.

Sponsored by:

• Factor: Healthy eating, made easy. Get 50% off your first box, plus free breakfast for 1 year, with code talkshow50off.
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Link: daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2025/11/18/ep-434

Jonathan V. Last, writing for The Bulwark: The president of the United States gave a speech yesterday before a group of McDonald’s corporate workers and franchise owners. I’m going to quote a few sections of his remarks at great length, because if you have not listened t...

llm-gemini 0.27

New release of my LLM plugin for Google's Gemini models:

• Support for nested schemas in Pydantic, thanks Bill Pugh. #107
• Now tests against Python 3.14.
• Support for YouTube URLs as attachments and the media_resolution option. Thanks, Duane Milne. #112
• New model: gemini-3-pro-preview. #113

The YouTube URL feature is particularly neat, taking advantage of this API feature. I used it against the Google Antigravity launch video:

llm -m gemini-3-pro-preview \
 -a 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTOVIGsqCuY' \
 'Summary, with detailed notes about what this thing is and how it differs from regular VS Code, then a complete detailed transcript with timestamps'

Here's the result. A spot-check of the timestamps against points in the video shows them to be exactly right.

Tags: projects, youtube, ai, generative-ai, llms, llm, gemini

Dark chocolate is very serious business. That’s why this ad for Bournville dark chocolate, which takes aim at dark chocolate snobbery, is so funny.

This one is so intense. It comes with a list of side effects.

Mine comes with a therapist.

To the uneducated palette, this tastes like burnt tire.

This one captures bitterness, astringency, and resentfulness. The taste is so grown up.

Oh, mine’s massively grown up.

This is only available under the counter of a pet store with no address.

This sugar was used by the Aztecs as currency.

Some believe this one’s haunted.

Mine’s flammable.

Tags: advertising · Bournville · chocolate · food · video

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Edward O. Wilson in 2009: “The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”

Inspired by this conversation on Hacker News I decided to upgrade MacWhisper to try out NVIDIA Parakeet and the new Automatic Speaker Recognition feature. It appears to work really well! Here's the result against this 39.7MB m4a file from my Gemini 3 Pro write-up this morning: You can export the transcript with both timestamps and speaker names using the Share -> Segments > .json menu item: Here's the resulting JSON. Tags: whisper, nvidia, ai, speech-to-text, macwhisper

The Strange Afterlife of Hilma af Klint, Painting’s Posthumous Star. “As af Klint’s fame has grown, so have the questions — about what she believed, whom she worked with, and who should be allowed to speak in her name.”

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Google Antigravity Google's other major release today to accompany Gemini 3 Pro. At first glance Antigravity is yet another VS Code fork Cursor clone - it's a desktop application you install that then signs in to your Google account and provides an IDE for agentic coding aga...

The Fascinating History of Tarot Card Decks: From the Renaissance to the Modern Day. The V&A does an unboxing of a half dozen tarot card decks from the last 500 years.

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President Donald Trump, today in the Oval Office alongside his “very good friend” Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, after ABC News reporter Mary Bruce had the temerity to pose a question regarding Mohammed having ordered the brutal murder of Washington Post columnist J...

In an interview lasting for more than an hour, classicist Mary Beard shares her knowledge & experience about how the picture of Rome we might have in our heads, inherited from Hollywood movies like Gladiator, is incomplete (and just plain wrong in some cases) and what ...

Three years ago, we were impressed that a machine could write a poem about otters. Less than 1,000 days later, I am debating statistical methodology with an agent that built its own research environment. The era of the chatbot is turning into the era of the digital coworker. To be very clear, Gemini 3 isn’t perfect, and it still needs a manager who can guide and check it. But it suggests that “human in the loop” is evolving from “human who fixes AI mistakes” to “human who directs AI work.” And that may be the biggest change since the release of ChatGPT.

— Ethan Mollick, Three Years from GPT-3 to Gemini 3

Tags: gemini, ethan-mollick, generative-ai, chatgpt, ai, llms, ai-agents

Raccoons Are Showing Early Signs of Domestication. “City-dwelling raccoons seem to be evolving a shorter snout — a telltale feature of our pets and other domesticated animals.”

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Google released Gemini 3 Pro today. Here's the announcement from Sundar Pichai, Demis Hassabis, and Koray Kavukcuoglu, their developer blog announcement from Logan Kilpatrick, the Gemini 3 Pro Model Card, and their collection of 11 more articles. It's a big release! I had a ...