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I gave a talk this weekend at Social Science FOO Camp in Mountain View. The event was a classic unconference format where anyone could present a talk without needing to propose it in advance. I grabbed a slot for a talk I titled "The State of LLMs, February 2026 edition", su...

This week Jason Snell published his annual Six Colors Apple Report Card for 2025. As I’ve done in the past — for the report-card years 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018 — I’m publishing my full remarks and grades here. On Snell’s report card, voters give per-category ...

Commenters in this thread shared a bunch of songs “where the drum beats are Morse code that also serve as a separate layer to the lyrics”.

What’s fun about school closing for the wicked blizzard in the Northeast today is last week was February break for Massachusetts schools, which means many kids are home for the the 6th school day in a row, and many will be home for closures tomorrow and beyond. All this to s...

Jim Vorel, writing just yesterday for Jezebel: It can be hard to know what exactly to call the substances that are now found coating many major candy bars such as Butterfinger, Baby Ruth, Almond Joy, Mr. Goodbar or Rolos. Food scientists refer to it as “compound chocolat...

Tear Gun by Taiwanese designer Yi-Fei Chen is a contraption that “collects and freezes actual tears to shoot them back at the person who caused the cry”.

Silvana Estrada is a singer, songwriter, and producer from Veracruz, Mexico. She won the Latin Grammy for Best New Artist in 2022, and she’s been nominated for three others, including for her song “Como Un Pájaro,” which is the song that we talked about for this episode. It’s from her second album, which came out in 2025, but she started writing the song several years before that. So we talked about all the different versions of this song, and a couple of versions of Silvana herself, that emerged throughout the process.

For more info, visit songexploder.net/silvana-estrada.

After writing a few days ago about the current brouhaha over the severe decline in the edibility of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and linking to Trader Joe’s shade-throwing description of their own, I of course had to try theirs. In the name of science, I bought both the milk and dark chocolate variants.

Verdict: Excellent. Both chocolates taste like chocolate, not candle wax, and the peanut butter is creamy and smooth — you know, like peanut butter. Not the sand-and-sawdust mix that Hershey fills Reese’s cups with now.

Link: mastodon.social/@gruber/116131665730352697

How far would you go to find the largest island in the largest lake on the largest island in the largest lake on the largest island in the largest lake in the United States?

This week, we’re bringing your stories of places that – for one reason you another – you can’t visit.    

Plus: We want to hear from you! What’s a place in your life that YOU can’t visit? Give us a call at 315-992-7902 and leave a message, or send an email to hello@atlasobscura.com.

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It’s also reasonable for people who entered technology in the last couple of decades because it was good job, or because they enjoyed coding to look at this moment with a real feeling of loss. That feeling of loss though can be hard to understand emotionally for people my age who entered tech because we were addicted to feeling of agency it gave us. The web was objectively awful as a technology, and genuinely amazing, and nobody got into it because programming in Perl was somehow aesthetically delightful.

— Kellan Elliott-McCrea, Code has always been the easy part

Tags: perl, generative-ai, kellan-elliott-mccrea, agentic-engineering, ai, llms, deep-blue

Agentic Engineering Patterns > Sometimes it's useful to have a coding agent give you a structured walkthrough of a codebase. Maybe it's existing code you need to get up to speed on, maybe it's your own code that you've forgotten the details of, or maybe you vibe code...

Learn how to connect the dots between slowdowns, crashes, and the user experience in your iOS app. This on-demand session covers how to:

• Set up Sentry to surface high-priority mobile issues without alert fatigue.
• Use Logs and Breadcrumbs to reconstruct what happened with a crash.
• Find what’s behind a performance bottleneck using Tracing.
• Monitor and reduce the size of your iOS app using Size Analysis.

Watch it here.

Link: sentry.io/resources/ios-workshop-jan-2026/?utm_source…

Jason Snell and Myke Hurley:

We discuss the results of the Six Colors Apple Report Card for 2025 in depth, with our added opinions on every category. Jason chooses to be a rascal, and Myke tries to give ten out of five.

Upgrade is always a good podcast, and their annual “Jason discusses this year’s Apple Report Card” episode is always one of my favorites. But when Jason got “rascally” regarding MacOS 26 Tahoe in this one, I wanted to reach out and strangle him.

Link: relay.fm/upgrade/604

Jason Snell: It’s time for our annual look back on Apple’s performance during the past year, as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple. The whole idea here is to get a broad ...

For a show on Hulu called Tell Me Lies, synth-pop band Chvrches covered Such Great Heights by The Postal Service. Lovely.

Tags: Chvrches · music · remix · The Postal Service · video

“I remember walking by a former drug dealer, a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent, a former mobster and a former preacher all sitting around a table together in the prison yard. Surely this was not happening anywhere else in America.”

I Am a 15-year-old Girl. Let Me Show You the Vile Misogyny That Confronts Me on Social Media Every Day. “I frequently feel objectified, dehumanised and disgusted by the hate towards women I see online.”

Apple Newsroom:

Apple today announced a significant expansion of factory operations in Houston, bringing the future production of Mac mini to the U.S. for the first time. The company will also expand advanced AI server manufacturing at the factory and provide hands-on training at its new Advanced Manufacturing Center beginning later this year. Altogether, Apple’s Houston operations will create thousands of jobs.

See also: Rolfe Winkler at The Wall Street Journal (gift link, News+ link): “Inside Apple’s Push to Build an All-American Chip”.

Link: apple.com/newsroom/2026/02/apple-accelerates-us…

Todd Bishop, writing at GeekWire: Paul Brainerd, who went on to coin the term “desktop publishing” and build Aldus Corporation’s PageMaker into one of the defining programs of the personal computer era, died Sunday at his home on Bainbridge Island, Wash., after living fo...