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Dylan is joined by Marisa Scheinfeld, a photographer who has dedicated years to exploring the lost and abandoned properties of the Borscht Belt: a stretch of hundreds of hotels, resorts and summer camps where Jewish Americans would go to escape. Check out more of Marisa’s work here, including her book, The Borscht Belt: Revisiting the Remains of America’s Jewish Vacation Land.

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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Google API Keys Weren't Secrets. But then Gemini Changed the Rules. Yikes! It turns out Gemini and Google Maps (and other services) share the same API keys... but Google Maps API keys are designed to be public, since they are embedded directly in web pages. Gemini API keys c...

If people are only using this a couple of times a week at most, and can’t think of anything to do with it on the average day, it hasn’t changed their life. OpenAI itself admits the problem, talking about a ‘capability gap’ between what the models can do and what people do with them, which seems to me like a way to avoid saying that you don’t have clear product-market fit.

Hence, OpenAI’s ad project is partly just about covering the cost of serving the 90% or more of users who don’t pay (and capturing an early lead with advertisers and early learning in how this might work), but more strategically, it’s also about making it possible to give those users the latest and most powerful (i.e. expensive) models, in the hope that this will deepen their engagement.

— Benedict Evans, How will OpenAI compete?

Tags: openai, chatgpt, benedict-evans, ai

When re-hanging signage, “Mind your P’s and Q’s” ought to be “Mind your H’s and S’s”.

Link: inconspicuous.info/p/h-bomb-a-frank-lloyd-wright…

Terry Godier, in a thoughtful essay on the design of RSS feed readers: There’s a particular kind of guilt that visits me when I open my feed reader after a few days away. It’s not the guilt of having done something wrong, exactly. It’s more like the feeling of walking in...

Emily Glazer, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:

The billionaire said he met with Epstein starting in 2011, years after Epstein had pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting a minor for prostitution. Gates said he was aware of some “18-month thing” that had limited Epstein’s travel but said he didn’t properly check his background. Gates said he continued meeting with Epstein even after his then-wife Melinda French Gates expressed concerns in 2013.

“Knowing what I know now makes it, you know, a hundred times worse in terms of not only his crimes in the past, but now it’s clear there was ongoing bad behavior,” Gates told staff. Speaking of his ex-wife, he added: “To give her credit, she was always kind of skeptical about the Epstein thing.”

“Kind of” is doing a lot of work there.

Link: wsj.com/articles/bill-gates-apologizes-to-foundation-staff…

Greg Knauss: People will argue that speaking English to LLMs is just another level of abstraction away from the physics of how the machine actually works. And while that’s technically true — the worst kind of true — it also misses the point. Industrialization fundamental...

Adam Engst returns to the show to talk, in detail, about certain of the UI changes in iOS 26 and Apple’s version 26 OSes overall. In particular, the new Unified view in the Phone app, and the Filter pop-up menu in both the Phone and Messages apps. Also: a shoutout to Balloon Help.

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Link: daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2026/02/25/ep-441

“A collection of images of trees at Dollar Tree store locations across the United States.”

tldraw issue: Move tests to closed source repo It's become very apparent over the past few months that a comprehensive test suite is enough to build a completely fresh implementation of any open source library from scratch, potentially in a different language. This has worry...

Ben Schoon, writing for 9to5 Google: When activated, Privacy Display changes how the pixels in your display emit light, making it harder or near-impossible to view the display at an off-angle. At its default setting, it definitely works, but the contents of the display a...

Physicist Sean Carroll leads off this video with this line:

I like to say that Einstein is, if anything, underrated as a physicist, which is hard to imagine given how highly he is rated.

And then leads us through a history of modern physics and quantum mechanics that, Einstein and Newton aside, is much more collaborative than you often hear about.

This idea that there are many people contributing and many different parts of the pieces need to put together is actually much more characteristic of how physics is usually done than the single person inventing everything all by themselves.

Tags: Albert Einstein · physics · science · Sean Carroll · video

These synchronized martial arts robots are genuinely impressive.

They’re doing a new Pride and Prejudice adaptation. From the comments on the trailer: “this looks like a temu version of the 2005” and “The Darcy is not Darcying”.

Jayden Hoffman spent more than 4 months customizing this computer keyboard, replacing the letter keys with hand-painted logos (McDonald’s arch for M, Avengers for A, Xbox logo for X, Google for G, etc.)

Is This Waymo a Better Person Than You? “When the light turns yellow, this Waymo does not speed up. It does not calculate whether it could make it. It does not believe in ‘probably.’ It waits.”

Claude Code Remote Control New Claude Code feature dropped yesterday: you can now run a "remote control" session on your computer and then use the Claude Code for web interfaces (on web, iOS and native desktop app) to send prompts to that session. It's a little bit janky rig...

“The CyberTruck is 17 times more likely to have a fire fatality than a Ford Pinto”, a 70s automobile that put the “car” in “exploding car”.