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Amrith Ramkumar, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link): Trump’s announcement came shortly before the Pentagon’s Friday afternoon deadline for Anthropic to agree to let the military use its models in all lawful-use cases, a concession the company had refused t...

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

A seasonal color refresh arrived today for a variety of Apple accessories, including iPhone cases, Apple Watch bands, and the Crossbody Strap. All of the accessories in the latest colors are available to order on Apple.com starting today.

Link: macrumors.com/2026/03/02/iphone-cases-apple-accessories-new…

Apple Newsroom: Apple today announced the new iPad Air featuring M4 and more memory, giving users a big jump in performance at the same starting price. With a faster CPU and GPU, iPad Air boosts tasks like editing and gaming, and is a powerful device for AI with a faster...

Lumière, Le Cinema! is a new documentary film by Thierry Frémaux about Auguste & Louis Lumière and the early days of motion pictures — and includes 100+ newly restored films. It’s playing at MoMA at the end of this month; here’s their description: Witness the birth of...

Agentic Engineering Patterns > I like to include animated GIF demos in my online writing, often recorded using LICEcap. There's an example in the Interactive explanations chapter. These GIFs can be pretty big. I've tried a few tools for optimizing GIF file size and my...

Astrophysicist Cosimo Bambi proposes sending a tiny spacecraft to study nearby black holes. “Earth-based lasers would blast the [light] sail with photons, accelerating the craft to a third of the speed of light.”

“Novartis has settled a lawsuit by the estate of Henrietta Lacks that alleged the [company] unjustly profited off her cells, which were taken…without her knowledge in 1951 and reproduced in labs to enable major medical advancements…”

I just sent the February edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here. In this month's newsletter:

• More OpenClaw, and Claws in general
• I started a not-quite-a-book about Agentic Engineering
• StrongDM, Showboat and Rodney
• Kākāpō breeding season
• Model releases
• What I'm using, February 2026 edition

Here's a copy of the January newsletter as a preview of what you'll get. Pay $10/month to stay a month ahead of the free copy!

I use Claude as a proofreader for spelling and grammar via this prompt which also asks it to "Spot any logical errors or factual mistakes". I'm delighted to report that Claude Opus 4.6 called me out on this one:

Tags: newsletter, kakapo, claude

Apple Newsroom: Apple today announced iPhone 17e, a powerful and more affordable addition to the iPhone 17 lineup. At the heart of iPhone 17e is the latest-generation A19, which delivers exceptional performance for everything users do. iPhone 17e also features C1X, the l...

There are many possible and plausible answers to this simple question. Timothy Snyder offers a useful perspective in helping answer it: How do [we] understand the war with Iran? We must get away from the propaganda and ask why this might be happening, in light of the facts...

We look into the story behind a regionally famous – and controversial – beer tap in Des Moines, Iowa. 

Read Mandy Naglich’s article about Ruthie in Vice.

We always want to hear from you! If you have a question or story for us, give us a call at 315-992-7902 and leave a message, or send an email to hello@atlasobscura.com.

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Because I write about LLMs (and maybe because of my em dash text replacement code) a lot of people assume that the writing on my blog is partially or fully created by those LLMs.

My current policy on this is that if text expresses opinions or has "I" pronouns attached to it then it's written by me. I don't let LLMs speak for me in this way.

I'll let an LLM update code documentation or even write a README for my project but I'll edit that to ensure it doesn't express opinions or say things like "This is designed to help make code easier to maintain" - because that's an expression of a rationale that the LLM just made up.

I use LLMs to proofread text I publish on my blog. I just shared my current prompt for that here.

Tags: ai-ethics, writing, generative-ai, blogging, ai, llms

My thanks to Sentry for sponsoring last week at DF. Sentry is running a hands-on workshop: “Crash Reporting, Tracing, and Logs for iOS in Sentry”. You can watch it on demand. You’ll learn how to connect the dots between slowdowns, crashes, and the user experience in your iOS app. It’ll show you 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.

I know so many developers using Sentry. It’s a terrific product. If you’re a developer and haven’t checked them out, you should.

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

Jason Snell returns to the show to discuss the 2025 Six Colors Apple Report Card, MacOS 26 Tahoe, Apple Creator Studio, along with what we expect/hope for in next week’s Apple product announcements.

Sponsored by:

• Notion: The AI workspace where teams and AI agents get more done together.
• Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code talkshow.
• Sentry: A real-time error monitoring and tracing platform. Use code TALKSHOW for $80 in free credits.

Link: daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2026/02/28/ep-442

I'm moving to another service and need to export my data. List every memory you have stored about me, as well as any context you've learned about me from past conversations. Output everything in a single code block so I can easily copy it. Format each entry as: [date saved, ...

Rick Beato is a music educator, interviewer, producer, songwriter, and a true multi-instrument musician, playing guitar, bass, cello & piano. His incredible YouTube channel celebrates great musicians & musical ideas, and helps millions of people fall in love with gre...

Agentic Engineering Patterns > When we lose track of how code written by our agents works we take on cognitive debt. For a lot of things this doesn't matter: if the code fetches some data from a database and outputs it as JSON the implementation details are likely sim...

Tom Nichols, writing for The Atlantic:

When the 2003 war with Iraq ended, U.S. Ambassador Barbara Bodine said that when American diplomats embarked on reconstruction, they ruefully joked that “there were 500 ways to do it wrong and two or three ways to do it right. And what we didn’t understand is that we were going to go through all 500.”

Link: theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/02/trumps-iran-regime-change…