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A new book by Rebecca Solnit came out yesterday; it’s called The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change (Amazon). The synopsis: Rebecca Solnit offers a thrilling account of the sheer breadth and scale of social, political, scientific, and cultural chan...

TIL about babysitting co-ops. “The premise is simple: Families in the co-op provide each other with free childcare. A point system…ensures that everyone contributes their fair share. Every half an hour is worth one point…”

Not sure if this page was there yesterday, but the main “Displays” page at Apple’s website is a spec-by-spec comparison between the regular and XDR models. Nice.

Link: apple.com/displays/

Agentic Engineering Patterns > There are some behaviors that are anti-patterns in our weird new world of agentic engineering. Inflicting unreviewed code on collaborators This anti-pattern is common and deeply frustrating. Don't file pull requests with code you haven't...

Hello, good afternoon! As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I have a bunch of new stuff for KDO in the pipeline. I’ve been focused on backend infrastructure recently to make my life (hopefully) easier and have gotten that to a place of “useful enough to test out to find all the b...

Academy Museum of Motion Pictures Acquires Original Disney Adult. “There wouldn’t be a Disney as we know it without this guy, a grown man who has watched Tinker Bell And The Great Fairy Rescue more than 90 times.”

TIL about burping your house, aka lüften (in Germany), aka opening up the windows in your house daily to air it out, even in winter.

Juli Clover, at MacRumors, notes that neither the new Studio Display nor the Studio Display XDR are compatible with Intel-based Macs. (I’m curious why.) Also, in a separate report, she notes that Macs with any M1 chip, or the base M2 or M3, are only able to drive the Studio ...

I'm behind on writing about Qwen 3.5, a truly remarkable family of open weight models released by Alibaba's Qwen team over the past few weeks. I'm hoping that the 3.5 family doesn't turn out to be Qwen's swan song, seeing as that team has had some very high profile departure...

The Library of Congress houses an online collection of 48 color photographs of Rome taken in the 1890s. The prints were created using the photochrom process: The prints look deceptively like color photographs. But when viewed with a magnifying glass the small dots that ...

Steve Jobs famously said that computers are a bicycle for the mind. What does that make LLMs? An e-bike for the mind? A car for the mind? A jet plane for the mind?

Jason Snell, Six Colors:

Here’s the backstory: With every new generation of Apple’s Mac-series processors, I’ve gotten the impression from Apple execs that they’ve been a little frustrated with the perception that their “lesser” efficiency cores were weak sauce. I’ve lost count of the number of briefings and conversations I’ve had where they’ve had to go out of their way to point out that, actually, the lesser cores on an M-series chip are quite fast on their own, in addition to being very good at saving power!

Clearly they’ve had enough of that, so they’re changing how those cores are marketed to emphasize their performance, rather than their efficiency.

Link: sixcolors.com/post/2026/03/apple-gives-in-to-temptation-and…

The Dutch city of Utrecht is built around an iconic canal lined with historic homes. But for the fish of the city, the view isn’t quite so picturesque. Each spring, migrating fish get trapped in the mazelike waterways of the city. Ecologist Mark van Heukelum came up with an innovative idea to help them out – a fish doorbell.

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Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I'd been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6 - Anthropic's hybrid reasoning model that had been released three weeks earlier! It seems that I'll have to revise my opinions about "generative AI" one of these days. What a joy it is to learn not only that my conjecture has a nice solution but also to celebrate this dramatic advance in automatic deduction and creative problem solving.

— Donald Knuth, Claude's Cycles

Tags: november-2025-inflection, claude, generative-ai, ai, llms

Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite Google's latest model is an update to their inexpensive Flash-Lite family. At $0.25/million tokens of input and $1.5/million output this is 1/8th the price of Gemini 3.1 Pro. It supports four different thinking levels, so I had it output four different pelicans: minimal low medium high Tags: google, ai, generative-ai, llms, llm, gemini, llm-pricing, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, llm-release

LLMs are getting pretty good at unmasking pseudonymous users — their success rate is “far greater” than humans alone can manage.

Apple Newsroom: Apple today announced a new family of displays engineered to pair beautifully with Mac and meet the needs of everyone, from everyday users to the world’s top pros. The new Studio Display features a 12MP Center Stage camera, now with improved image quality...

“Imagine what it was like for women in colonial North America. Life was different depending on where you lived, your background, and how much money you had.”

Apple Newsroom: MacBook Air now comes standard with double the starting storage at 512GB with faster SSD technology, and is configurable up to 4TB, so customers can keep their most important work on hand. Apple’s N1 wireless chip delivers Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 for seam...