“If measles-mumps-rubella vaccination rates decline 1% annually for the next five years, associated medical and societal costs could reach $1.5 billion.” (That 1% is a conservative estimate “given current policy and coverage trajectory”.)
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
Another Steve Jobs Quote on Lower-Priced Macs
technologizer.com/2008/10/22/the-case-for-a-mac-netbook/index.html
Steve Jobs, on Apple’s quarterly results call back in October 2008:
There are some customers which we choose not to serve. We don’t
know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk, and
our DNA will not let us ship that.
Harry McCracken, writing at the time:...
Bazookasaurus
05.03.2026
04.03.2026
Agentic manual testing
Agentic Engineering Patterns >
The defining characteristic of a coding agent is that it can execute the code that it writes. This is what makes coding agents so much more useful than LLMs that simply spit out code without any way to verify it.
Never assume that code g...
The Atlas Obscura Podcast
• SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura
The Grave of XYZ (Classic)
We go to Deep River, Connecticut – where the story of a botched bank robbery more than 100 years ago has taken on a life of its own as an urban legend. MORE: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-grave-of-xyz-deep-river-connecticut
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Clinejection — Compromising Cline's Production Releases just by Prompting an Issue Triager
Clinejection — Compromising Cline's Production Releases just by Prompting an Issue Triager
Adnan Khan describes a devious attack chain against the Cline GitHub repository, which started with a prompt injection attack in the title of an issue opened against the repo.
Cline we...
Director Rian Johnson (Knives Out, Poker Face) wrote the...
Director Rian Johnson (Knives Out, Poker Face) wrote the review of the Thursday crossword puzzle for the NY Times today. “I love a good Thursday. The baffling special graphics, the wait-that-can’t-be-right puzzlement and that glorious ah-ha moment…”
Introducing GPT‑5.4
Introducing GPT‑5.4
Two new API models: gpt-5.4 and gpt-5.4-pro, also available in ChatGPT and Codex CLI. August 31st 2025 knowledge cutoff, 1 million token context window. Priced slightly higher than the GPT-5.2 family with a bump in price for both models if you go above 27...
681: The Price of Your Nightmares
Pre-show: The best (but slowest) website on the internet
Million Dollar Homepage
2013 BMW M5 (PDF)
2014 Honda Accord (PDF)
M4 iPad Air
iPhone 17e
New displays (‼️)
Studio Display 2
A19 per MacRumors
Some excellent throwback snark from Jack Wellborn
Studio Displ...
Earth’s gravity is lumpy . “The gravity in...
Earth’s gravity is lumpy. “The gravity in East Antarctica is measurably weaker than anywhere else on the planet.”
Big Tuskers
Oh wow, I love these photographs of “big tusker” elephants by Johan Siggesson.
I didn’t even know big tuskers were a thing — and they may not be for much longer:
The term “Big Tusker” refers to an elephant with tusks so large they scrape the floor. Unfortunately, the o...
This is kind of amazing: World Monitor is a real-time...
This is kind of amazing: World Monitor is a real-time global intelligence dashboard. Includes military activity, climate anomalies, live webcam feeds in warzones, internet outages, active fires, and even the Pentagon Pizza Index.
Yes, let’s retire the restaurant monologue ....
Yes, let’s retire the restaurant monologue. “The urge to direct diners through every bite of a meal runs counter to what I love about dining out, one of just a few cornerstones of American life that have not yet been optimized into oblivion.”
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
Steve Jobs in 2007, on Apple’s Pursuit of PC Market Share: ‘We Just Can’t Ship Junk’
In August 2007, Apple held a Mac event in the Infinite Loop Town Hall auditorium. New iMacs, iLife ’08 (major updates to iPhoto and iMovie), and iWork ’08 (including the debut of Numbers 1.0). Back then, believe it or not, at the end of these Town Hall events, Apple executiv...
From ProPublica, a database of financial disclosures...
From ProPublica, a database of financial disclosures from the Trump regime’s political appointees. “Use this database to explore potential conflicts of interest for President Donald Trump and his team.”
Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies on HyperCard
After posting the video on the history of HyperCard the other day, I went down a bit of a HyperCard rabbit hole on the Internet Archive. There are a ton of HyperCard programs, manual & packaging scans, and other resources available on IA; among them:
The Manhole, from...
Can coding agents relicense open source through a “clean room” implementation of code?
Over the past few months it's become clear that coding agents are extraordinarily good at building a weird version of a "clean room" implementation of code.
The most famous version of this pattern is when Compaq created a clean-room clone of the IBM BIOS back in 1982. They h...
Web game: list as many animals as you can in 1 minute...
Web game: list as many animals as you can in 1 minute (but you get more time with correct guesses).