The New School Cancelled Their Class on Soccer and World Politics. We Are Going To Teach it Anyway. Enrollment is now open; the class will deal with questions like “Which regimes are using this tournament to launder their reputations?”
SETI might be missing alien signals because...
SETI might be missing alien signals because “stellar ‘space weather’ may blur ultra-narrow radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations before they leave their home star systems”. SETI usually looks for “extremely sharp frequency spikes”.
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
The Verge Interviews Tim Sweeney After Victory in ‘Epic v. Google’
theverge.com/23996474/epic-tim-sweeney-interview-win-google-antitrust-lawsuit-district-court
The Verge:
Sean Hollister: What would you say the differences are between
the Apple and Google cases?
Tim Sweeney: I would say Apple was ice and Google was fire.
The thing with Apple is all of their antitrust trickery is
internal to the company. They use their store, t...
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
Tim Sweeney Signed Away His Right to Criticize Google’s Play Store Until 2032
theverge.com/news/889595/tim-sweeney-signed-away-his-right-to-criticize-google-until-2032
Sean Hollister, writing for The Verge:
But Google has finally muzzled Tim Sweeney. It’s right there in a
binding term sheet for his settlement with Google.
On March 3rd, he not only signed away Epic’s rights to sue and
disparage the company over anything covered in the ...
Anthropic and the Pentagon
This piece by Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders is the most thoughtful and grounded coverage I've seen of the recent and ongoing Pentagon/OpenAI/Anthropic contract situation.
AI models are increasingly commodified. The top-tier offerings have about the same performance, and there is little to differentiate one from the other. The latest models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, in particular, tend to leapfrog each other with minor hops forward in quality every few months. [...]
In this sort of market, branding matters a lot. Anthropic and its CEO, Dario Amodei, are positioning themselves as the moral and trustworthy AI provider. That has market value for both consumers and enterprise clients.
Tags: bruce-schneier, ai, openai, generative-ai, llms, anthropic, ai-ethics
“For the Colonel, It Was Finger-Lickin’ Bad”
Here’s a gem from the archive of the NY Times. One day in September 1976, NY Times food critic Mimi Sheraton and Colonel Harland Sanders stopped into a Manhattan Kentucky Fried Chicken. The Colonel, then estranged from the company he founded, strolled into the kitchen afte...
The Met Introduces High-Definition 3D Scans of Dozens of...
Radiolab
• WNYC Studios
Snail Sex Tape
In this episode, we consider a creature we often don’t think much about—the snail. And not just snails, but their sex lives. Which, as it turns out, is epic. There is persuasion and subterfuge, spaghetti penises and co-copulation. And this very surprising habit—erm kink—of m...
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
The MacBook Neo’s Price, Looking to the Past and Future
Ethan W. Anderson, on Twitter/X:
I’ve plotted the most expensive McDonald’s burger and the least expensive MacBook over time. This analysis projects that the most expensive burger will be more expensive than the cheapest laptop as soon as 2081.
Looking to the past, if you plug $599 in today’s money into an inflation calculator, that’s just ~$190 in 1984, the year the original Macintosh launched with a price of $2,495 (which works out to ~$7,800 today.)
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
‘Never the Same Game Twice’
John McCoy:
From around 1970 to 1980, the Salem, Massachusetts-based Parker
Brothers (now a brand of Hasbro) published games whose innovative
and fanciful designs drew inspiration from Pop Art, Op Art, and
Madison Avenue advertising. They had boxes, boards, and component...
“If measles-mumps-rubella vaccination rates decline...
“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...