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Beyond the Game: In Philadelphia, Ben Franklin’s Musical Invention

Dylan tries his hand at playing a “glass armonica,” a musical instrument invented by Benjamin Franklin. Its high-pitched, eerie sounds were rumored to cure all kinds of illnesses – or even, sometimes, cause them.

This episode is part of our ongoing coverage of the soccer world championship. In each episode, we take you beyond the stadium, and to a nearby wonder that’s off the beaten track.


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Quoting Julia Evans

[...] Instead, I picture a specific person and I just write for them. Often this person is "me, but 3 years ago" or a good friend.

— Julia Evans, write for 1 person

Tags: writing, julia-evans

The Rewatchables
Audio

‘The Hand That Rocks the Cradle’ With Bill Simmons, Chris Ryan, and Joanna Robinson

From Hell Month continues with Bill, Chris, and Joanna revisiting the nanny from hell in the 1992 thriller ‘The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,’ starring Rebecca De Mornay, Annabella Sciorra, and Matt McCoy.

Producers: Craig Horlbeck, Chia Hao Tat, Eduardo Ocampo, and Matt Pevic

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Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t

Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kappor take on the question of AI job losses through the lens of a profession that is uniquely suited to AI disruption - software engineering. In this essay, we argue that there is enough evide...

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Mapping SQLite result columns back to their source `table.column`

Research: Mapping SQLite result columns back to their source `table.column` It would be neat if arbitrary SQL queries in Datasette could be rendered with additional information based on which columns from which tables were included in the results. To build that, we w...

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Publishing WASM wheels to PyPI for use with Pyodide

The Pyodide 314.0 release announcement (via Hacker News) includes news I've been looking forward to for a long time: You can now publish Python packages built for Pyodide (or any Python runtime compatible with the PyEmscripten platform defined in PEP 783) directly to PyPI a...

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luau-wasm 0.1a0

Release: luau-wasm 0.1a0

See Publishing WASM wheels to PyPI for use with Pyodide for details.

Tags: lua, webassembly, pyodide

Rick Beato Updates instantly via WebSub
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Strombo on interviewing Noel Gallagher #oasis #noelgallagher #shorts

Strombo on interviewing Noel  Gallagher #oasis #noelgallagher #shorts

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Trump’s Name (Set in the Wrong Font, of Course) Has Been Removed From the Kennedy Center

apple.news/ANLNtQOeuSkiJ35tzkYw9oA

Jonathan Edwards reporting for The Washington Post:

President Donald Trump’s name is off the Kennedy Center.

Crews at the performing arts venue started removing it from the front of the building around 3 a.m., several hours after the center missed a federal judge’s two-week deadline to do so. The judge had ruled that the decision by the center’s board of trustees to rename it was illegal.

A perfect metaphor for the work ahead of us.

Link: apple.news/ANLNtQOeuSkiJ35tzkYw9oA

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Apple’s Private Cloud Compute Is Severely Limited for Third-Party Developers

developer.apple.com/private-cloud-compute/

From Apple’s Developer site: To ensure getting started with a large cloud model is as accessible as possible, developers in the App Store Small Business Program with fewer than two million first time App Store downloads will be able to use Apple Foundation Models running...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

U.S. Government Directs Anthropic to Shut Down Fable 5 and Mythos 5 Models on National Security Grounds

anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access

Anthropic: The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. ...

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Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 Well this is nuts: The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, wheth...

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OpenAI WebRTC Audio Session, now with document context

OpenAI WebRTC Audio Session, now with document context

I built the first version of this tool in December 2024 to try out the then-new OpenAI WebRTC API for interacting with their realtime audio models.

Last month OpenAI introduced a brand new model to that API called GPT‑Realtime‑2, which they promoted as "our first voice model with GPT‑5‑class reasoning" - with a Sep 30, 2024 knowledge cut-off.

I've been waiting for that model to show up in the ChatGPT iPhone app but it still hasn't, so I revisited my old playground.

You can now pick the better model, and you can also paste in a big chunk of document context so you can have as audio conversation in your browser about whatever information you think would be useful to explore in a conversational way.

Screenshot of a web interface titled "OpenAI WebRTC Audio Session" with a gray status dot. Form fields: "OpenAI API Token" showing a masked password of dots, "Voice" dropdown set to "Coral", "Model" dropdown set to "gpt-realtime-2". A collapsible section labeled "▼ Document context (optional — paste text to talk about)" with bold instruction "Paste a document here before starting the session and the model will be able to discuss it with you" above a textarea containing a pasted Markdown document about whether DuckDB can run untrusted SQL as safely as Datasette runs SQLite. Below are a blue "Start Session" button and a gray disabled "Mute Mic" button, then a green success message "Session established successfully!" At the bottom, a dark panel headed "Last transcript" reads: "DuckDB can be made about as safe as SQLite for running untrusted SELECT queries, but only if you lock it down properly. Using read only true by itself is not enough, because SQL can still" (text cut off).

Tags: audio, tools, ai, openai, generative-ai, llms, multi-modal-output, webrtc

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

★ The Talk Show: Live From WWDC 2026

Recorded in front of a live audience at The California Theatre in San Jose on Tuesday 9 June 2026, special guests Joanna Stern and Nilay Patel join John Gruber to discuss Apple’s announcements at WWDC 2026. Immersive 3D video with spatial audio: Available exclusively in S...

xkcd.com Valid
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Plate Flip

It's great for exfoliating your skin, bones, houses, cities, landscape, etc.

kottke.org Valid
Text • Jason Kottke

The world’s first trillionaire is a killer . “A...

The world’s first trillionaire is a killer. “A year ago, Musk’s actions directly led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. He did it knowingly. And, worse — gleefully.”

kottke.org Valid
Text • Jason Kottke

Two competing (?) thoughts kept going through my head...

Two competing (?) thoughts kept going through my head while reading this: “Not even a celeb like Emily Ratajkowski can find a decent man to date” and “A celeb like Emily Ratajkowski especially can’t find a decent man to date”.

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Quoting Andrew Singleton

Jenny owns a crematorium. John’s propane company gives her a $20 billion investment in return for 5 percent of her operation. Jenny throws $10 billion into the incinerator, then pays John $10 billion to buy propane to burn that money to ashes. John reports that his AI investments have generated $10 billion in revenue this quarter and that he owns 5 percent of a $100 billion business. A reporter from Forbes is assigned to profile John and Jenny, and over the course of his research, he becomes embroiled in a passionate but confusing three-way love affair with them, which eventually turns into a polyamorous common-law marriage. His profile is glowing, but light on financial details.

— Andrew Singleton, AI Economics for Dummies

Tags: ai

Colossal Valid
Text • Christopher Jobson

‘Big Walk’ Is a New Video Game about … Walking and Talking

‘Big Walk’ Is a New Video Game about … Walking and TalkingThe antithesis of Fortnite or Grand Theft Auto.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article ‘Big Walk’ Is a New Video Game about … Walking and Talking appeared first on Colossal.

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

The WWDC 2026 Keynote and State of the Union on YouTube

youtube.com/watch?v=hF8swzNR1-o

Apple’s Developer app lets you download local copies of every session, including the State of the Union, except the keynote. Why this is I don’t know. But if you want a local copy, you can grab it from YouTube.

Speaking of the State of the Union, the full version runs just over an hour, but Apple cut together a 4.5-minute recap. If you haven’t watched the full thing you should at least watch that recap.

Link: youtube.com/watch?v=hF8swzNR1-o