FeedCity

Last week both Google and Apple updated their maps to accommodate Trump changing the United States Geological Survey’s recognized name for Lake Ontario to “Lake America”. Just as with Trump’s fiat renaming of the Gulf of Mexico back in the first days of his 2.0 administratio...

School is back in session for many. So all week, we're bringing you stories from our archive about schools with a little something extra -- unusual traditions, ceremonies and customs. In this episode, producers Jonathan Carey and Michelle Cassidy have stories from the campuses of Gallaudet University and Cornell University .

If you have stories about schools with strange, unusual or wondrous traditions or ceremonies tell us about it. Give us a call at (315) 992-7902 and leave a message telling us your name and story. Or better, you can record a voice memo and give it to us at hello@atlasobscura.com.

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Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI

Apparently today is RSI day at OpenAI, for Recursive Self-Improvement - I think it's their new AGI. Both this piece and the new essay An Alien Mind (by Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki) talk about it, and this one doesn't even bother to expand the acronym.

Included are details on how OpenAI's own research team are using coding agents. Like pretty much everyone else 2026 has been the year that agentic engineering really took off at OpenAI, best illustrated by this chart:

I'm intrigued at what caused that significant acceleration in AI spend per researcher in late July - my best guess is that's when internal employees gained access to the model later released as GPT-6 Astra.

Tags: ai, openai, generative-ai, chatgpt, llms, coding-agents, november-2025-inflection, recursive-self-improvement

My comment on There's No Limit to How Bad Code Can Get — Lobste.rs. [In reply to a comment about burning it down to start from scratch when technical debt becomes overwhelming] In my experience it's so rare for that to work. You announce the old thing is irrecovera...

Zac Hall, writing for 9to5Mac on August 19: The new Meta AI desktop app is version 1.0 beta at launch and weighs just 16MB once installed. Based on initial inspection, it runs natively on Apple silicon Macs with macOS 15 or later, using an AppKit and SwiftUI shell with W...

In today's livestream I talk about what I've been up to these last two weeks and what is new with music tech.

🎉 THE BEATO FLAGSHIP SALE: The Beato Book Interactive + my rebuilt Ear Training Method, $59 for both → https://rickbeato.com/s/flagship-1

Ends Thursday, October 1st at 11:59pm ET

My thanks to WorkOS for once again sponsoring Daring Fireball. Give an agent an access token and it spreads: into the context window, into tool call logs, into notes it keeps between steps. Each copy works from anywhere, long after the fact.

Relay keeps the credential at WorkOS. Your agent names the user, WorkOS attaches that token, refreshes it, and releases it only to allowlisted hosts. A hijacked agent session is a live process you can kill.

Learn how it works at WorkOS’s blog.

Link: workos.com/blog/delegated-access-for-ai-agents?utm_source…

Matt Haughey: One case in point is the Honda Prologue EV. It’s a partnership between Honda and Chevrolet, where the Prologue is basically a Chevy Blazer EV with Honda badges, slight visual differences in the sheetmetal and interior, but all the underpinnings are straight...

A handful of Temu-style knockoffs of games like Flappy Bird, Snake (that’s the one where you round up border-crossing migrants), and, most notably, Tetris (the one where you “build a wall” to keep border-crossing migrants out) — the copyright to which is held by the notoriou...

Mark Gurman, in his weekend Power On column at Bloomberg (gift link): The Schiller exit is a bit more notable. Unlike Maestri, he still had a real job: The veteran executive ran the App Store and Apple Events. The App Store portion alone is no joke. It generates an estim...

How does this even happen? Who is this for? What possible purpose could by served by injecting a “We value your privacy” dickover into an RSS feed via iframes in the entry bodies?

Link: discourse.netnewswire.com/t/dickover-in-the-slashdot-rss…

In the wake of Nitter/XCancel’s demise, here’s a delightful new Safari extension from Zhenyi Tan (of And a Dinosaur fame): But sometimes people still post X content. Maybe you want to see Gruber roast Google Design. Maybe you want to see posts by Federico Viticci who rec...

The purpose of DNS is to spread scams

Terence Eden shares some daunting statistics in support of his take that "the Domain Name System's purpose seems to be a vector for criminals to run scams on people at a terrifyingly high rate".

On this Interisle report (via Andrew Campling), Terence says:

It says 85 million new registrations of gTLDs were made in 2025. Of those 8.5 million were added to blocklists by May 2025. It reckons that a 10% abuse rate is the likely floor for these numbers and it's probably closer to 20%. One in five newly registered domains with a gTLD are scams. That's a bloody crisis.

I had no idea. Apparently ICANN have been discussing this problem for years.

Tags: dns, scams, terence-eden

That’s not a movie for me. I really did not care about anything or anyone in this. The story is boring and it’s all pretty pointless. While some images are great, the dream-like sequences border on ugly. Then it has some short funny scenes weirdly inserted. The end At the Gates of Hel is just disappointing. I’m sorry.

Absolut wahnsinniges Buch über das und aus dem Bewusstsein einer Irren. Aber einer intelligenten Irren.

Ewige Gedankenabschweifungen und Erzählungen u.A. über die Leute, die sie kennt oder glaubt zu kennen.

Sehr lustig, aber auch etwas tragisch. Super unterhaltsam geschrieben. Nicht lang. Empfehlung! Man sollte allerdings vielleicht nicht zu zart besaitet sein.