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Kelly's Picks: The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

All week, host Kelly McEvers surfaces some of her favorite episodes from the archive. Here's today's story:  One of the many objects that went down with the ship during the sinking of the Titanic was a beautiful, jewel-encrusted edition of a poetry book called the “Ruba...

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2026 in LLMs (so far)

On Friday I gave the closing keynote at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America in San Jose. I tied together the key trends from the past year into a chronological exploration of everything that happened in 2026. The video is on YouTube; here are my annotated slides...

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
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S3 Is the Future, S3 Is the Past

My comment on S3 Is the Future, S3 Is the Past — Hacker News.

One thing I find notable about S3 today is that, while it used to drop in price reasonably often, there hasn't been a price drop in a full decade:

2006-03-14  $0.150/GB-month
2010-11-01  $0.140/GB-month
2012-02-01  $0.125/GB-month
2012-12-01  $0.095/GB-month
2014-02-01  $0.085/GB-month
2014-04-01  $0.030/GB-month
2016-12-01  $0.023/GB-month

Today it's still $0.023/GB-month.

Tags: amazon-web-services, s3

Mars For The Rest of Us Valid
Text • Maciej Cegłowski

Lost Dinosaur Cities on Mars

Lost Dinosaur Cities on Mars

Is this really the Solar System’s first rodeo?

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Katie Notopoulos on Alexandr Wang’s ‘Faux-Hallmark Pap’

x.com/katienotopoulos/status/2103993429659386026

Katie Notopoulos, in a short tweet thread regarding Alexandr Wang’s “Why We’re Building Muse” essay: This makes me feel insane! This is faux-hallmark pap and if you believe for 1 sec that he cares about helping people “spending more time with family” or “opening a bakery...

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Text • John Gruber

Mux: Turn Your Video Into Context

mux.com/?utm_campaign=fireball&utm_source=DF

My thanks to Mux for sponsoring last week at DF. Video isn’t just something to stream; it’s structured data you build with.

Mux Robots — hosted AI workflows — turns video into context. Generate chapters, find key moments, translate audio, and more, through one API call, with no model hosting to maintain. Each workflow is evaluated against real video, not generic benchmarks. Configure the workflows once, and every new upload runs automatically.

Mux is video infrastructure trusted by Patreon, Substack, and Perplexity. Start building for free. Use code FIREBALL for an extra $50 credit.

Link: mux.com/?utm_campaign=fireball&utm_source=DF

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🎬 The Martian

letterboxd.com/danielpietzsch/film/the-martian/

Movie poster for “The Martian”.

It’s a space movie. I like space movies. But this is not the best of its genre IMHO. I can’t complain about how it’s made, really. I definitely enjoyed the acting and most of the visuals and sets. But the story is a bit so-so. I found it a little awkward making everyone explain everything all the time. And Mark Watney’s good mood with its constant funny-cool slogans went a little on my nerves (together with the partly cheese music). The final space scene is just bonkers. So: “ok”, I’d say.

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🎬 Big Trouble in Little China

letterboxd.com/danielpietzsch/film/big-trouble-in-little-china/

Movie poster for “Big Trouble in Little China”.

This is so absurd, you can not not be entertained. And if you just take Jack Burton’s view and go with it, you can just indulge yourself in this. Chinese clans fighting themselves in back alleys? Sure! Superfighters flying in form the sky? Why not! Cursed villains with superpowers? Ok!? Surprise monster? Ok, what the hell!

It’s a weird Carpenter movie. I liked the old-school-ness of it all. The humour was actually pretty great. But it’s not my favourite from him.

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Andromeda Before Photoshop

Explanation: What does the Andromeda galaxy really look like? The featured before image shows how our Milky Way Galaxy's closest major galactic neighbor really appears in a long exposure through Earth's busy skies and with a digital camera that introduces normal imperfection...

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
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Kākāpō Party

Tool: Kākāpō Party I gave presented a closing keynote for the WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America yesterday. As a STAR moment I decided to weave in references to the record breaking kākāpō breeding season we had in 2026. For my closing slide I wanted to cele...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Reelizer Returns

reelizer.com/

Back in 2011 I linked to Reelizer, a splendid archive of movie posters curated by Roger Erik Tinch. Reelizer went away for a few years, but Tinch has brought it back, seemingly better than ever. Huzzah.

Link: reelizer.com/

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Alexandr Wang: ‘Why I’m Building Muse’

x.com/alexandr_wang/status/2103551714536439951

Alexandr Wang, blogging on X: Now imagine every person on earth with a second mind beyond their own. A general manager whose whole job is to find out what you want and make sure it happens. Someone that hears the half-sentence, “I feel like there’s something more I could...

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The Sheryl Crow Interview

In this episode I sit down with iconic artist Sheryl Crow to deep dive into her legendary career, songwriting process, and the mechanics behind some of her biggest hits. The interview includes 3 live performances! My Beato Club supporters: Justin Scott Terence Mark Jason Mu...

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Text • John Gruber

Apple’s Other Recent ‘Duo’

support.apple.com/en-us/111812

I keep mentioning Apple’s 1992 groundbreaking PowerBook Duo series as a precedent for the iPhone Duo’s name. But of course in 2020, Apple released the MagSafe Duo Charger, a wonderful Lightning peripheral for charging an iPhone and Apple Watch at the same time. It even folde...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

International Standard Paper Sizes

cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-paper.html

Markus Kuhn: In the ISO paper size system, the height-to-width ratio of all pages is the square root of two (1.4142 : 1). In other words, the width and the height of a page relate to each other like the side and the diagonal of a square. This aspect ratio is especially c...

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Text • John Gruber

Microsoft Took the ‘Copilot+ PC’ Brand Out Behind the Shed

windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/the-copilot-pc-brand-is-dead-microsoft-and-pc-makers-quietly-pull-back-on-tarnished-windows-11-ai-pc-branding

Zac Bowden, Windows Central: In 2024, Microsoft and Qualcomm kicked off a new category of Windows hardware it called “Copilot+ PCs” that set the baseline for a new wave of AI-first computers, and launched with exclusive features that would not be made available on PCs th...

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The Talk Show: ‘I’m Thinking X, Not X’

daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2026/09/25/ep-455

Andru Edwards returns to the show to discuss Apple’s big September event and their new products: the iPhones 18 Pro and Duo, AirPods 5, and Apple Watch Series 12/Ultra 4.

Sponsored by:

  • Factor: Healthy eating, made easy. Get 50% off and one free breakfast item per box for one year, while supplies last, with code talkshow50off.
  • Notion: The collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents work side by side, with a developer platform teams can build on.

Link: daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2026/09/25/ep-455

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Humans Can Regrow an Organ

Every month, the uterus builds an entire new layer of tissue, prepares it for a possible pregnancy, then starts all over again. Billions of people experience this cycle, yet there’s still a surprising amount we don’t understand about it. #kurzgesagt #inanutshell #kurzgesag...

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New feeds overview pages

The overview pages of the “Subscriptions” and “Feeds” pages for each timeline got an overhaul: they are a little cleaner, show the date a feed was last updated, and you can now sort them by “Last updated” (the default), “Subscribed” and “Title”.

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Audio • SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura

Is Alton, Illinois America's Most Haunted Small Town?

Alton, Illinois has been called the most haunted small town in America. It’s a place where practically every building has its own ghost story, from an old penitentiary, an eroding island, and even an old 1920s resort. And bubbling underneath all this lore is the fascinating ...