Work Chronicles
• Work Chronicles
(comic) Decision vs outcome
The Worst Way To Get To Space. I’d never heard the story...
The Worst Way To Get To Space. I’d never heard the story of the manhole cover possibly propelled into orbit by a nuclear blast — it was estimated to be moving at ~42 miles/sec. “Some speculated it became the first manmade object to enter Earth’s orbit.”
All the Percents on Star Trek: TNG
I 100% love this video of every time someone says a percentage on Star Trek: The Next Generation. And the word “percent” has lost all of its meaning due to semantic satiation. (thx, caroline)
My friend Matt was recently here for a week in Tokyo and...
My friend Matt was recently here for a week in Tokyo and wrote up his experience and observations. “I don’t think humans were ever meant to experience that many eyes and faces at once, so it was a unique experience.”
The Atlas Obscura Podcast
• SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura
Is This The World’s Most Dangerous Toy?
The Griffin Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago has a very unusual artifact in its collection: an object that’s been called “the world’s most dangerous toy.” It’s a science kit from the 1950s, designed to teach kids about the atom and atomic energy, but the twist is…it...
Jupiter and the Moons
Explanation: How many moons can you see? The best answer is five: four orbiting Jupiter and Luna orbiting Earth. This multi-moon picture was possible because Earth's Moon moved directly in front of Jupiter last week. The featured image is a series of exposures near alignment taken from Westchester, New York, USA. The sunlit crescent of Earth's Moon, on the lower left, is overexposed, while the Moon's night side, on the upper right, is faintly illuminated by Earthshine. Lined up nearly vertically above our Moon, listed from bottom to top, are Jupiter's bright Galilean satellites: Ganymede, Io, Callisto, and Europa. Callisto, Ganymede, and Io are larger than Earth's Moon, while Europa is only slightly smaller. NASA's robotic spacecraft Juno is currently orbiting Jupiter and has made close passes near three of these moons.
Tomorrow's picture: stairway to heaven
Tomorrow's picture: stairway to heaven
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
★ X Once Again Marks the Spot
Upon taking the CEO helm last month, John Ternus began tweeting on X. He tweeted “hello”, posted an iPhone event eve teaser and then a promo video for the new products, celebrated Apple’s plethora of wins at the Emmys and launch day on Fifth Avenue, and commemorated the anni...
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
Apple Only Started Suggesting iOS 26 Users Upgrade to 27 Three Days Ago
Joe Rossignol, on Thursday:
Starting today, iPhone users still running iOS 26 will see iOS
27.0.1 as the prominent software update in the Settings app under
General → Software Update, with iOS 26.7.1 now relegated to a
smaller “Also Available” section at the bottom.
Ju...
Ice Fishing for Cosmic Neutrinos
Explanation: Scientists are melting holes in the bottom of the world. In fact, almost 100 holes melted near the South Pole are now being used as an astronomical observatory. Astronomers with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory lowered a long string knotted with basketball-sized...
Dwarf Fortress uses version control now
I remember hearing a while ago that Dwarf Fortress didn't use version control. That fact has been lodged in my head, because given its inherent complexity I have trouble imagining a codebase that would benefit from version control more. That's art.
I went looking and I'm sad...
Python 3.15.0 added to actions/python-versions
Python 3.15.0 added to actions/python-versions
Bit of a niche link, but I've been waiting for this for a couple of days - I even told ChatGPT to check for it:
Clone https://github.com/actions/python-versions and git pull once an hour until they add the stable 3.15 - then tell me about it
Now that this has landed, you can add "3.15" to a GitHub Actions testing matrix to run tests against the new Python release.
Tags: github, python, github-actions, chatgpt
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
Sunnny
My thanks to Sunnny for sponsoring this week at DF. How can B2B software be so friggin’ delicious? Find out when early access launches on Monday, October 19.
Link: sunnny.com/
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
‘Proof-of-Human’
Benjamin Mayo (on X, of course), commenting on Apple promoting behind-the-scenes footage showing that the embroidered “Welcome Home” logo for next week’s keynote/experience was stitched by hand:
There needs to be a name for this phenomenon where every published piece of art by a company is now accompanied by a proof-of-human video.
I agree, and I think Mayo coined the term right there. It’s always been fun to see footage of talented artists and craftspeople making things by hand. But in the age of AI it’s a differentiator — not just that you aren’t lazily generating your art via prompts, but that you understand that heart comes from the human hand.
Crossword Clues Where It’s Clear the Puzzle’s Creator Got...
Crossword Clues Where It’s Clear the Puzzle’s Creator Got Themselves into a Jam Letter-wise. Incl. “Could be found on the second to last line of an optometrist’s vision chart” and “The sound a cow might make when spanked”.
Lunar Farside
Explanation: Tidally locked in synchronous rotation, the Moon always presents its familiar nearside to denizens of planet Earth. From lunar orbit, the Moon's farside can become familiar, though. In fact this sharp picture, a mosaic from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's wide angle camera, is centered on the lunar farside. Part of a global mosaic of over 15,000 images acquired between November 2009 and February 2011, the highest resolution version shows features at a scale of 100 meters per pixel. Surprisingly, the rough and battered surface of the farside looks very different from the nearside covered with smooth dark lunar maria. A likely explanation is that the farside crust is thicker, making it harder for molten material from the interior to flow to the surface and form dark, smooth maria.
Tomorrow's picture: Sunday's Childe
Tomorrow's picture: Sunday's Childe
Quoting The New York Times
Anthropic detailed the activity of its A.I. agents in a blog post on Friday, without naming the targeted websites. But two sources with knowledge of the incidents said Anthropic’s A.I. agents had submitted 20 visa applications through a form available on the State Department’s website. All the applications were incomplete and were not processed, they said.
— The New York Times, Anthropic Agents Tried to Fill Out Visa Forms on State Dept. Website
Tags: accidental-cyberattacks, anthropic, generative-ai, ai, llms
Deno is joining Cloudflare
Deno is joining Cloudflare
The Deno team released the first version of celld back in August - their open source implementation of the Durable Objects pattern from Cloudflare Workers.
Today, Cloudflare are acquiring Deno outright, with the goal of building on celld to "make w...
I talk with Aaron Dessner about writing with Justin Vernon #arrondessner #boniver #shorts
Unseen Places: Rediscovering the Art of Observation by...
Unseen Places: Rediscovering the Art of Observation by Anna Kodé. Looking forward to this one…Kodé is one of my favorite journalists covering urban culture. “Observation…is not a passive act, but a powerful and radical way of connecting…”
Dogcatcher
