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For all its miracles, the internet has had some drawbacks. Before the internet, people generally had more friends, and more lasting relationships; they went outside more, and were more physically active; the fighting weight of the average cultural product was a little higher...

“We’ve spent four months and half a million dollars trying to connect our AI to our business systems, and it

The post MCP + SQL: The Secret Weapon To Connect AI to Enterprise Systems appeared first on The New Stack.

Elora Mukherjee, professor at Columbia Law School and director of Columbia Law School’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, talks about the impact of the Trump administration's revocation of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for immigrants from seven countries, what legal recourse might be available, and what it means for the immigrants and the City.

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The Space Shuttle drips romance. Representing nearly a half-century of human spaceflight—from its conception in 1968, even before the Moon landing, until its retirement in 2011—its design and even its name capture a hope that space travel would one day be commonplace. That b...

General Motors’ homemade version of the low-cost power option favored by China’s auto industry will hit three years before its super energy-dense tech arrives—and could bring affordable US EVs sooner.

When we launched Micro.blog, we got pushback on the lack of likes and reposts and follower lists and trends and global firehouse. Now eight years later I’m confident our approach is an important niche on the social web.

We absolutely do lose customers who drift away because of lack of engagement. So be it. If you want the dopamine hit of notifications and a more active timeline, pulling you back in, there are other platforms like… well, literally all of the other ones!

This week's puzzle was constructed by Maddy Ziegler and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Maddy is an attorney in Madison, Wisconsin. She enjoys watching many sports and playing none. You can find more of her puzzles at poppypuzzles.blogspot.com.

Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE. Note that our submissions are closed through July 31. 

An old boxing coach of mine became an avid tennis player after he retired from pro fighting. He always said that boxing and tennis were very similar. This never struck me as completely convincing. Yes, both are one-on-one sports, and both require strategic choices about how ...

Mark Zuckerberg posting to Threads:

For our superintelligence effort, I’m focused on building the most elite and talent-dense team in the industry. We’re also going to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into compute to build superintelligence. We have the capital from our business to do this.

Mark has moved extremely quickly on this. He can do that because he runs the whole show. But Meta is the last company I want with this power. Ad-based businesses will always be misaligned with human needs.

AWS today launched Kiro, its take on agentic IDEs like Cursor and Windsurf. Like its most direct competitors, AWS used

The post Kiro Is AWS’s Specs-Centric Answer to Windsurf and Cursor appeared first on The New Stack.

Jim Walden, attorney running as an independent in the NYC mayoral race, introduces himself to the voters.

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Podcast: Rebooting the Democratic Party.

The VHS/DVD championship season recap is a lost art in the era of Youtube, but I'm old enough to remember when it was the only game in town. I'd see ads for them in the immediate aftermath of a title win—a chance to relive a great run through a curated collection of clips an...

Fleshing out an idea I presented on Scripting News on July 11. Next time there's a Big Beautiful Bill, let's set up a ChatGPT project or equivalent to injest new versions of the bill as they come out, and quickly alert us to issues, and also suggest ways to frame it for the ...

The choice of Bills Week for this year's What Defector Does When It Needs To Skive Off For A Week Week had an unforeseen deficiency when it was being spitballed by the Phlegm Committee. Specifically, we are historically low on Bills.

Between 1950 and 2008, the name Bill (or more specifically William), became gradually and increasingly uncool in the United States, according to data from the Social Security Administration. Even by 1980 a kid might as well have been named Jehoshaphat, Algonquin, or Xythron The Enfeebled. Most likely, Bill is the name of your last living relative, and if it isn't, may he rest in peace. If you have a Bill in your family, cherish the old coot. Water him regularly, and keep the air in front of his easy chair free of things he can trip over. You need him mobile and independent, at least from you.

AI is not going to save media companies, and forcing journalists to use AI is not a business model.

People are uploading videos of their post-deportation life to TikTok and other platforms.

I enjoyed this essay by Windsor Johnston at NPR about a date with a chatbot:

The date started with a boat ride from Georgetown in Washington, D.C., across the Potomac River to Old Town Alexandria in Virginia. I wore a little black dress and ballet flats. The sun was shining, the breeze was warm, and I was texting a chatbot.

Most articles like this are alarmist and depressing. This one is balanced and funny, and ultimately gets more at a truth about what all of this means.

I’ll admit: Having grown addicted to the treats of literary nonfiction, I don’t make it through too many academic histories these days. If I’m going to, there’d better at least be a decent lede—and the Marxian opening to a new history of the eugenics movement in Texas fits the bill. “Monsters haunted the imaginations of […]

The post The History of Eugenics in Texas Isn’t What You Think appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Defector will be turning five years old in September. What better way to squander whatever warm feelings our upcoming birthday will elicit from our dedicated readers and subscribers than subjecting them to yet another inscrutable theme week? Hopefully you did not assume that Senators Week, Rays Week, and Wings Week had exhausted us of all […]