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It was a lovely, balmy late-fall afternoon. The low sun betrayed the warmth's incongruence for the time of year, and warned of the inevitable approach of winter. It was a lovely day to be alive; a lovely day to be outside and not watching your two-win football team. It was a...

Let’s get in the solving zone. This week's puzzle was constructed by Ben Zimmer (who created our first official Defector puzzle two years ago!), and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Ben is a linguist, lexicographer, and all-around word nut. He has been a language columnist for the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, and the New York Times. He's also chair of the American Dialect Society's New Words Committee and vocabulary judge for the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

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 we're pausing open submissions until Dec. 1.

Andrew Gounardes, New York State Senator (D, District 26 -  Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, the Columbia Street Waterfront District, Dumbo, Dyker Heights, Fort Hamilton, Gowanus, Park Slope, Red Hook, South Slope, and Sunset Park), makes the case for a free CUNY system, which he has advocated for in Albany.

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Turned on the TV this morning and they were covering the AWS outage. It doesn’t appear to have affected Micro.blog from what I can tell. I could use the small wins this week.

Cal Newport blogs about what Sora might mean for a business model shift at OpenAI:

A company that still believes that its technology was imminently going to run large swathes of the economy, and would be so powerful as to reconfigure our experience of the world as we know it, wouldn’t be seeking to make a quick buck selling ads against deep fake videos of historical figures wrestling.

Sora is a gimmick. OpenAI should build more tools like ChatGPT Pulse, which is one of the most amazing products I’ve ever used. Truly new and useful.

Amazon Web Services experienced DNS resolution issues on Monday morning, taking down wide swaths of the web—and highlighting a longstanding weakness in the internet's infrastructure.

Frontier's Simple Cross-Network Scripting was one of my favorite features ever.

You can't say that the Mariners didn't have their chances Sunday night to clinch a World Series berth. Down 2-0 in the top of the third inning, they had the bases loaded with one out and Cal Raleigh up to bat; he grounded into a double play. Down 4-0 in the top of the fourth...

Anthropic partnered with the US government to create a filter meant to block Claude from helping someone build a nuke. Experts are divided on whether its a necessary protection—or a protection at all.

A degree in computer science used to promise a cozy career in tech. Now, students’ ambitions are shaped by AI, in fields that blend computing with analysis, interpretation, and data.

Plant parents don’t always want another plant—up your gift-giving game with these favorite plant presents we've tested.

Took yesterday off, aside from a little blogging, which isn't work for me -- now on Monday, I'm going to do a few warmup projects, and figuring out which big item I should focus on in my post-WordCamp experience.

I wish WordPress had a "home" social network. The community is all over the place, on Twitter, Slack, Masto, Bluesky, GitHub, and probably a few other places. I hope to have a social network that is built on WordPress and RSS. That would be one I'd like to be the first user of. I'd make my account simply dave. And of course I'd offer "matt" to Matt. But it would be open to the public, and anyone could start their own, by running a very easy to install piece of software on a server.

When immigration agents detained Douglas Menjivar in June, it wasn’t his first time. Menjivar, a 50-year-old master mechanic originally from El Salvador, had lived in the United States for most of the last twenty years. A decade prior, he’d spent 2013 to 2015 in immigrant detention, including at the Houston-area Joe Corley Detention Center, which […]

The post Trump’s ICE Arrested a Whistleblower Who Exposed Sexual Assault in Detention. Now, He’s Left the Country. appeared first on The Texas Observer.

"Elijah Clark, a consultant who advises companies on AI implementation, is blunt about the bottom line. ’CEOs are extremely excited about the opportunities that AI brings,” he says. ’As a CEO myself, I can tell you, I’m extremely excited about it. I’ve laid off employees mys...

Tariffs are at their highest rate in nearly a century, and the labor market is weakening. These are volatile times for the U.S. economy — but the stock market keeps going up. Joe Rennison, a reporter covering financial markets for The New York Times, explains what is going o...

The HyperCard inventor was a huge proponent of taking lower doses of 5-MeO-DMT, which is widely considered the strongest psychedelic in the world.

These $600 headphones are loaded with features for gaming, but they also offer a high-end music listening experience.

BetterGuards has teamed up with the NBA Training Association to outfit players with its adaptive ankle brace. The pro ballers are avoiding serious injury while evaluating the stabilizing design.

The Federal Trade Commission removed several blog posts in recent months about open source and potential risks to consumers from the rapid spread of commercial AI tools.