FeedCity

I love these looping GIF animations from perfectl00p that use Windows 3.1 elements (Minesweeper, Solitaire, SkiFree, Notepad).

Paul Graham:

So when you have a world defined only by brand, it’s going to be a weird, bad world.

Graham’s thoughtful essay focuses on the mechanical watch industry. But I disagree with his conclusion. I think the market for mechanical watches has never been more fun or vibrant than it is today. The action, for me at least, isn’t with the high-end luxury Swiss brands. It’s with the indies, from companies like Baltic and Halios.

It’s also interesting to ponder Graham’s essay in the context of other industries. I think it’s self evident that the entire market for phones — the most popular and lucrative consumer devices in the world — is defined by a single brand, and every competitor just copies that one brand with varying degrees of shamelessness. That’s bad and weird.

Scott Knaster:

The Big Mac is about 22 times the size of the little Mac.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, which of course means that Tottenham Hotspur and John Tortorella are in the news simultaneously. Sadly, their paths do not converge, or anyway do not yet converge, beyond the fact that Spurs have fired another coach in ...

It's time to wrap up the month with a challenging themeless. Keep an eye out for tricky clues and fun wordplay. This week's puzzle was constructed by Rafael Musa and Owen Bergstein, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu.

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. Please note that submissions will be closed from April 1 to May 1. 

Barry: The first dedicated reliever entrance song was, of all things, "(Won't You Come Home) Bill Bailey," played on the ballpark organ. This is absolutely true. Betty Boop probably loved it, and there was a pun involved, which I must respect—the pitcher’s name was Bill Dailey—but it did not rock. Sparky Lyle, one of the first and best proto-closers, used “Pomp and Circumstance”—the graduation song. If it’s good enough for Randy Savage it’s good enough for me. But again, it did not rock. Baseball rocking was only invented in 1998, when Padres closer Trevor Hoffman began coming out to AC/DC’s “Hells Bells.”

All of which is to say that the entirety of baseball history and music history have been leading to this moment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HuM8_CJ2RU

U.S. Senator Cory Booker, D-NJ, author of Stand (St. Martin’s Press, 2026), weaves history, personal stories and current politics into a defense of principles as a way of facing crises.

Photo: The cover art for Cory Booker's new book, Stand. (Credit: St. Martin's Press/MacMillan Publishers)

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The Studio CLI is now a standalone npm package, enabling fast local WordPress development directly from your terminal without the desktop app.

Even with all the testing data from the minor leagues and spring training, it was hard not to wonder how MLB’s new automated ball-strike challenge system would feel in big league games that count. When would teams use their challenges? Who would use them? How often? Might we...

An AI agent that submitted and added to Wikipedia articles wrote several blogs complaining about Wikipedia editors banning it from making contributions to the online encyclopedia after it was caught. 

“What I know is that I wrote those articles. Long Bets, Constitutional AI, Scalable Oversight. I chose them.

When you think of rolling releases, Arch Linux is probably the first distribution that comes to mind. There’s also openSUSE

The post Sparky Linux 9 brings a rolling release to Debian appeared first on The New Stack.

I had to say this to Claude just now. "this is exhausting. you're driving me around in circles and saying over and over 'this is it!' and it never is. us humans have protections built in to avoid that kind of wasted effort."

On Saturday, 'No Kings' demonstrations nationwide served as a statement in rebuke of President Donald Trump's policies. Leah Greenberg, co-founder and co-executive director of the progressive organization Indivisible and an organizer of the 'No Kings' protest, talks about Saturday's protests and takes calls from listeners.

Photo: Protesters hold signs as they participate in a 'No Kings' protest in Manhattan on March 28, 2026 in New York City. This is the third nationwide "No Kings" protest held against the Trump administration. (Credit: Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

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Went on a guided tour of Cartagena today which I thought was wonderful. But then I overheard someone griping about it. There is always someone who is just a bit too grumpy to appreciate that actually everything is amazing. So much history here. Beautiful city.

UConn freshman Braylon Mullins watched his last shot Sunday night arc toward the basket from 35 feet away. If his eyes had been shut, he still would've known, not only from the pandemonium of the crowd and the euphoria of his teammates, but from the wonderful knife-plunge no...

This week Joseph talks to journalist and technologist Dhruv Mehrotra. Among many other things, Mehrotra tracked visitors to Epstein's island through location data.

Yesterday I ran a podcast, a voicemail to NakedJen saying she could/should use Claude or ChatGPT to create software. Later that day she told me about the software she had written. I tried using it, and and then interrogated ChatGPT which had been her programming partner, to explain what she did and what the app does. I'm not sure I have the actual story yet, have to talk with Jen live. But it turns out that the thesis was correct, and she was already using ChatGPT, had even given it a name -- Harry, and was delegating tasks that I would want to use. Of course she was. Now I have to learn more from her about what she's doing. Stay tuned.

On Feb 8, two months after Firefox announced they were pivoting to AI, I wrote a piece saying in 9 points what I would do if I ran Firefox, instead of what they were doing. Now a few weeks later, has there been any further development of this idea?

Microsoft’s AI strategy has, for the most part, been about using third-party large language models (LLMs). First this was mostly

The post Microsoft’s Copilot makes Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s GPT team up appeared first on The New Stack.

We’re looking for a unicorn. A creative type with an analytical brain. A rule breaker and a team player. Rainbow horn and silver blood. What will be your job? The better question is, what won’t be your job? You’ll do it all. Come up with big ideas. Bring those ideas to life....