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TL;DR: It's been a weird 3 weeks. We adopted a new cat, a void named Minnaloushe. I also got completely sucked into the Artemis II mission, watching the livestream like it was my favorite TV show. Also featured in this post: more random crap and miscellanea than usual, because it's been a little while.

Defector is proud of its sweeties and enemies binary. In athletic competition, there are sweeties, who cause a feeling of butterflies in tummies, and there are enemies, who are shitheels. Nobody denies this.

This year's NHL playoff bracket looks a little weird. Some teams seem like they've innocently stumbled into a place they don't belong. Other franchises are truly despicable embarrassments to ice. To make sense of the first round, I have divided every series into a sweetie and an enemy. Here they are, without further comment.

NHL Playoff Sweeties

Federico Viticci blogs about the new Codex app from the perspective of his early preview of Sky last year: It also helps that computer use in Codex is exquisitely designed – not a surprise given OpenAI’s design team and the pedigree of the team behind this feature. The flow...

A few years back, the Mini Cooper’s taillights were designed to look like the Union Jack flag, which is fine until you turn the blinker on and it looks like an arrow pointing in the wrong direction. I hated this design the moment I saw it on the road.

I'm working with @dopatwo on a 10th anniversary Mastodon merch design and the sketch he sent me is so good. I usually don't even talk about these things until they're done but it's so exciting I just have to vent it.

Oh my gosh, look at these tiny snow leopard cubs from the Melbourne Zoo. 🥹

I have always found the starter-into-closer pipeline to be demoralizing. Per baseball truisms, even the best reliever would be a starter if they were only, by certain definitions, better. Moving a starter to the pipeline is so often the last-ditch move of teams that do not k...

Honestly, what’s hotter than a real person?

Whoaaaa, get a load of this! The NBA playoffs are starting tomorrow. Yes yes, there are more play-in tournament games tonight, but we're not here to talk about that. We're here to talk about the real playoffs, and get you caught up to speed so that you may witness these contests with all the basketball knowledge one could possibly need filling your skull.

Before we get to the previews, however, we wanted to talk about some other important issues facing the NBA. Below you will find a roundtable discussion between Defector's biggest basketball nerds about tanking, uncompetitive regular season games, and the NBA's popularity crisis. There's a lot to discuss on those topics, so be sure to check that out.

Just kidding! God, that would be awful. OK, here are the previews.

On Wednesday night, the NBA fined LaMelo Ball for his "unnecessary and reckless contact" with Bam Adebayo during Charlotte's victory over Miami in their play-in game Tuesday. It made for a deflating end to what had become a whole media saga over Ball's intentions, or lack th...

Anthropic Labs, the Claude-maker’s AI safety and research division, on Friday launched Claude Design, a new service in research preview

The post Anthropic launches Claude Design, a Figma and Canva rival built on Claude appeared first on The New Stack.

You won’t go to jail for filming ICE with a drone, but the government may still shoot it down and it expanded the list of protected agencies to include the Department of Justice.

The Astronomy Picture of the Day, in which the International Space Station looks like it’s landing on the Moon.

Miranda Nazzaro, senior technology reporter for The Hill, talks about her reporting on Anthropic's Mythos model, which is unnerving some big businesses over cybersecurity concerns.

Photo: Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, delivers remarks at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023. (Credit: TechCrunch via Wikimedia Commons CC 2.0)

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"Fibermaxxing" is the latest social media nutrition trend. Trisha Pasricha, MD, MPH, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, director of the Institute for Gut-Brain Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the “Ask A Doctor” columnist for The Washington Post and the author of the new book You’ve Been Pooping All Wrong (PRH/Avery, 2026), talks about the major health benefits of eating plenty of fiber, and how to do it.

Photo: A bowl of cereal with berries. (Credit: U.S. Food and Drug Administration via Wikimedia Commons)

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Thanks for reaching out. I’ve stepped away from my office, but I’ll respond promptly when I return. To clear up any confusion, please be advised that: I don’t suffocate people with pillows. Hexes cost extra. I don’t know Florence + The Machine personally, although I have me...

I’d vaguely heard of Project Plowshare but good god, what a ridiculous and dangerous waste of time and money.

At the height of the Cold War, nuclear weapons were seen not only as devices of destruction, but also as tools for progress. Project Plowshare was a bold attempt to use atomic explosions for more practical purposes: from digging canals and creating harbors to reshaping entire landscapes. This project was designed to push the limits of what seemed possible, but instead turned into an environmental disaster.

This reminds me of that episode of the Simpsons when Homer buys a gun and uses it around the house for everything, like changing the TV channel and opening beer cans. If the only tool you have is a hammer…

Tags: Cold War · nuclear bombs · science · video

AI-assisted writing is creeping into newsrooms under the guise of efficiency. But the tradeoff may be more profound than publishers are willing to admit.

Mayor Mamdani announced plans this week to expand the pedestrian corridor of the notoriously chaotic Grand Army Plaza, which advocates have been pushing for for years. Liam Quigley, parks & sanitation reporter for Gothamist and WNYC, unpacks the latest announcement, plus digs into the city-wide decline in composting.

Photo: A market at Grand Army Plaza pictured in 2003. (Credit: Alex756 via Wikimedia Commons CC 3.0)

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Something about blondies really gets my motor humming. I love brownies, and I really love chocolate chip cookies. But put a thick-cut blondie in front me and suddenly I go as wild as an ape. A blondie is like a chocolate chip cookie but like, more of it. That’s my kind of 50...