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In this episode of Uncanny Valley, we unpack the mass layoffs at Meta, big announcements at Google I/O, and the latest backlash against AI.

Water World, created by Seán Doran from imagery captured by a NASA/NOAA weather satellite, is a gorgeous, swirling, painterly portrait of the Earth’s dynamic atmosphere. Doran calls it “a meditative slow gaze at Earth’s atmosphere, revealing the hidden depths of activity in the water-filled skies of planet Earth”. It’s 4K, so put it on the biggest screen you can find and just sit back and watch.

Tags: clouds · Earth · meditative · mesmerizing · Sean Doran · video · weather

Are Copilot Plus PCs truly delivering the local AI power Microsoft promised, or are buyers still ending up with hardware that can't keep pace? Paul breaks down the latest specs, features, and what the next wave of chips means for your next upgrade.

Host: Paul Thurrott

Download or subscribe to Hands-On Windows at https://twit.tv/shows/hands-on-windows

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Om Malik with a little late-night reading of the SpaceX prospectus:

The SpaceX IPO is a masterpiece of financial engineering. The prospectus is a perfect blend of reality, sci-fi, and skullduggery.

It is important to have a silly little morning brain thing. Aside from the studies attesting to how beneficial these puzzles and games can be for your cognitive abilities, I just think it's nice to have something fun to do to get your brain stretched out before you put it to...

Learn why Activity Monitor is the macOS tool experienced users trust first to diagnose hidden memory drains, runaway CPU usage, and behind-the-scenes energy hogs. Mastering a single built-in tool can put real-time answers and expert-level control right at your fingertips. ...

First post — testing the pipeline.

Why does it matter whether people know how to use files and tabs or re-install their operating system? Isn't it better to let people get on with their day? Well, it's like with everything in life, ignorance costs a premium. If you are ignorant of something, you can be taken advantage of. Apple sells you expensive devices capable of running any program in the world, but keeping an iron grip on what you can run on it. Google is following suit. Many such cases.

When I was growing up, we had operating systems that exposed a lot of the technical details about their inner workings, and websites that let us use code to customize them, like MySpace and Geocities. UX designers in tech have since optimized away most of the stuff that allowed and encouraged people to learn to use technology and now people get confused by files and browser tabs. And as the knowledge shrinks, more and more things have to be simplified away. I only ever see it as a one way road.

The Secret to Winning on Jeopardy. “To win on Jeopardy, you don’t need to learn everything. You just need to learn one thing about everything.” As an proficient player of Yell Answers At The TV Jeopardy in my teen years, I can confirm this strat.

Apple Newsroom: Apple Sports — the free app for iPhone that gives fans access to real-time scores, stats, and more — is now available to download on the App Store in more than 170 countries and regions around the world, including more than 90 newly added markets. Designe...

Along with other improvements today, I updated the home page for Inkwell so it’s a little less plain. Now includes a screenshot and download links for all the platforms. For iOS, still linking to the TestFlight version while we wait for Apple.

Is your Apple Watch doing all it can for you? Explore how advanced features like multi-watch setups, app grids versus lists, and watch-based security tools can seriously level up your experience. Apple Watch independence, multiple watches per iPhone, and family setup Pro...

TL;DR: A few weeks of catch-up. First tattoo (Catsby in a vine of purple flowers). The backyard pond is done, and the raccoons and crows have already moved in. Built out the rest of the me-to-markdown family and an orchestrator that fans them out in one fetch — this post is the first dogfooded weeknote drafted from its output. The AI-coding bookmark pile this period was mostly variations on being tired.

Paul Brown’s iPod. This is a lovely remembrance & time capsule: a playable iPod emulator of “the music on the iPod my dad had in 2018 before he died”. Click wheel works and everything.

LAVAL, QUEBEC — I wasn’t close enough to hear Laura Stacey’s screams last Thursday, but I saw her wife’s panic clear as day. “When one of my teammates gets caught, I get fired up,” Marie-Philip Poulin told LSTW last year. “But when it’s Laura, my heart drops. I want to react and it’s hard not to, but I can’t.” 

That Poulin was reacting—bending over her wife who laid crumpled on the ice, frantically waving over medical personnel, skating said medical personnel to Stacey as fast as she could, staying with her the whole time she was being examined, begging for them to call an ambulance, giving her a shoulder to lean on as she wobbled off the ice several excruciating minutes later—made me feel nauseous. 

“I knew she was in full panic mode, and I was a little bit too,” Stacey said of the moment on Wednesday night. 

We love this brand’s stylish storage lockers, and there's a big sale on eight colors through the end of the month.

“Autobiography,” the critic John Berger said, “begins with a sense of being alone. It’s an orphan form.” Berger wrote these words weeks after the death of his mother, but he was speaking generally, about the project of remembrance which so many artists take up over the cours...

With apologies to Wallace Stevens. - - - I Meeting with the academic dean I asked him to share with faculty How admin are using AI. II A colleague shares a short story: Kafka sitting in a sales meeting For AI. III AI can help faculty take Burdensome things off their plate, S...

Underground Artists is an ongoing comic by Ali Fitzgerald (Hungover Bear & Friends) that follows woodland creatures as they create art and search out whimsy in a bleak forest.