I think it’s safe to say the lens manufacturing industry is undergoing a seismic shift. As Chinese manufacturers start delivering more and more lenses with a high degree of optical sophistication, they’ll also iterate on the remaining features that are lacking, such as image stabilization and faster autofocus motors. Much of this technology is locked by patents, though, so that is one area where Canon, with its massive patent library, may have an advantage over these manufacturers. I’m not entirely convinced, though, that it’s going to stop the manufacturers for very 

The interface is restless, needy, less predictable, less legible, and constantly pulling focus rather than supporting seamless access to content. Instead of smoothing the path for everyday tasks, iOS 26 makes users relearn basics while enduring a constant parade of visual stunts.

…… that they can build an Apollo Lunar Module-like lander within 30 months. Amit Kshatriya, NASA’s associate administrator, favors this government-led approach, sources said.

A good figure from the Nobel Prize Foundation’s Scientific Background to the Mokyr, Aghion and Howitt Nobel. The figure shows that firm exit rates and job destruction rates are positively correlated with growth in labor productivity; creative destruction in a nutshell.

Now, that era of power transitions is ending. For the first time in centuries, no country is rising fast enough to overturn the global balance. The demographic booms, industrial breakthroughs, and territorial acquisitions that once fueled great powers have largely run their course. China, the last major riser, is already peaking, its economy slowing and its population shrinking. Japan, Russia, and Europe stalled more than a decade ago. India has youth but lacks the human capital and state capacity to turn it into strength. The United States faces its own troubles—debt, sluggish growth, political dysfunction—but still outpaces rivals sinking into deeper decay. The rapid ascents that once defined modern geopolitics have yielded to sclerosis: the world is now a closed club of aging incumbents, circled by middle powers, developing countries, and failing states

gonna go out on a limb and say that 99% of the journalists snarkily-quote tweeting this clip haven’t actually watched it, because what Luckey is saying is not only uncontroversial but basically identical to Toni Morrison’s comments on the same topic circa 1989.

But Araque and many other pioneers of next-generation geothermal tech are undeterred. If humanity can someday economically drill wells more than 6 miles deep, he says, we can tap energy that amounts to more than double all the electricity used on earth today. Others, like researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, have calculated that in the U.S. alone, thousands of times as much energy as Americans use in a year is already available at much shallower depths.

The NYC Voting Guide for People Who Aren’t Insane:

“Look, you can pull statistics up but our murder rate has been cut in half.”

This is part 1 in a 5 part series about challenges and solutions in accelerating heat pump adoption across the US. Stay tuned for the next issue!

Launched in June 2024, JupyterGIS was introduced as a collaborative, web-based GIS environment built on the JupyterLab framework. Its objective is to bring QGIS-inspired workflows into the browser, enabling real-time collaborative editing, seamless integration with notebooks, and support for core geospatial data formats.

….. but rather because of the single sensible — if very belated — thing they have done in recent memory, which was to usher a doddering Joe Biden out of the 2024 presidential race.

We cannot trust crime stats in America. They have been widely corrupted to serve a racist agenda.

“As an economist, I don’t think it’s a problem that there are different prices for the same (items) across town,” Stevens said. “That actually makes a lot of sense.”. It might seem concerning at first, he said, “but when you dig under the hood, it’s like, ‘Oh yes, there are lots of reasons that could be true.’ It’s a complicated ecosystem of retail and food sales.

The German language has acquired strange new phrases since I emigrated. Spend enough time in a different country and your mother tongue moves on without you. One of those modern idioms I’ve never really got the hang of is: “Ist das Kunst oder kann das weg?” which loosely and lamely translates as: “Is this art or is it rubbish?” It was first introduced by a comedian and is now frequently used to poke fun at modern art, implying that the piece in question is so abstract that you can’t even tell it’s art and might mistake it for a piece of rubbish to be binned.

REPORT: How AARP Makes Health Insurance Unaffordable.

Subsidized debt drives up prices, sucks up wealth, and makes it hard for millennials to buy homes

But <output>? Most have never touched it. Some don’t even know it exists.

Toyota said that its new batteries could significantly enhance driving range, charging times, and output, potentially transforming the future of automobiles. Compared to current liquid-based batteries, which use electrolyte solutions, Toyota’s all-solid-state batteries utilize a cathode, an anode, and a solid electrolyte. According to Toyota, the next-gen battery tech “offers the potential for smaller size, higher output, and longer life.”

For both hiring and promotion, decision-makers have a legibility problem. This problem will inevitability lead to a focus on details that are easier to observe directly precisely because they are easier to observe directly. This is how fields like graphology and phrenology come about. But just because we can directly observe someone’s handwriting or the shapes of the bumps on their head doesn’t mean that those are effective techniques for learning something about that person’s personality. 

Instead, state inspectors documented nearly 100 alleged new violations of the agreement. The letter also accuses the company of failing to hire an independent environmental manager to regularly inspect its construction sites. State regulators counted 689 missed inspections. The Boring Co. is disputing the violation letter, a state spokesperson said.

That’s because for decades, May and his family have managed May Ranch near the Arkansas River — a major tributary of the Mississippi River — to encourage native habitat to thrive alongside their cattle. This region is part of a swath of grassland that sweeps from central Canada to northern Mexico, vital to many species of birds that migrate across North America.

He managed to leave Saudi Arabia and was attempting to build a new life for himself in Virginia. All he wanted to do was write— and writing for the Washington Post, especially when we translated his work into Arabic, meant the world to him, even as he came under great pressure.

I started wondering: for the Free Texting service, could I bypass the messaging app restriction and access other websites freely?

Geosynchronous (GEO) satellite links provide IP backhaul to remote critical infrastructure for utilities, telecom, government, military, and commercial users. To date, academic studies of GEO infrastructure have focused on a handful of satellites and specific use cases. We perform the first broad scan of IP traffic on 39 GEO satellites across 25 distinct longitudes with 411 transponders using consumer grade equipment. We overcome the poor signal quality plaguing prior work and build the first general parser that can handle the diverse protocols in use by heterogeneous endpoints. We found 50% of GEO links contained cleartext IP traffic; while link-layer encryption has been standard practice in satellite TV for decades, IP links typically lacked encryption at both the link and network layers. This gives us a unique view into the internal network security practices of these organizations. We observed unencrypted cellular backhaul traffic from several providers including cleartext call and text contents, job scheduling and industrial control systems for utility infrastructure, military asset tracking, inventory management for global retail stores, and in-flight wifi.

What emerged is one of the most complete pictures to date of the modern surveillance industry. The tracking archive is unprecedented in scope, and reveals how the company and its clients surveilled all types of people from all over the world. Reporters interviewed more than a hundred victims, as well as former employees and industry insiders. A trove of confidential emails and documents provide a detailed inside account of how First Wap’s tech was marketed to authoritarian governments and accessed by corporate actors. Behind closed doors, First Wap’s executives touted their ability to hack WhatsApp accounts, and laughed about evading sanctions.

So John Kerry is back, lecturing us that agriculture—the very foundation of human civilization—is a climate villain that must be “front and center” to be “solved.”. Let’s translate the globalist grift. He isn’t talking about Chinese coal plants or private jets. He’s talking about YOUR food. What John Kerry is really saying: “We’ve calculated that independent farming and ranching are incompatible with our centralized control model. Your steak is a symbol of sovereignty. Your local dairy farmer is a node of resilience we cannot monitor or manage.

Erebor was granted “preliminary and conditional” approval by regulators on Wednesday, just four months after its application for a national bank charter in June — a sign of the Trump administration’s initiative to lower regulatory hurdles and encourage new banking entrants focused on digital assets and services. The administration has encouraged new entrants to the banking sector including from technology groups, prompting a number of fintechs and cryptocurrency companies to seek bank charters this year.

The Fact Graph is a production-ready knowledge graph for modeling, among other things, the United States Internal Revenue Code and related tax law. It can be used in JavaScript as well as any JVM language (Java, Kotlin, Scala, Clojure, etc.).

The California decision was announced by Space Launch Delta 30 this week. Under the new approval, SpaceX will be able to launch both Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets from its two pads — Space Launch Complex 4 (SLC-4) and Space Launch Complex 6 (SLC-6).

“Almost every reasonable AI company that’s out there is saying, listen, if it’s a fair playing field, then we’re happy to pay for content,” Prince said. “The problem is that all of them are terrified of Google because if Google gets content for free but they all have to pay for it, they are always going to be at an inherent disadvantage.”

The “New Stuff” that you’ll see here is the result of my journey into the world of digital art. Believe me, this has been a bit of a learning curve for me. I hail from a world of pen and ink, and suddenly I was feeling like I was sitting at the controls of a 747. (True, I don’t get out much.) But as overwhelmed as I was, there was still something familiar there—a sense of adventure. That had always been at the core of what I enjoyed most when I was drawing The Far Side, that sense of exploring, reaching for something, taking some risks, sometimes hitting a home run and sometimes coming up with “Cow tools.” (Let’s not get into that.) But as a jazz teacher once said to me about improvisation, “You want to try and take people somewhere where they might not have been before.” I think that my approach to cartooning was similar—I’m just not sure if even I knew where I was going. But I was having fun.

Then one day at a Berkeley community bulletin board “there was a posting that said, ‘I’m driving to Madison, Wisconsin, and I’m looking to split gas with someone.’ And my mother took it.”

For 32 years, competitors have come from around the globe armed with their spurtles, the tapered sticks Scots use to stir their oats, to see what they can conjure up in their pots in the allotted 30 minutes. It seems simple enough. In its traditional form there are just three ingredients to porridge: water, oats and salt. Yet so much can go wrong.

GREAT interview with @USComptroller:
?the bias of federal bank regulators “that only the largest banks can do innovation safely” must end (YES!)

This week, Canadian airline WestJet became one of the first to try to switch the ability to recline into a paid “perk” by announcing that it was reconfiguring 43 of its Boeing 737-8 MAX and 737-800  (BA)  planes to have what it classifies as a “refreshed range of seating options.”. In actuality, this means making customers pay for a seat that reclines.

I measured my reputation with mail-testerand got a 10/10 score. The missing PTR record did give me negative points, but those were offset by 2 free points for “trusted relay”. I’m also not on any blocklists, so my IP really is lucky 🙂

NEON CLASSES: BENDING BASICS

The art of neon and the bending of neon tubes is a fascinating craft! Learn the basics of neon and glass bending.

The Space Force is paying SpaceX $714 million for the five launches awarded Friday, for an average of roughly $143 million per mission. ULA will receive $428 million for two missions, or $214 million for each launch. That’s about 50 percent more expensive than SpaceX’s price per mission.

Summary: People often over-engineer solutions, and it leads to them running into problems with their CSS. In this article, we’ll take a look at the least amount of CSS that you need to make a decent looking page.

The book provides enough details to piece together how the early Standard Oil business model worked. The reality seems different than many popular accounts and is much more logically consistent.

That effort turned into the Clinton administration’s first crisis, but over time, what is now called diversity, equity and inclusion won out. President Barack Obama ended Mr. Clinton’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in 2010, allowing lesbian, gay and bisexual people to serve openly in the armed forces. He approved women in combat in 2013 and in 2016 opened all combat positions to women, revising some physical training requirements in the process. In 2016 he also opened the ranks to transgender soldiers.

Once the New York Times held out as unconnected contractually to the NFL – free to criticize its public subsidies, billionaire ownership class and bad examples set for young people. No more

Software quality was already collapsing when AI coding assistants arrived. What happened next was predictable.

Doctors say insurers are automatically downgrading their claims and paying less. Insurers say it’s their duty to prevent overbilling.

The 25 most interesting ideas I’ve found in 2025 (so far).

This is exactly my problem. Tech arrives as an option and ends up as an obligation.

But history doesn’t quite bear this out. Galileo was in his forties when he published his most radical works. Thomas Paine was forty when Common Sense reshaped political thought. Susan B. Anthony was fifty-two when she cast her first illegal vote. The assumption that genius peaks young has always been a convenient myth. It flatters the ambitious and terrifies the hesitant. It also blinds us to the fact that many of history’s breakthroughs came from people who had been around long enough to see patterns others missed.

7th edition of the Map of Near and Middle East Oil. Published by B. Orchard Lisle, International Oil Consultant, Pertroleum Technologist, Research Analystd, 1965. Majestic Bldg., Fort Worth Texas

It’s widely accepted that rosin potatoes hail from the South’s turpentine camps, where workers chipped and slashed and scraped pine trees to collect oleoresin (aka resin or gum), the trees’ natural defense mechanism. When a tree’s bark is breached — by a beetle, fungus, or a woodsman’s hack — it oozes gum, not sap, from the wound. When fossilized, oleoresin transforms into amber. When distilled, it yields turpentine and rosin, whose uses range from paint thinner and Vicks VapoRub to rubber cement and chewing gum, respectively.

Did you know we created an Excel chart with drivetrain part prices taken directly from official service catalogs – precisely to stop the misinformation pushed by mainstream media? The truth is that the most expensive vehicles to maintain are actually: 1) hybrids, 2) fossil-fuel cars, and only after that come EVs.

The Software Essays that Shaped Me

An effect that’s being more and more widely reported is the increase in time it’s taking developers to modify or fix code that was generated by Large Language Models. 

If you’ve worked on legacy systems that were written by other people, perhaps decades ago, you’ll recognise this phenomenon. Before we can safely change code, we first need to understand it – understand what it does, and also oftentimes why it does it the way it does. In that sense, this is nothing new. What is new is the scale of the problem being created as lightning-speed code generators spew reams of unread code into millions of projects.

It’s September 2025. We have Claude Opus 4.1. GPT-5. Nano banana. There has never been a better time in the history of computing to build software. Here are a few ideas I wish existed.

The Boat Race ins’t a cocktail party for gilded Oxbridge types. It’s free to watch, pulls two hundred thousand ordinary spectators to the Thames every year, and has always been a working-class London day out. Rowing may have its posh stereotype, but the event is about rivalry, endurance and spectacle – things any nation should be proud to show the world. Yet the BBC’s cultural gatekeepers have a deeper allergy: tradition that isn’t re-branded, rewritten, or apologised for. They can throw millions at “inclusive” events nobody asked for and wall-to-wall virtue TV. But a British crowd on the riverbank waving flags? That’s suspect. That’s “exclusive.”

Second, I speculate that the round circle carved into the stone, the centerpiece of the image, is not the sun but instead represents the North Celestial Pole (Earth’s projected rotational axis) as it appeared at some point in the distant past—based upon our knowledge of the Precession of the Equinoxes. Finally, I presume that the stone’s artist was both skilled in their knowledge of the night sky over their home and bore a desire to communicate an important message to those generations who followed.

After all, the transformation of the microcomputer hobby into a large-scale commercial enterprise came as a surprise to most outsiders. In 1977, the established mainframe and minicomputer makers remained cooly aloof from the microcomputer business. Clearly, computer enthusiasts had found in the Altair and its successors a fascinating gadget to occupy their spare hours. It did not necessarily follow that these toys had anything to do with the “real” computer business, any more than model rocketry had to do with putting a man on the moon. In a la of the leading minicomputer makers, Hewlett-Packard and Digital, were offered ready-made micro designs by computing-loving engineers within their ranks (Steve Wozniak and Dave Ahl, respectively), but both rejected the idea, unwilling to pursue a fringe market that seemed to have nothing to do with their business.[2]

The purpose of this article is to articulate how NASA ended up falling behind China, and more importantly, how the Western world could realistically retake the lead. But first, space policymakers must learn from their mistakes.

The effects of hospital systems acquiring physician practices are hard to determine, because until now, there has been no comprehensive source of data about these mergers and the effects of integration on pricing can be hard to isolate. New research by Yale SOM economist Fiona Scott Morton tackles these challenges, determining the scale of hospital-physician mergers and examining their effects on pricing. In their study, Scott Morton and her co-authors—Yale economist Zack Cooper; Stuart V. Craig and Ashley T. Swanson of the University of Wisconsin–Madison; Aristotelis Epanomeritakis of Harvard University; Matthew Grennan of Emory University; and Joseph R. Martinez of the University of California, San Francisco—found that these integrations significantly increase prices for consumers, because competition decreases.

No details due to encryption.

The guarantee structure (a more accurate way of saying it than “buyout”) is an interesting one, allowing the school some relief based on performance, and only up to 75%.  Of course, head coach candidates with more leverage would fight a clause like that and probably keep it out.