Car designs look more like each other than ever. Color is disappearing as most cars become white, gray, or black. From Sydney to Riyadh to Cleveland, an upscale coffee shop is more likely than ever to bear the same design features: reclaimed wood, hanging Edison bulbs, marble countertops. So is an Airbnb. Even celebrities increasingly look the same, with the rising ubiquity of “Instagram face” driven by cosmetic injectables and Photoshop touch-ups.

If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly
I’ll now cover the opposite case: my peers who see generative models as superior to their own output. I see this most often in professional communication, typically to produce fluff or fix the tone of their original prompts. Every single time, the model obscures the original meaning and adds layers of superfluous nonsense to even the simplest of ideas. If you’re lucky, it at least won’t be wrong, but most often the model will completely fabricate critical details of the original writing and produce something completely incomprehensible. No matter how bad any original human’s writing is, I can (hopefully?) trust that they have some kind of internal understanding to share; with a language model, there is no such luck.

“Whenever the time came to elect a new doge of Venice, an official went to pray in St. Mark’s Basilica, grabbed the first boy he could find in the piazza, and took him back to the ducal palace. The boy’s job was to draw lots to choose an electoral college from the members of Venice’s grand families, which was the first step in a performance that has been called tortuous, ridiculous, and profound. Here is how it went, more or less unchanged, for five hundred years, from 1268 until the end of the Venetian Republic.

The average crowd size for University of Wisconsin men’s basketball games slumped again this season.

…. and has used reserve funds to balance its budget in recent months.

You will then have a lean, mean combat-ready cadre of senior leaders, I promise.

The latest work builds on earlier breakthroughs from the Vesuvius Challenge, a global competition launched in 2023, which offers prizes for progress in reading the scrolls from 3D X-rays. Last year, a team of computer-savvy students shared the $700,000 (£527,350) grand prize for developing artificial intelligence software that enabled them to read 2,000 ancient Greek letters from another scroll.

Good call. Tweet it from the official account.

And we STILL don’t know why U.S. taxpayers were paying China to alter a virus previously harmless to people so that it would be lethal to us. WHY did Fauci want this?

A $1 billion company has operated for 53 years with ZERO managers. Workers buy $500,000 machines without approval. Hire their own colleagues. Set their own salaries. And they’re outperforming every competitor in their industry. The coolest company you’ve never heard of ?

The way we build and ship software these days is mostly ridiculous, leading to apps using millions of lines of code to open a garage door, and other simple programs importing 1,600 external code libraries—dependencies—of unknown provenance. Software security is dire, which is a function both of the quality of the code and the sheer amount of it. Many of us programmers know the current situation is untenable. Many programmers (and their management) sadly haven’t ever experienced anything else. And for the rest of us, we rarely get the time to do a better job.

Because one day, when the machine stops, we’ll need to remember how to think.

WW2 Aircraft recognition posters.

In short, getting things done means getting them in a state where:

(a) executives at the company understand what’s happened, and (b) are happy with it

To many, this will be an unsatisfying definition of what it means to get things done. Lots of engineers will want a more solid definition than “it’s a social construct”. However, as someone with a philosophy background, I have a healthy respect for social constructs. The concept “chair” is a social construct, and chairs are plenty real[2]. In some ways, “getting things done” is even more real. It can pay your rent! If you don’t respect it, it can even get you fired.

“You think I’m gonna be sitting in line at United?!” The utter contempt for the victims of his own policies is just breathtaking. This is the Democrats FAR LEFT flank! Fighting the oligarchy and climate change from private jets, sentencing you to carbon taxes, sneering at coach.

That’s why, as uncomfortable and old-fashioned as it may sound, you should let someone set you up.

Among the most impressive manufacturing achievements of the US during WWII was the number of ships it produced. Prior to the war, the American shipbuilding industry had been moribund. Shipyards had been busy during and immediately following WWI, but the huge flood of wartime ships greatly reduced demand for new ones, and American shipyards didn’t produce a single oceangoing hull between 1922 and 1928. The onset of the Great Depression only made things worse, and by 1935 annual tonnage produced by US commercial shipbuilders had fallen to its lowest level in more than 100 years.

What’s unfolding now is a case study in how some progressive movements have become more invested in symbols than systems;

I suppose you could argue Sanders goal, of among other things, decreasing the amount of private jet flights, is so morally righteous he has to fly a few private jets to accomplish it.

At the heart of the energy plan is the construction of a small modular reactor, a type of transportable nuclear reactor assembled on site, which can power a wide range of applications, including AI data centers. If successful, Argentina could be the first country in the world to have a commercially available SMR, and only the third after China and Russia to have an operational one.

The absurdity is everywhere. You see it in music, where record labels prefer to invest in 50-year-old songs—instead of new hits. You see it in film, where a studio dumps 36 Marvel superhero movies on the market—and then acts surprised because audiences sicken of them. These ridiculous actions tell us that a reversal is at hand. We don’t measure that by anything logical. We measure it by the absurdity.

To fill the remaining vacancies, the Admiralty waived their “able-bodied” requirement and drafted 500 men from the “Corps of Invalids,” a stockpile of army veterans who were too old, injured, or otherwise infirm for further army service. Some of these men were barely able to stand unassisted, let alone walk, or handle rigging on a lurching deck. Among those who could walk, many of them did, directly away from the navy ships, before the squadron was even underway.

In 1981, the Hearst Corporation donated its newsreel collection to the University of California. In cooperation with the UCLA Film & Television Archive, the Packard Humanities Institute is developing this website as part of a joint project to make the Hearst newsreel collection more easily accessible to the public.

Porsche and now Mercedes limiting charging performance of some of their EVs. Not knowing all the details, but mein Gott, german engineering: was hat dich bloß so ruiniert?

I know the series is cringe now but my theory remains that Jill Biden thought she could pull a Claire Underwood.

VW down a million cars. GM down a million cars. Jeep JV bankrupt. Suzuki out. Nissan deeply wounded.

Which brings me to Boston. Ever heard of Route 128? To my surprise, neither have any of my students at Duke or the entrepreneurs I’ve met in Silicon Valley. I’m surprised because it wasn’t so long ago that Silicon Valley was considered a poor cousin of Boston’s tech center—a cluster of technology companies located along this freeway which partially rings the city. Starting in the 1960s and on through the 1980s, Route 128 was, if anything, more closely associated with tech than Silicon Valley. Today few young technology workers even know where Route 128 is located, let alone its importance in the tech world. Silicon Valley has simply left Boston’s tech center behind.

A U.S. defense official told TWZ yesterday that Yemeni militants have or are suspected to have brought down six MQ-9s since March 15. Fox News reported today that U.S. officials have acknowledged the loss of another Reaper, the seventh one since the beginning of last month. Back in March, an unnamed U.S. defense official told Stars and Stripes that the Houthis had downed 12 Reapers since October 2023.

the pipe organ is a big box of whistles. Each pipe sits on top of a hollow wind chest that is filled with compressed air provided by a bellows or blower. Each ‘stop’ at the organ console represents a set of pipes (a rank) of a particular tone color, with a different pipe for every note on the keyboard. Pulling the stop activates a slider under that specific set of pipes on the windchest, making them available as a sound-source. The wind chest also contains a series of valves (pallets) connected to the keyboard by a mechanical linkage. These pallets govern the flow of air to each pipe, and even though a stop may be on, no pipes will sound until a key is depressed and its respective pallet opens. This allows the compressed air to pass up through the pipe for that note, creating sound

Reading obituaries can boost creativity by exposing you to distant ideas, fueling the associations that lead to unexpected breakthroughs.

And… Not every address is relevant. Some benches are on streets. But we probably don’t want to imply that the bench is inside or belongs to a specific nearby house.

In China, doing business there meant providing “benefit” to its new and growing industries. “Benefit” was a loosely defined term that generally meant transferring technology, helping create a supply chain and ordering parts and components made in China. For some, it meant providing kickbacks. (This is not suggesting Airbus engaged in kickbacks, but corruption is a matter of public record. Such was suggested to me when I was doing business in China between 1989 and 1993.)

Informants weren’t just deployed to sabotage group activities and implement Zersetzung plans, but also to gather intelligence on individuals and groups (around 160km worth of Stasi archives survived the end of the GDR). Most intelligence was used to evaluate relationships and activities (which then led to an extension of intelligence gathering to previously untargeted individuals and groups), and as a basis for planning Zersetzung operations. Obviously plans for actions and activities were also reported, but these were acted upon only in rare and serious cases – if intelligence were used to disrupt the activities in any obvious way then suspicion could be drawn to the informant.

“Subsidence has become a huge challenge,” said Mehdi Pirhadi, a member of Tehran city council. He warned the “massive land sinking will destroy infrastructure and threaten lives” unless it was addressed urgently.

This interactive tool allows you to toggle between 5 different maps of Milwaukee from different points in its history. Much changes between them. Two of the most dramatic changes to explore are the demolition of many neighborhoods to create freeways and the creation of much of the modern-day lakefront via infill.

Zhaoxin is a Chinese x86 CPU designer. The KaiXian KX-7000 is Zhaoxin’s latest CPU, and features a new architecture dubbed “????”. ???? is a road in Shanghai called “Century Avenue”, following Zhaoxin’s practice of naming architectures after Shanghai landmarks. Zhaoxin is notable because it’s a joint venture between VIA Technologies and the Shanghai municipal government. It inherits VIA’s x86-64 license, and also enjoys powerful government backing. That’s a potent combination, because Zhaoxin’s cores are positioned to take advantage of the strong x86-64 software ecosystem.

Between 1960 and 1967, the almost forgotten Lebanese Rocket Society, led by its founder Manoug Manougian, competed with the great powers of the Cold War to create a space program in Lebanon. Founded as a student association within the Haigazian College in Beirut in November 1960, the Rocket Society operated without any official funding from the state or the university. Relying on the dedication of a few professors, seven students, and a modest donation from the Lebanese entrepreneur and Parliamentarian Emile Bustani, what the burgeoning Society lacked in resources, it made up for in ingenuity, drive, and vision.

Regardless of how one feels about DeepSeek’s open-source R1 model, it is a clear indication that innovation is moving rapidly around the world, with or without leading U.S. tech. If U.S. platforms are absent, companies will turn to strategic competitors like Huawei to fill the gap. This is why leadership in AI depends not just on what we restrict—but on what we enable.

If you or someone you love has lost the ability to speak, you can sign up to our Patient Registry today and help shape the future of communication. (3/3)

For the first time in US Gov history, 25 people are retiring online only, to inform scaling to everyone. This is a big win for retirees to get their full check faster, and testament to how quickly @USOPM is working towards the President’s software modernization Exec Order ????

The budget contains some notable changes for the US space agency. Overall, NASA is asked to take a 25 percent cut in its budget, from about $25 billion to $18.8 billion. Ars has previously reported on some of these proposed cuts, most notably to its science budget. These include a $2.265 billion reduction in Space science and a $1.161 billion reduction in Earth science. Perhaps the most notable cancellation here is the Mars Sample Return mission, which the budget proposal says will be achieved by human missions to Mars.

100x better models running on 100x better chips running in data centers with 100x more chips is a total increase of 1,000,000x. A million times more artificial intelligence.

This is the story of the people who made music visible.

The Altair was created by a small company called MITS, which initially stood for Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry. In 1974 MITS had been selling calculator kits via mail order. Later in the year they started working on a computer based on the then-new Intel 8080 8-bit CPU. About this time they were contacted by Popular Electronics magazine who was looking to do a feature on a computer project.

So why are American SOF used almost exclusively at the tactical level?  Because the people employing them, the staffs of major commanders, don’t understand operational art.  Some service schools claim to teach it but they don’t.  They reduce it to processes, as Second Generation war does with everything.  But an art reduced to process results in crap.  One U.S. military school goes so far as to say that all you have to do is write a paragraph where this is a noun, that is a verb, and presto!  You know what to do at the operational level.  That’s operational art for dogs.  As General Hermann Balck said, “It is an art; only a few can do it, most can never learn.  The world is not full of Raphaels either.”

The MNP is the world’s first purpose-built drone carrier.  And it costs only about $135 million, approximately one-hundredth of the price of a Ford-class American aircraft carrier.

“Bomb, bomb, bomb, that’s all my generals know how to do.”

One of the core questions discussed in the breakouts and in the halls was how to broaden the geospatial audience. How can we better communicate geo data’s utility, in all industries and domains? Many tactics and case studies were debated, but the one I kept coming back to is that of DuckDB.

There are so many solutions to this problem. We don’t need to list them all here. I documented some of them one time, but there are many more.

Ultimately, SpaceX’s simplified Starlink deployment architecture has fewer parts and eliminates the need for a carrier structure. This allows SpaceX to devote a higher share of the rocket’s mass and volume capacity to the Starlink satellites themselves, replacing dead weight with revenue-earning capability. The dispenser architecture used by Amazon is a more conventional design, and gives satellite engineers more flexibility in designing their spacecraft. It also allows satellites to spread out faster in orbit.

We paid $50 million for half of GEICO in 1976, what turned out to be half of GEICO, $50 million. We now own 100%, but 50% of $2 billion that we earned in the first quarter is $1 billion, which on a $50 million investment… The only thing I’d like to add is in addition to the underwriting profit, GEICO provides $39 billion of float.

It improved coverage but not care. It was the result of complete regulatory capture from health insurance companies (requiring 85% Medical Loss Ratio) and medical record/billing vendors (requiring Meaningful Use).

Two young German travelers expected their Hawaii trip to be the highlight of a months-long world adventure. Instead, their visit ended in handcuffs, jail time, and deportation — a stark reminder of the risks some international visitors face at U.S. borders. (more)

This reliance on readily available solutions, particularly for familiar problems, creates a real risk: engineers may inadvertently atrophy their own problem-solving skills, hindering their ability to tackle truly novel challenges.

A podcast on epic systems.

“No one would build a volume that’s a void like that anymore,” says Paul Aferiat, a former employee of Gwathmey’s, whose firm Stamberg Aferiat + Associates was tasked with expanding the barn in 1995 when it was bought by new owners Dana and Paul Caan. Gwathmey recommended Aferiat when the Caan’s asked who would be a good fit to work on the barn as they had run out of bedrooms for their three daughters.

The only thing the Fed seems to be good at is using its vast powers to inject trillions of dollars of liquidity into the financial system to bail out banks from a problem the Feds often “help” the banks create. Former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke even called the subprime mortgage crises “largely contained” as late as May 2007 when the crisis was turning into an economic tsunami.

What has gotten less attention is that his case is an example of the self-defeating absurdities of our immigration system and, in particular, of how it hands out “humanitarian protection.”. When Abrego Garcia avoided deportation back in 2019, he didn’t take

Consider where we are in this debate: 20 years ago the cry from LGBT activists was “leave us alone, let us live our private lives.”. Now it’s “you will bake me the cake, and you will force your children to sit through our curriculum, regardless of your religious beliefs.”

DeepSeek represents a profound threat to our nation’s security. Although it presents itself as just another AI chatbot, offering users a way to generate text and answer questions, closer inspection reveals that the app siphons data back to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), creates security vulnerabilities for its users, and relies on a model that covertly censors and manipulates information pursuant to Chinese law. Equally troubling, the model appears to have been built using stolen U.S. technology on the back of U.S. semiconductor chips that are prohibited from sale to China without an export license and when it was released, PRC-affiliated social media accounts amplified and celebrated the model, according to Graphika research. This report documents some of the risks DeepSeek poses and explains how its development is based on common Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tactics designed to unlawfully undermine U.S. technological leadership and critical American policies to protect national security.

Should we expect a gale of chaos to continue blowing through American tariff policy for the next four years? Yes, we should. By imposing punitive tariffs and threatening to retract America’s security umbrella, Trump hopes to coerce the world into sharing what he sees as the burdens of providing public goods like the global dollar system and military protection. Within Trump’s White House, at least three factions are vying for influence on these matters. Peter Navarro, Trump’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, holds the most aggressive and hawkish views. The titles of his books, like The Coming China Wars (2006) and Death by China (2011), give a flavor of his approach, as does a document he circulated within the White House during Trump’s first term alleging that a “weakened manufacturing base” would cause a “higher abortion rate,” a “lower fertility rate,” and “increased spousal abuse.” The administration’s more technocratic figures, such as Miran and J.D. Vance, have a clearer set of goals and a more coherent, but still predatory, worldview. Their thinking rests on a nationalist critique of global finance, which they blame for deindustrialization and the long-term unemployment left unaddressed after 2008. Both camps are in tension with Elon Musk, the South African industrialist, whose multinational corporations will suffer from trade conflicts. At the moment, however, Navarro seems to be ascendant. 

SpaceX raised $10B. NASA spent $450B. Only one is reliably sending humans to orbit. I was bored this weekend so did some digging on where NASA’s $450B went since 2002.

A new profile on billionaire heir and socialite dilettante @AlexanderSoros details the noble and inspiring ways that the Democratic Party is combatting the evils of oligarchy (by @svzwood in @NYMag):

A Practical Way to Get More Out of Limited Foreign Assistance Budgets

Grades for Water Quality-Health, Infrastructure & Operations, and Finance are based on data provided by Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin (PSC) for the years 2022 and 2023. Grades for Communication are based on data the WWEP team collected in 2024. Some inaccuracies in grading may be due to accidental misreporting or errors in the underlying data. Water customers are encouraged to contact their utilities with questions or concerns.

Let’s summarize:

? Allies are being asked to pay
? IMF is being retooled
? U.S. assets are being monetized
? Tariffs are a negotiating tool, not a tax policy
? Dollar is being gradually reweighted
This is the setup year. The real game is 2025–2029.

NTT Corporation (Headquarters: Chiyoda, Tokyo; President and CEO: Akira Shimada; hereinafter “NTT”) has become the first in the world to successfully trigger and guide lightning using a drone. This experiment also demonstrated, under natural lightning conditions, the effectiveness of both the drone’s lightning protection technology and the electric field-based lightning triggering method. These results are expected to contribute to further research on the still-mysterious mechanisms of lightning and to help reduce lightning-related damage to cities and people.

The internet is littered with digital ghost towns—premium domains once associated with thriving businesses, now sitting dormant or parked, waiting for their next life. Some of the biggest companies in the world have made strategic acquisitions, only to shut down the businesses they bought, leaving behind valuable domain names that are either redirected, held indefinitely, or simply left in limbo. Let’s take a look at some high-profile cases where major corporations scooped up valuable domains, shut down the original companies, and left the URLs in the digital graveyard.

First BETA-collection of Berlin-based DeepTech Startups

Pick the cheapest geocoding API provider for your project. An impartial comparison of pricing for HERE, Google Maps Platform, Azure Maps, OpenCage, TomTom Maps, LocationIQ, and Nominatim.

The Rise and Fall and Rise Again of Lionel Trains.

Sons had tried to disinhert murderer’s girlfriend,
their adoptive sister. The adopted daughter of Dr. Beth Potter and Robin Carre has settled out of court with her two siblings over the slain couple’s contested will. Miriam’s boyfriend, Khari Sanford, was convicted of their murder in 2022 and sentenced to life in prison without parole. Sanford and a young accomplice abducted the two from their beds on the near West side of Madison on March 30, 2020. Sanford held a handgun on them as he directed the driver to the north entrance to the UW Arboretum. That is where Sanford shot each in the head, execution style, trial evidence showed. Joggers found the two the next morning, still in their night clothes on that frigid morning, Dr. Potter was alive but barely. She died in a hospital emergency room hours later.

Yet, in an era of airlines placing loose bets on aviation startups, United’s investment and interest in JetZero’s design stands out from its previous venture capital investments, which have been in aircraft whose market niches don’t target a spot in its current fleet. Notably, this JetZero investment is the first to offer a potential direct challenge to the Airbus and Boeing duopoly.

Yet even as the Chinese argument has some surface plausibility, many of its claims are dubious. While it’s true that China has sought to forge a new economic order through initiatives such as the BRI and agreements such as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership—and that its exports to BRI countries now exceed those to the United States, the European Union, and Japan combined—these figures tell only part of the story. A significant portion of these exports are transshipments ultimately destined for the U.S. market. These transshipments can take various forms: simple repackaging of Chinese-made goods, basic assembly using Chinese components in third countries, or even falsified export documentation listing obscure jurisdictions like Heard Island and McDonald Islands as the country of origin. As a result, the apparent decline in China’s direct exports to the United States—from 19.2 percent in 2018 to 14.7 percent in 2024—is likely overstated. In reality, the volume of Chinese goods reaching the United States might not have fallen much, if at all.

The IRS Tea Party scandal is about as black-and-white a scandal as you can imagine. All the information is out there and uncontested. If you think it’s fake, that is a problem you have with being able to digest plain factual information over partisan talking point.

The victims were in the courtroom ready for the pre-trial conference; they were waiting for justice. Judge Dugan found out that ICE agents were in the hallway. She put Flores-Ruiz in the jury box (unusual) & went to confront the federal agents in the hall.

How did we end up with a more than 5000 pound BMW M5 in the year of our Lord 2025?

The ex-ATF informant, Carol Howe—who warned her handlers in early 1995 that neo-Nazi extremists in Oklahoma were planning to attack federal buildings—had vanished in the late 90s after being acquitted from explosives charges. In the remaining years of her life, she was reportedly living in Sparta, Tennessee under the name “Sarah Collins.” She died in a house fire on Jan. 6, according to documentarian Jon Ronson.

‘I have an assumption that my chromosomes are probably XY but I don’t know.’

Arthur John Keeffe, ‘Practicing Lawyer’s Guide to the Current Law Magazines,’ 48 American Bar Asso. J. 491, 491 (1962) (explaining that during the American Civil War, federal authorities arrested Judge James L. Bartol of the Maryland Court of Appeals and Judge Richard Bennett Carmichael of the Maryland Circuit Court, and the “latter was arrested while conducting court”).

What is described above happened under President Obama and under President Lincoln. Judges are not above the law; judges cannot interpose their courthouse and personal rules and policies against federal officers. And when state judges violate the law, they must be arrested .  .  . like you and me and anyone else. We all know that—or, at least, we should. 

I must admit I did not realize that if you are a prior deport, you do not need to appear before a judge. I also learned that some who are not prior deports can be removed without a judge as part of the Expedited Removal System created by Bill Clinton in 1996. (verified by the American Immigration Council)

Shelter I spent the majority of nights on my trip inside a Naturehike Cloud-Up 1 Person Tent. I was happy with the volume of the assembled tent as a 5’11” person. It was also a small, light (~1500 grams) piece of luggage. That said, the tent didn’t make it through an overnight rainstorm without leaking water through the floor. I’d recommend finding another one :/ I also brought a 20-degree sleeping bag and a small sleeping pad. If I had taken the trip in the summer, a 40-degree bag would probably have sufficed.

Before I get to some supporting evidence for that statement, let’s recap what apertures really do:

• f/1.2 — let’s call this our new “baseline”
• f/1.4 — half stop slower (-0.5EV)
• f/1.8 — one and a third stops slower (-1.3EV)
• f/2 — one and a half stops slower (-1.5EV)
• f/2.8 — two and a half stops slower (-2.5EV)

“All you need are a good pair of tennis shoes or some sort of sneakers that you can run in, and they can come play,” Feldman said. 

In The Final Flight of Captain Forrester, Texas Monthly staff writer and podcast host Josh Alvarez takes listeners along Karoni’s harrowing journey to find her father. Traveling to Hawaii, Utah, Vietnam, and Washington, D.C., Alvarez chronicles Karoni’s fight for answers. Through interviews with American and Vietnamese government officials, Forrester’s family members, forensic scientists, anthropologists, military pilots, and a retired CIA spy, The Final Flight of Captain Forrester reveals the extreme challenges involved in finding missing soldiers decades after the fight has ended.

Over four weeks she drove 2,600 miles and visited hundreds of local breweries, restaurants and cheese shops throughout the state. The result is a 200-page highlight reel titled “Beer, Brats, and Cheese: A Wisconsin Road Trip.” “Was it crazy? In more ways than one. Did I question my life choices? Maybe just a few times. But was it worth it? Undoubtedly, 100 percent yes,” she wrote in the book.

At one of the milking robots, several cows are lined up, nose to tail, politely waiting their turn. The cows can get milked by robot whenever they like, which typically means more frequently than the twice a day at a traditional dairy farm. Not only is getting milked more often more comfortable for the cows, cows also produce about 10 percent more milk when the milking schedule is completely up to them. “There’s a direct correlation between stress and milk production,” Jacobs says. “Which is nice, because robots make cows happier and therefore, they give more milk, which helps us sell more robots.”

Typography is a discipline that studies the formation and appearance of letters, not only as symbols of verbal sounds but also as elements in design. The art of typography refers to the arrangement of letters as the main element (Wijaya, 1999). The difference between Japanese typography and Latin letter typography is based on the complexity of Japanese character writing. The Japanese language has a writing system that uses Chinese characters (kanji), ideograms; hiragana and katakana, and the Roman alphabet (Romaji (Igarashi, 2007)

Researchers from China are to be allowed access to half a million UK GP records despite western intelligence agencies’ fears about the authoritarian regime amassing health data, the Guardian can reveal. Preparations are under way to transfer the records to UK Biobank, a research hub that holds detailed medical information donated by 500,000 volunteers. One of the world’s largest troves of health data, the facility makes its information available to universities, scientific institutes and private companies. A Guardian analysis shows one in five successful applications for access come from China.

Recently I was targeted by an extremely sophisticated phishing attack, and I want to highlight it here. It exploits a vulnerability in Google’s infrastructure, and given their refusal to fix it, we’re likely to see it a lot more. Here’s the email I got:

Divorce formularies from PBMs. Require them to come from independent organizations with no economic incentive from the formulary
Make them about wellness, not pay for play like a grocery store endcap. This ends rebates and allows for net pricing. It also allows for better care and wellness.

As promised, I have declassified the Biden Administration’s Strategic Implementation Plan for Countering Domestic Terrorism.

Mauch has made some upgrades to his operation. In our previous story, we described how Mauch was renting an air compressor to blow fiber through his conduits. He recently bought an industrial air compressor at a government liquidation auction, spending under $4,000 for equipment that often costs about $20,000, he said. He had previously spent $8,000 on a directional drill machine that installs cables or conduits under driveways and roads without digging giant holes.

California-based Natilus is on target to begin delivering its first aircraft for service in 2029, a Blended Wing Body (BWB) turboprop cargo aircraft, according to CEO Aleksey Matyushev.

What if UBER partnered with Hertz on an AV fleet roll out over time?

So it’s interesting that an American brand is trying to bring its concept to France. While France isn’t hurting for large chain stores, Costco is a different story. What they sell is more specialized, many items are their own brand, Kirkland, and almost all items are sold in larger quantities, such as 3-pound (1,35kg) bags of almonds vs. 4-ounce (125g) bags at Carrefour. When I see those tiny bags in my local grocery store, I wonder: Who buys a 1/2 cup of almonds? I eat that in one afternoon.

The Chinese growth and stability model also requires relatively secure energy supplies. For that it relies on the United States and its allies, as the Chinese programs for nuclear and solar power remain far from their final goals. If the Western alliance system collapses, who is to keep the Middle East relatively stable, at least stable from the point of view of procuring fossil fuels? China hardly seems up to that task, as the country has neither the means, the inclination, the experience, nor the allies to do the job.

Effective April 5, 2025, all shipments to the U.S. with a declared customs value over USD 800 require formal entry processing – down from the previous USD 2,500 threshold due to new U.S. Customs regulations.

They even possess many of the characteristics of a nation—all they need to become a network state is to recognize that they are part of a group that has the potential to have a political identity. Once they have this consciousness, they can create a state to represent and protect them.

Distributed filesystems provide two main advantages over local storage – they can serve massive amounts of data (up to petabytes) and provide high throughput that exceed the capabilities of a single machine. They offer fault tolerance (the system keeps running if one machine goes down) and redundancy (if data gets corrupted on one node, other nodes have original copies).

Those five values will replace Boeing’s current set of principles put in place by former CEO Dave Calhoun, who took over after two fatal MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019 and then stepped down after the panel blowout last year. 

judyrecords is a 100% free nationwide search engine that lets you instantly search hundreds of millions of United States court cases and lawsuits.judyrecords has over 100x more cases than Google Scholar and 10x more cases than PACER, the official case management system of the United States federal judiciary.As of Jul 2022, judyrecords now features free full-text search of all United States patents from 1/1/1976 to 07/01/2022 — over 8.1 million patents in total.

Today, I bring you an interview with Ryan Allen. Ryan Allen is a professor of international education at University of America in Southern California and the author of the newsletter “College Towns,” which explores the intersection of higher education and urbanism. Our conversation covers his transition from academic publishing to public writing, the challenges facing higher education, and how colleges can better integrate with their communities through thoughtful urban design.

Peter felt as if he had stepped on to an alien planet. There were no billboards, the streets were vast and the signs were incomprehensible. In South America, Rudi and Peter had explored on foot; here, they were whisked around by stern men in black Volga limousines. After a day in Leningrad, Rudi and Peter were driven to the railway station, where a private compartment in an overnight express train to Moscow awaited them. On arrival, they took a drive to one of the Stalin-era skyscrapers on the river embankment. To Peter, it looked like a vast castle from a fantasy comic. A safe-house apartment in the building was to be their home in Moscow. Inge was already there. A housekeeper cooked meals for the family, and that first evening the table was set for eight with plates of local delicacies and three glasses per person, for tangy Borjomi mineral water, wine and vodka. Several handlers from Directorate S, which ran the illegals programme, soon arrived for dinner.

the thing about stuff like this (demonstrated here in replies) is that people will say, “that was different” which is true but also elides the part where the difference is of degree rather than kind, so the only argument you can make is for restraint rather than principle.

I’ve highlighted in red what I think won’t work, yellow, what I’m unsure about, and green what I think will work.

beautiful losers model of the respectable Right….

Gen. Caine said the military is too slow to integrate advanced technology into its weapons and other systems.

For Synology customers, the challenge of being vendor-locked into using Synology branded drives is not just about alleged firmware improvements. It is also about being able to keep data secure while finding easy replacements.

Because the information is suppressed.
The planning and execution of Brennan’s anti-Trump ops took place at Cambridge University, England. The word University and the country, UK with capital London was classified for 9 years until Pres Trump released the docs this month.

Criticism #4: “He’s pushing anti-vax conspiracy theories again!” This one is just false. Not once during his 27-minute speech did he mention vaccines. Instead, he discussed toxins such as mold, pesticides, and additives. But the media (who appear to hate him for past positions) decided to resurrect the vaccine angle even though he didn’t bring it up. This is yet another example of a targeted smear campaign by individuals more invested in promoting narratives than seeking the truth.

Edward Feser wrote a critique of President Trump’s new tariffs and his trade policy. A reader asked ChatGPT to respond to his critique as if it was me. And apparently AI now does non-fiction nearly as well as it does fiction.

1. Feser’s Overemphasis on Prudential Moderation over Existential Necessity

Vox Day might begin by pointing out that Feser’s argument is essentially one of technocratic prudence—tariffs might be useful in moderation, if well-targeted, in the right economic climate, with good timing, and clear justification. Vox would call this academic dithering in the face of civilizational crisis. From his view, America is not merely suffering a mild imbalance of trade—it is being gutted by decades of globalist betrayal that have systematically offshored its manufacturing capacity, hollowed out its industrial base, and turned its working class into wage-serfs of the service economy.

Forget “incrementally,” it’s got to be exploded. Would more of the same and a slow death be better?

In the absence of a more senior officer, the surrender was accepted by Colonel Bùi Tín, a journalist who many years earlier had witnessed the departure of the French from Hanoi. Bùi Tín would eventually become disillusioned with the new order. He was destined to end his days in Paris, an exile from his homeland. His memoir Following Ho Chi Minh is one of the very few inside accounts of life in the upper reaches of the secretive Vietnamese Communist party.

“The threat to democracy, indeed the existential threat to democracy, is the unelected bureaucracy of lifetime tenured civil servants who believe they answer to no one, who believe they can do whatever they want without consequence, who believe they can set their own agenda no matter what Americans vote for.”

Final conclusion be: Some tariff be permanent, much America company move back. Trump say he victory. China increase better relation with other Asia countrys for increase trade to make up for lost America trade, China also cheat and steal less. China reputation enhance. Then Xijinping say he victory

MUSK: “People think that Biden was asleep at the switch. They weren’t asleep at the switch. It was a massive large scale program to import as many illegals as possible, ultimately to change the entire voting map of the United States and disenfranchise the American people and making it a deep blue one party state from which there would be no escape

Find new friends. I just left visiting my two youngest daughters, one with a 5 day old son and one with a 3 month old daughter. They are happier than I have ever seen them. Their joy was palpable.

A few months back Linneaus reached out to me on Twitter, asking if we could have a formal debate on the topic of Race. I agreed, and our opening arguments are published here (and on his website oldluth.com). 

The restaurant was broken into twice within three months, prompting Tarantino to spend thousands of dollars on reinforced security windows. Pink Tarantino was in the building in her office when the second break-in unfolded and saw the whole thing on their security cameras.

The statements the jury was not allowed to see demonstrate the FBI’s deep involvement in concocting not only the Whitmer plot but a separate one against VA governor Ralph Northam (by using same handlers and informant, Dan Chappell), organizing almost all of the events including the “recon” trip to Whitmer’s vacation cottage, and even disclosing exculpatory evidence.

Hurdles to convenient voting access once worked to the benefit of the Republican party in Wisconsin, whether deliberately or not. Now, the calculus appears reversed. The best chances for a GOP candidate will appear in an electorate of 3 million or more. As any Democrat working on campaigns in the Obama years could tell you, winning elections by maximizing turnout is possible, but hard.

Altair Basic.

1) 1996 Chuck Schumer says the number one reason illegals come to the US is to defraud Social Security

Does the Governor realize that since 2000 the number of Illinois manufacturing jobs has fallen from over 900,000 to less than 600,000?

Now you identify genuinely strategic areas. You do not care about French wine or Canadian maple syrup. You do care if the US military’s vendor’s vendors are located in China, as per this Pentagon-commissioned study:

A year and a half since fires devastated the historic town of Lahaina on the island of Maui, Hawaii, only six houses have been rebuilt—six out of more than 2,000. more.

The Crouches had unwittingly stumbled into a little-known battle over tidy neighborhood lawns. Celebrated in modern American suburbia, tended lawns have become a prized avatar of the American dream of home ownership, a key backdrop to neighborhood rituals and a symbol of order and calm and safety — of a good life. The moral rectitude around lawns has been given muscle through HOAs — which governneighborhoods home to more than 75 million Americans — and town and city ordinances that stipulate how long grass can be and how often people should trim it.

As with cryptocurrency, if it were so easy, it wouldn’t be worth anything. Value is tied to scarcity, and scarcity on social networks derives from proof of work. Status isn’t worth much if there’s no skill and effort required to mine it. It’s not that a social network that makes it easy for lots of users to perform well can’t be a useful one, but competition for relative status still motivates humans. Recall our first tenet: humans are status-seeking monkeys. Status is a relative ladder. By definition, if everyone can achieve a certain type of status, it’s no status at all, it’s a participation trophy.

In the meantime, those fascinated by accounting minutiae still have plenty to hold their interest, as Tesla invests heavily in AI infrastructure and has almost $7bn worth of assets under construction. Cash generation and debt issuance remain areas of interest.

The end of Argentina’s extensive rent controls has resulted in a tripling of the supply of rental apartments in Buenos Aires and a 30 percent drop in price. More.

Do you know how many times NPR interviewed Adam Schiff about the Russia Collusion hoax?”

NPR CEO: “Idk.”

REP FALLON: “25 times. How many times did NPR interview Chairman Comer about the Biden impeachment inquiry and the Biden family’s illicit business dealings?”

NPR CEO: “Idk.”

REP FALLON: “0 times. 25 to 0. Between June and November of 2023, PBS’s News Hour used the term ‘far-right’ 162 times, and ‘far-left’ was only used 6 times. Do you find that troubling?”

The most surprising thing about Ezra Klein is how he takes zero responsibility for his work lauding Obama, the ACA, and the entire framework he’s now criticizing. The idea of demand stimulus without looking at supply and regulatory bullshit is Obamacare!

Gotta find the guy who did that!

“I have contempt for such people and I want to make that clear. Because they’re virtue signaling and their lack of a solution means that kids don’t have a father. It means parents lost a son. For what? Nothing.”

2011: Obama signs a @DOGE-style executive order to “cut waste and promote efficiency.”

Recently, for no good reason at all, I did some archaeological research into the Postgres buffer manager locking design evolution for the past 30 years. I suppose no one but the most hopeless Postgres nerds will find this topic interesting. So, here we go!

First of all, what does Postgres buffer manager do? Just briefly, Postgres organizes on-disk data files in 8KB fix-sized pages. It also maintains a fixed-size array of page buffers in memory, to cache recent reads and writes of these disk pages and improve performance through caching and lazy disk flush.

This sprawling diagram was designed by Daniel McCallum in 1855 shortly after he became general superintendent of the New York and Erie Railroad and drawn by Civil Engineer George Holt Henshaw. He created it as part of his efforts to improve accountability, operational efficiency, and lines of communications throughout the complex railroad system. Unfortunately, his insistence on enforcing rules he devised to govern all employees ultimately resulted in their resentment toward him, financial difficulties for the railroad as a whole, the first strike of railroad engineers in America, and his resignation. He was later appointed by President Lincoln to take charge of the United States Military Railroads due to his bridge and railroad expertise (Wrege et al., 2005). Despite its origins and the outcomes it precipitated, the diagram remains an impressive feat of design that up until just a few decades ago was relatively unknown.

I was first to report on a January 2016 letter from the intelligence community’s internal watchdog that exposed the Clinton email scandal. The Intelligence Community Inspector General concluded Clinton’s emails contained “CONFIDENTIAL, SECRET AND TOP SECRET/SAP” intelligence.

Cummins is launching a gas engine that behaves like a diesel to avoid all the DEF regulations.
B6.7 inline-six gas engine makes up to 300hp and 660 lb-ft torque at 1,800 RPM. They will launch in Kenworth Class 5 to 7 trucks. That covers T180-T480 models.

this is the key question. events like this were terrible for journalism

The NYT reporter who reported this initial story was neither a health nor science reporter (of which the Times employs many of both). She was, however, the daughter of a journalist infamous for collaborating with the intelligence community.

A Secret Mortgage Blacklist Is Leaving Homeowners Stuck With Unsellable Condos. Fewer homes can get Fannie Mae-backed mortgages, a response to Surfside condo collapse and insurance crunch

Starlink operates in more than 120 markets worldwide, though in some countries, SpaceX must coordinate spectrum sharing with domestic satellite operators before activating service.

Still, despite Weissmann’s status as a ferocious Trump critic and symbol of Russiagate, the Jenner & Block letters hint at wider institutional issues. “The problem is, all of Washington does this,” says an administration spokesperson. “The revolving door has turned into something completely corrupt, and that the weaponization of government is often coordinated from K Street. The administration wants it stopped.”

FinCEN “issued a Geographic Targeting Order (GTO) to further combat the illicit activities and money laundering of Mexico-based cartels and other criminal actors along the southwest border of the United States,” according to the announcement. “The GTO requires all money services businesses (MSBs) located in 30 ZIP codes across California and Texas near the southwest border to file Currency Transaction Reports (CTRs) with FinCEN at a $200 threshold, in connection with cash transactions.”

If I had to choose, I’d definitely choose to return to the job market of the 2010s, so I can be paid more to work less and have more job security. I’m not an idiot. But the silver lining to actually having to ship is that you’re no longer living in a dream. If you’re realistic about how things work, the job of software engineering becomes much easier to understand:

1. Providing value to the company gets you rewarded
2. Not providing value to the company gets you punished
3. “Value to the company” means furthering the explicit plans of your company’s executives

Mountain Village Town Manager Paul Wisor slammed the elder Horning as an out-of-touch owner whose resort is aging and needs major infrastructure upgrades and engaged ownership that works productively with his town, which is connected to the old mining town of Telluride by an iconic public-transit-style gondola that is aging out.

Never thought we would find ourselves needing to defend our leading technological competitor but here goes….. We remind the Governor of his own positions on EVs and by extension – Tesla – before he was beaten like a rented mule last November.

The Freebsd, gnu/Linux, Solaris, and Windows operating systems have kernels that provide comparable facilities. Interestingly, their code bases share almost no common parts, while their development processes vary dramatically. We analyze the source code of the four systems by collecting metrics in the areas of file organization, code structure, code style, the use of the C preprocessor, and data organization.

The aggregate results indicate that across various areas and many di?erent metrics, four systems developed using wildly di?erent processes score comparably. This allows us to posit that the structure and internal quality attributes of a working, non-trivial software artifact will represent first and fore-most the engineering requirements of its construction, with the influence of process being marginal, if any.

The EVERY1 will be the first to ship with Rivian’s vehicle architecture and software as part of a $5.8 billion joint venture struck last year between the German automaker and U.S. EV maker. The ID.2all is based on the E3 1.1 architecture and software developed by VW’s software unit Cariad.

And memory is not the same as nostalgia. Many Azerbaijani emigrants lose their emotional connection with Baku even before they fully become emigrants. In fact, this loss of emotional connection often becomes an additional reason for their departure.

Confirmed donors to liberal Susan Crawford’s campaign, election is April 1st:

George Soros (NY) $ 4,451,000
Reid Hoffman (CA): $14,460,000
JB Pritzker (IL): $ 6,515,000
Karla Jurvetson (CA): $ 7,331,020

“You find contracts that are 10, 20, 30, $50 million and you just ask like, why are we doing this? And everyone’s just like, meh, I don’t know. And then you cancel it and then nothing happens. It’s just inertia, has just taken over.”

because those in that world collectively decided that identitarianism, not storytelling, was the most important thing

Charlie lives in Manvel, about twenty miles south of Houston, with her family. They spend almost every weekend at rodeos. Most are much larger than the Youth Rodeo Association (YRA) event in Giddings, but each one helps Charlie qualify for major competitions, including this month’s Hooey Junior Patriot, in Fort Worth, and the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. Winning at one of the prestigious events—where more than $100,000 is awarded to winners—would be a significant step toward a professional career, and Charlie has qualified for both.

Highlights

• •We use synthetic controls to assess the effect of the shale gas boom on U.S. green house gas emissions.
• •Our findings indicate that the shale gas boom reduced average U.S. annual green house gas emissions per capita by 7.5%.
• •We decompose the total treatment effect into substitution, transition, and consumption effects.

Basically, China is trying to do to AI what they always do: study, copy, optimize, and then bankrupt everyone with low prices and enormous scale.

We ate at the Four Seasons in the Seagram Building, on Park Avenue. Back then, it was Manhattan’s premier power lunch spot, also known as the Condé Nast cafeteria because so many of its editors and top executives ate there every day. The maître d’, Julian Niccolini, greeted Art effusively, and led him to his usual table. Without even asking, a waiter brought him a cocktail. Art ordered the spécialité de la maison: an absurdly expensive piece of Dover sole. I had the lamb chops. We went through two bottles of wine, and after we had settled on the financial terms, we celebrated with several glasses of cognac. When lunch was over, three hours later, Art and I staggered out without even looking at a bill. It was sent directly to the Condé Nast accounting department.

Within the span of 10 years, Rickover created an entire office dedicated to nuclear propulsion, and successfully launched the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine without cost overruns. He conclusively demonstrated the strategic importance of nuclear propulsion in a timeframe no one thought possible and helped the US beat the Soviets to nuclear propulsion for submarines by 3 years. His institutional legacy is the US Navy’s safe construction and operation of nuclear reactors.

Gasoline-powered cars generate more RFI than diesel-powered cars because they have spark plugs. That meant that NRAO had to purchase diesel cars when they bought their original fleet, and by the way, these cars are part of that original purchase.

Web SVG Images: Everything you need for your digital craft & design projects.
Find free SVG icons, SVG animations, and SVG tutorials to get you going.

We implemented an ELT stack for our new data platform, leveraging cheap storage to prioritize raw data ingestion and subsequent in-warehouse transformations. We also strategically reused existing software components where they weren’t being fully utilized, further optimizing our development efforts.

While US AID appears to pass a cost-benefit test, it does seem ripe for reform.  Based on what I have read and heard, I would focus all the more on public health programs, and forget about “trade promotion,” “democracy promotion,” and more.  I would get rid of virtually all of the consultants, and make direct transfers to worthy African and Ukraine programs, thus lowering overhead.  If such worthy programs exist, why not give them money directly?  Are they so hard to find?  And if so, how trustworthy are these intermediaries really?  What are they intermediating to?

In the United States, SpaceX’s historic launch competitor, United Launch Alliance, has yet to fly a single rocket this year. In fact, the company has not launched in 156 days. During that time, SpaceX has launched 64 Falcon 9 rockets. So yes, SpaceX has had some technical issues. But it is also flying circles around its competition.

“TSMC is essentially the only trillion-dollar company in the world not on the West Coast of the United States. It is this incredibly important thing in the world. It’s this unlikely success of grand scale—”. Morris Chang: “Unlikely, in your opinion…”

These pages contain a fairly brief technical history of Acorn Computers. I have decided to focus on the technology because that is where my interests lie. Only very major non-technical events in Acorn’s history have been included. If anyone finds any inaccuracies in the following pages please contact me using the link at the bottom of the page, including a correction if possible.

The bulldozer we know today took shape in the first quarter of the 20th century. In 1917, the Russell Grader Manufacturing Company advertised a bulldozer in their catalog: a huge metal blade pulled by mules that could cut into the earth and flatten the land. Other manufacturers like Holt, Caterpillar and R. G. LeTourneau were working on similar devices, technological descendants of scraping tools developed in the American West and associated with Mormon farmers. In time, animals were replaced with tractors (on either wheels or continuous tracks) powered first by steam, then gasoline and eventually diesel. The word, which at first referred only to the blade itself, started to mean the entire machine, one that was unrivaled in its ability to rip, shift and level earth.

But what we do instead, as non-strategic players, is deploy some ostentatious symbolism. When Volodymyr Zelensky walked around the table at last week’s European Council, every European leader got up to embrace him. They wanted to produce a counterpoint to that sofa scene in the Oval Office. But pointless posturing is not a strategy. I have yet to see any strategic purpose behind anything any of the Europeans, including Starmer, have done in the past two weeks. Everything they have done, including Friedrich Merz’s decision to exempt defence spending from Germany’s constitutional fiscal rules, has been as a result of Trump’s first move. They aren’t anticipating his second.

As we discussed on The Air Show recently, Southwest’s failure to change under previous CEO Gary Kelly had put the airline in a bad place that just primed it to be torn down by an activist investor like Elliott. Elliott came in pretending to be interested in improving Southwest, but everyone who saw a wolf in sheep’s clothing was right. Elliott only cares about Southwest until it can extract a nice gain on its investment. Then it’ll walk away and Southwest will be a shell of its former self.

Deciphering the dilemma: The surprising impact of QR code menus on diminishing customer loyalty.

To give you some idea of the scope of the problem I have listed a number of such truths. (Nearly all computing scientists I know well will agree without hesitation to nearly all of them. Yet we allow the world to behave as if we did not know them….) 

Kai Grünitz, Volkswagen’s technical chief, elaborated how this approach will allow for scalable software applications across different models. “The benefit of the zonal architecture is that I can put one, two or three zones in a vehicle,” Grünitz told Autocar. “Vehicles in lower price segments will just need one zone, while a premium vehicle might need three or four, depending on functions.”

Biden administration to award nearly $1.1 billion to Stellantis, GM for EV production. more

“after $9 trillion globally over the last decade spent on wind, solar, electric vehicles, energy storage, electrified heat and power grids, the the renewable share of final energy consumption is slowly advancing at 0.3%–0.6% per year.”. more.

In order to get the balls airborne, Conner came up with a proprietary mortar system — essentially truck-mounted cannons designed with an engineer’s mindset.The typical bouncy ball, originally made of the synthetic polymer Zectron and marketed under the name Superball by toy company Wham-O, has a remarkably high coefficient of restitution of 0.92 — meaning if dropped from 100 feet,it bounces back up to 92 feet. If launched from a high-enough height, one could easily clear a Victorian.

My dad is in jail for one simple reason: He and his newspaper fought for freedom and democracy in resistance to Beijing’s encroaching control of the city. He is being tried under a “national-security law” China forced on the city in 2020 to criminalize free speech and suspend civil liberties. It has played a key role in the city’s repression during the last five years.

Beginning in the late 1980s, Fiatarone ran a series of studies in which she asked residents to commit to a regimen of high-intensity strength training. To many of her colleagues, the research seemed risky. Conventional wisdom in medicine at that time said the oldest people were not capable of lifting heavy weights – it might cause cardiac events. In all of western medical literature, Fiatarone found no evidence that any doctor had ever previously tried to teach frail 90-year-olds to do this kind of training.

There is a feeling that everything depends on which chancellor you happen to draw. There are chancellors who understand their job well and those who chafe at their role of doing the predictable and expected thing. So your outcome depends on which one you draw. 10/

In the case of war, speeding up this cycle for yourself and slowing it down for your adversary allows you a more accurate model of your environment and more optimal decisions than the other side. In the software and product world, our adversaries are mainly ourselves and our environment. We’d typically focus on managing the pace at which our team and its members can run this cycle. We may have adversaries in the form of market competitors, but it’s a lot tougher to affect them directly, especially if you’re a smaller organization.

With any database architecture the goal is to ensure that nothing hits your database if you can help it.

The idea for this classic Bugs Bunny short came about after producer Eddie Selzer said, ‘I don’t want no gags about bullfights. Bullfights aren’t funny’; which left Chuck Jones and writer Michael Maltese no option but to make one.

China’s message to global automakers was crystal clear. If you want to sell cars in China, you will need to manufacture them inside China. And to secure an approval to manufacture inside China you must first marry up with a Chinese partner. And, by the way, the Chinese partner will own no less than 50% of the joint venture. 

Dear Reader: You might be wondering what right-minded global automaker CEO would go along with terms that so heavily favored the home team, China. 

As it turns out, practically every one of them. 

Over the next three decades, Japanese, American, German, French and Korean automakers invested tens of billions of dollars to form manufacturing joint ventures in China. By 2000, China was building one million cars a year. By 2010, that number exploded to 16 million.  In 2024, China produced 31 million vehicles, three times more than the United States. The tariff and non-tariff barrier regime never relaxed. During that 35- year sprint to automotive manufacturing supremacy, China never permitted car imports to exceed 6% of the total market. 

Looking back, I realize I wasn’t the best of managers, and I have learned from that by becoming more open and by listening more. Failure taught me the necessary empathy towards other founders, mostly because in the end (unless they are psychopaths), they are trying their best in an imperfect situation for a perfect outcome. 

Some really interesting data from Kirkland & Ellis. Never quite seen data like this. First slide, earnouts are up and happen in 27% of deals. Not surprised that they are up given the value expectation gaps. Surprised at 27%.

In a book published this week, Why I Would Never Fight for My Country, the 27-year-old argues ordinary people should not be sent into battle on behalf of nation states and their rulers — even to fend off an invasion. Occupation by a foreign power might lead to a “shitty” life, he told the Financial Times. “But I’d rather be occupied than dead.”

The truth is, software development — hell, any complex endeavor — doesn’t work that way. It’s messy, it’s unpredictable, and it requires actual thinking. But that’s too much for these simpletons. They’d rather play scrum master and feel important moving sticky notes around a board.

What Kasia designed is a perfect Kanban system. It relies on visual signals, which are put in the context. Even better, unlike most Kanban boards I see across teams, the system is self-explanatory. Everything one needs to know is written on the index card.

Between November and the end of February, Madison building inspection issued eight notices of violation for excessive salting compared with only three last winter. None of those notices resulted in a fine, though, as the city tries first to get compliance from residents. Salt enforcement is complaint-based, too, which means residents have to contact city building inspection to have a sidewalk checked for a violation.

What’s even crazier is that there is a clear political story behind all of this. The 1980 Judicial Conduct and Disability Act, signed by Jimmy Carter, gave judges the power to police themselves through an obfuscated multi-layer system where chief judges dismiss almost all the complaints and judicial councils choose confidential sanctions in most of the cases where they even admit wrongdoing occurred.

“500 million Europeans are asking 300 million Americans to defend them against 140 million Russians. […] Europe today lacks the belief that we are truly a global force.”

“whose site the NYT calls “independent,” is actually being bankrolled by… George Soros”. Real shocker!

In 2014, Senator Chris Murphy bragged about the United States successfully overthrowing Ukraine’s government: “I think it was our role, including sanctions and threats of sanctions, that forced, in part, Yanukovych from office.”

Because the G7 is in relative decline. Until you understand this, you’ll be confused.

They were also incredibly beautiful. Another import that had become available in the wake of World War II was incense cedar, the material of choice for high-quality pencils. Most of the pencil industry’s incense cedar comes from California, and Tombow quickly restarted its imports of the aromatic red wood. HOMO’s design takes full advantage of the material upgrade, with a subtle transparent lacquer that highlights the cedar’s color and grain.

Restaurants with very many neighbor nodes (nodes connected to it) are restaurants whose alumni go on to create and work in other prestigious restaurants. This is the case of Ducasse (ok, not a restaurant but a placeholder for all the restaurants in the Ducasse brand), Mandarin Oriental (technically the restaurant is called Sur Mesure) or Septime. To visualize and analyse this network, I combine information contained in reviews of restaurants across France by LeFooding.com’s critics. Most reviews contain information about the staff and their CV.

Sigma is the closest thing we have to that. Their disclosure that they can only make nine (!) of their new bf cameras a day is the way things should work. That’s probably about 2500 cameras a year when all is said and done.

the Bifurcation of the Global System along two centers of power with their alternative supply chains, critical infrastructure and networks. You may not want to see it but it’s there.

I was thrilled to learn that, like me, Wolfe was an only child, wound up getting a doctorate in American studies, hated stuffy institutional rules, ignored boring injunctions to “write what you know,” and took a big pay cut to buy himself more freedom. Alas, the similarities ended there. His style was fresh, bold, and inimitable (Lord knows we all tried). As a kid, he had longed to be related to Thomas Wolfe, to have that literary pedigree. Alas, the connection was only a phonetic coincidence, so he satisfied himself by stealing literary devices and sneaking them into journalism.

AI search engines and AI summaries on results pages are taking a bite out of clickthrough traffic.

As promised,Here are the Bingo Cards for @ChicagosMayor ‘s testimony tomorrow. These are all HIS words . No prize if you win but save your card and send it into City Hall to demand his immediate resignation.

Interestingly, AI workstations have been one of the strongest categories in the PC industry. A LOT of AI software is developed on Macs. Mac Studio with M3 Ultra will position itself nicely in AI workstation. Also, most RAM ever given to a GPU in a workstation!

Out of 12,000 North Korean soldiers sent to Russia to fight against Ukraine, only two have been captured alive. They have recently been telling their stories to American and South Korean journalists, providing a unique perspective on the war.

Perhaps the single most important thing they could build would be mass-produced Tesla humanoids, which (if successful) could in turn build everything else.

“It’s quite evident that we’re being governed by idiots in Ottawa… there’s a number of us in Alberta that have had enough.”

And if “amateurs talk about strategy, but experts think about logistics”, SpaceX has created exactly what’s needed.

So many commentators are stunned that Democrats are clinging to the idea of boys in girls’ sports, even though the idea is opposed by 82% of the public, and they are equally stunned that Democrats more broadly make the transgender movement a central component of their policy agenda, despite popular opposition.

We’re going to put an action plan on those things, and I think they’re going to be brutal to leadership, quite frankly,” Ortberg added.

About half of the US population does not own any retirement assets, see chart below.

Denmark’s state-run postal service, PostNord, is to end all letter deliveries at the end of 2025, citing a 90% decline in letter volumes since the start of the century. The decision brings to an end 400 years of the company’s letter service. Denmark’s 1,500 post boxes will start to disappear from the start of June.

Great software design looks simple because it eliminates as many failure modes as possible during the design stage. The best way to eliminate a failure mode is to notdo something exciting (or if you can, not do anything at all). Not all failure modes are created equal. You want to try hardest to eliminate the really scary ones (like data inconsistency), even if it means making slightly clunky choices elsewhere.

Sobering facts but all is not lost. The Houthis are not ten feet tall and can be defeated cost effectively. Just like the intervention done in 1965 by David Stirling and his team, give the private sector a chance. This can be solved for less money than Egypt loses per month in Suez fees. ($800m)

Among the findings: the research estimates the median YouTube video has been watched just 41 times mostly by machines.