Grocery stores offer the rarest thing in modern travel, the uncurated ordinary. The supermarket is the one place travel cannot fully manicure itself. Hotels can lie. Brochures can lie. Restaurants, especially the ones with menus printed on thick paper, can lie beautifully. But supermarkets are hopeless at lying. They’re too busy. They’re too full of nappies and mince.

It may be a simple thing – image on one side, writing on the other – but, as the mini narratives printed here show, a postcard always tells a story. In celebration of this small but mighty form, we invite you to submit an imaginative short story, piece of text, or poem (up to 250 words) in response to a postcard image. The text need not necessarily correspond to the image on the postcard (it may even be more interesting if it doesn’t, as with many of the postcards we do send).

Coding LLMs are currently on track to produce most software in the near-future, despite being generally mediocre quality or outright insecure (with vibecoded software being especially bad). Future rewrites with coding LLMs may help, but are not guaranteed to happen or to plug as many holes as we need to be secure against pervasive cybersecurity LLM offensives. How can we avoid this? LLMs could potentially write all software in provably secure, safe ways like formally-verifiable systems, but progress in that lags behind. How far behind?

Ald. Richard Kopp, representative of the large 18th Ward on the northeast side of the city, was critical because the voters in 1960 approved a $1.8 million bond issue for east side highway work and “to date there has been no construction.”

It’s nothing short of cowardice to refuse to tell airports and small communities the hard truth. I referred to this on the last T&G but Mr. Swelbar has put the situation and the foundation of it in clear concise words: we have a very serious case of planning fright at the top – at the DOT, at the alphabet organizations that apparently are fearful of their members to speak out clearly, and the intentionally misinformed small communities that are being fed intellectual garbage instead of hard facts.

This reversal does not get much attention in accounts of current differences in the deadliness of extreme temperatures. This is unfortunate because from an early-20th century perspective, it was far from obvious at the time that this would happen. But the lack of willingness to adopt the arrival of a very useful technology (AC) was something that we (Europeans) have brought onto ourselves over many decades, and this is largely independent from recent phenomena such as rising global temperatures, inequality trends, etc. This is simply inefficient governance and lack of attention to a problem that takes the lives of many.

Because if those transistors go unused, what’s the point? It’s not about adding something and hoping somebody finds a use for it. We want those capabilities available to solve real problems. I think that’s what allows us to build better systems and ultimately better products.

A $1bn investment in PPE (plant, property, and equipment) would require a $1m margin per aircraft over 1,000 deliveries (not including financing costs). You do not make that investment unless you must.  Boeing sees a demand for a production rate of at least 12/mo and up to 14/mo. However, there is enough room in the second building to eventually accommodate a new airplane program. Demand for the 787 will inevitably taper off as it gets older. Charleston, with half the space of Boeing’s giant Everett plant, will be well-positioned for new airplane programs.

I perceived two difficult Wiesbadens.  In one, if you walk through the cheaper part of the pedestrian zone in the evening, the city seems mostly Muslim.  But if you walk around during the morning, the city seems mostly German.  I might add that some of the younger Muslim women show signs of assimilating, at least based on how they dress and present themselves.  The older women tend to stick with the headscarves.

Illegal immigrant accused of kidnapping, raping a woman in Fairfax County, VA.

Slopfix is a team of three senior engineers who refactor vibecoded codebases back to maintainability.

So, I wrote a story about all this, recounting the Texaco case and the bankruptcy it was forced to file when it lost the Getty lawsuit. I pointed out that Delta faced a similar situation; Delta might have to seek bankruptcy protection should it lose. I pointed out that Delta failed to disclose the possible “material adverse impact” of losing in its federal securities filing.

The top official in the Zohran Mamdani administration’s Office for International Affairs made plans to meet with Iran’s ambassador and permanent representative to the United Nations.

Stepping into the archive today – housed, very appropriately, in a former brewery building at Schlitz Park, the office complex that occupies the former brewery that made Milwaukee famous – my jaw dropped.

To understand what went wrong, we need to learn a little bit about the economic logic of ambulances, and why ambulance services are more like option sellers than taxi companies. It’s more interesting than it sounds.

I should have included a point about distribution/ owning your own audience. That will not change, and become more valuable as it becomes more difficult and expensive to build. My miss, and completely agree.

Her parents didn’t raise her to be a tennis player. It was just one of a number of sports she did. Her father and brother were both professional soccer players. She played a little bit of everything. It wasn’t until she got older and began to have success as she got older that she had any hard knowledge of Czech women’s tennis history. She had to do some research. None of her coaches or relatives had regaled her with tales of the footsteps she was beginning to follow.

The Guangzhou documents include a presentation devoted entirely to countering Starlink. Although it is bilingual, the many obvious errors in the Russian text leave no doubt it was prepared by the Chinese side. The slideshow was delivered by two researchers from the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC): Huang Hui (??) and Ren Jie (??). CASC is China’s principal state space contractor, responsible for the Changzheng (“Long March”) rocket family and much of the country’s military satellite infrastructure. The document is marked “internal” — one level above material cleared for public release.

I contend that the 21st century has seen a dramatic loss of information on screen, making for a less luxurious and less satisfying experience for the viewer, and trace how this loss was manufactured, department by department.

We are officially halfway through 2026, and ChinaTalk just surpassed 75k subscribers on Substack. To celebrate, here are the twenty most interesting things we learned so far while making ChinaTalk.

At the end of last year, Volkswagen still employed about 660,000 workers, roughly one for every 14 cars it sold. Toyota, the only company similar in scale, employed roughly 410,000 to sell 11.3 million vehicles—about 28 vehicles per employee. The Detroit Three have sales-to-staff ratios in the mid-20s.

Even four centuries later, the sinking of Vasa is an instructive affair, although it is important to draw the right lessons. A 2001 paper in The Academy of Management Executive is titled “Vasa Syndrome: Insights from a 17th-Century New-Product Disaster”, and offers various gems — for example, that the shipwrights should have clarified the customer’s goals, which would have revealed a crucial but unstated preference for a ship that floats.

SNAP-to-Cash: How food assistance vouchers were traded for cash at the Heart of the City Farmers’ Market

Waratlas.org

SLA Credit Watch monitors vendor status pages and keeps a monthly downtime ledger per service. When an outage crosses an SLA credit threshold, it shows the credit the terms entitle you to and the filing deadline.

Looking back, the Apple car project probably shouldn’t be remembered as a futile exercise. Sure, the company abandoned the vehicle. But it kept the technology that may ultimately prove far more valuable.

I’ve been thinking about my parents, who are in their mid-60s. During my first 18 years, I spent some time with my parents during at least 90% of my days. But since heading off to college and then later moving out of Boston, I’ve probably seen them an average of only five times a year each, for an average of maybe two days each time. 10 days a year. About 3% of the days I spent with them each year of my childhood.

When choosing what to do with your time, choose wisely. Your library has more books than you could ever read. Your friends and family have hearts and desires the bots can never fathom. Your mind, once you remove the noise of the world at large, is still capable of imagination, creativity and flow. Find it!

This book is for programmers who are fluent in at least one other language and want to understand what MUMPS was, how it worked, and what made it historically significant. You do not need any prior MUMPS experience.

Marfa Public Radio is literally never asleep. It operates 24/7 (except when lightning strikes) and there’s so much that goes on behind the scenes to make this happen– fundraising, compliance, protocols, emergency response, maintenance…the list goes on and on. Do you lay awake wondering what FCC compliance entails? Ever wondered what NPR’s code of journalistic ethics involves for the newsroom?

“The Chinese were involved in the bidding contest at the time when Airbus ended up taking over the former C Series, so there’s certainly some resentment there. That’s ten years ago. They have long memories,” said Christian Kley, head of single-aisle market development.

Sony is contacting PlayStation Store users who bought movies from the platform that were distributed by StudioCanal—like Terminator 2, Total Recall, and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind—to say that “you will no longer be able to access your previously purchased content from Studio Canal, and it will be removed from your video library.” There’s no mention of any refunds or make-goods for the affected users. Sony simply says the films are going away “due to our content licensing agreements,” once again reaffirming the fact that you are never truly buying anything that’s digital, just temporarily renting it.

The more accurate picture is that wine consumption has dispersed rather than declined. The glass poured at a hotel wine bar, the bottle ordered at a restaurant, the flight at a downtown tasting room — these register in restaurant receipts and transient occupancy tax revenue but not in winery reservation data.

But luckily the injury hasn’t interfered with her work at all, coming just when she was about to take a few days off anyway to play tennis, and so won’t affect the many millions she earns every year, almost none of it from whacking a ball with a spaghetti strainer. Which is why, being an old-fashioned guy, I admire Emma so much: because despite having a full-time job, she manages to play lawn tennis to such a high standard in her spare time that she occasionally goes deep in major international competitions. Like Suzanne Lenglen or CB Fry or something. It’s positively Edwardian. And so, when she eventually wins Wimbledon (the ladies’ singles title, not the Uniqlo franchise), I shall cheer her to the rafters as the first amateur to do so since Billie Jean King in 1967.

Your 22-byte button now arrives in a 2-megabyte bundle, assembled by a config file you did not write and cannot read.

In this post we go through some of the link-rot studies and look at them from the perspective of the Wayback Machine to see how much of the dead Web can be rescued. Table 1 shows the status of the dead and rescued Web at a glance as sampled by a few different studies.

At the end of the day, the US and the rest of the world can play along with China, avoid its blackmail over Rare Earths and other materials, and gradually decouple from its supply chain. Despite technological progress, suppressing domestic Chinese demand could leave Chinese people poorer in a few decades. It’s hard to predict what will happen in a decade or two, but the reality in Russia should tell the Chinese that something very wrong can indeed occu….

As he points out, we’re already at a stage where, in 2025, “China surpassed the United States in the number of new investment projects in Germany.” And, given that you need new investments and new industrial projects to reindustrialize Germany, it’d be completely schizophrenic to attempt reindustrialization while simultaneously closing the door to such a major provider of new investment projects.

Xavier University men’s basketball coach Richard Pitino testified on Wednesday that his team had a spending budget of “a little over $14 million” for the upcoming season.

the blackpill was seeing the terrible quality of the software and interacting with the contractors. coming from silicon valley, i couldn’t believe how low the talent and quality bar was for selling software to the government. it’s clear, as the OG USDS people explained to me a decade ago, the primary skill these vendors have is securing government contracts. it’s a huge moat. delivery of quality product be damned.

We fired the vendor and took over the project. they’d been working on it for more than a year, and there was another year before they were going to deliver it. at first we tried to bend it to our will, to actually connect all the various data sources and get to a decent UX for case workers in the mine to use, but we soon realized we were going to have to rebuild the whole stack from scratch.

Our second oversight was, like others, not anticipating the staggering degree to which China would be able to slash its oil imports. Crude imports are 5m barrels a day lower than a year ago, despite the fall in prices. China has cut its demand and shored up supply. Its oil reserves are opaque—many barrels are hidden from satellites underground, and there is a blurred line between official reserves and corporate inventories. But they have been shown to be a powerful buffer. Perhaps a newspaper whose critics bang on about a clanger in 1999, when we wrongly predicted oil prices falling to $5 a barrel, should have known better. We woz wrong then, too. Fortunately, we can report that investors who say we are a guide to what to bet against are cherry-picking our failures. With the help of AI we analysed 7,000 of this century’s leaders. When we are moderately out-of-consensus, our record is good. Our more outlandish predictions are, unsurprisingly, more likely to be wrong.

Here Coolidge’s faith enters, and I won’t sand it off; he credits the whole lineage to the colonial clergy, and notes that Jefferson himself said his best ideas of democracy came out of church meetings. You can take the theology or leave it, but the structural claim survives either way: the idea was homegrown. Profoundly American, in his words. /11

The climb to Alpe d’Huez is one of the greatest theatres in sport thanks to its 32 appearances on the route of the Tour de France since 1952. Legends have been born and dreams dashed on its 21 hairpin bends, where race leaders part crowds of more than 600,000 screaming spectators (according to the tourist office estimate, though no one really knows because it’s free, unticketed and barely controlled chaos).

Tehran’s strategy rested on a simple asymmetry: Populations tolerate acute devastation better than chronic and increasing inconvenience. For Iran, fighting an existential war, devastation was something to be endured — martyred leaders and generals, bombed airfields, and sunk ships only hardened regime resolve. For the US, with more limited interests at stake, inconvenience became something to escape. 

Wednesday’s award compensates for lost revenue caused by Google’s preferential treatment of its own comparison-shopping service over independent price-comparison services, conduct that also drives up costs for consumers, Klarna said in a statement after the judgment.

New home battery installations reached a record 673 megawatt hours of energy storage in the first quarter of 2026, according to the US Energy Information Administration. That trend was driven by states with high electricity prices that have implemented policies to incentivize home battery installation, Bloomberg News reported.

Second, the Van der Heydens replaced the rigid spout with a long, flexible leather hose. Called a ‘snake’ (slang in Dutch), this hose could reach deeper inside buildings and aim more precisely at hot spots than the nozzled pipes of the Hautsch engine. Finally, the brothers added an air chamber so that water could be pumped out in a continuous, high-pressure flow rather than intermittently on the down stroke. This feature, they hoped, would keep the engine from freezing up in cold weather.

BPI:

Ensuring that AI is safe and empowers American workers must be a top priority for US policymakers. But the discussion about AI safety should not be influenced by geopolitical rivals, especially China, which aims to accelerate AI development “to gain the initiative in global science and technology competition.” Depending on the advances made in this field, there may come a time when the United States and China must engage in bilateral negotiations to ensure safe AI development. But until then, an honest conversation about AI safety requires filtering any foreign influence. 

The same logic applies to debates surrounding AI data centers. AI data centers have become a lightning rod in policy conversations across all levels of government. American citizens have legitimate concerns about water use, energy costs, and grid capacity, concerns that deserve serious local deliberation. But local deliberation works only when the public can see who is bankrolling and influencing the campaigns shaping the debate. This report aims to provide that transparency to equip citizens and lawmakers alike with the information they need to make informed policy decisions on AI and other emerging technologies.

What emerges from our research is a disturbing trend: international actors are working through state media organizations, nonprofit networks, and dark money groups to shape US policy and public opinion on artificial intelligence. The campaign against American AI is being waged across three vectors of foreign influence:

The RHS Chelsea Flower Show: A Brigadoon of Horticultural Perfection in the Heart of London.

Mikala continued: “Because each area has a very distinct dialect or accent, my dad would go and play with the other children to pick up whatever that village’s accent was, so that when he went around to beg for rice and food for him and my grandma, he at least sounded like a local and they wouldn’t get outed.” 

We’ve been talking about buy vs. build in software circles for years, but last year the calculus changed. It used to be that build was a very expensive proposition, especially given the state of engineering salaries and scarcity of great people. One could expect huge upfront cost, schedule overruns, and an infinitely deep rabbit hole to slide down. The general wisdom had always been to build only inside your core domain and avoid getting sidetracked by peripheral projects. Once your company reached enormous size, and the cost of those distractions disappeared comfortably into its margins, then maybe they’d be worth doing.

A few weeks ago, I decided that it would be fun to rank the 100 greatest ones. My task was made easier by Wikipedia’s List of birds by common name, but narrowing down 11,000 names (this is a genuine curated list, I really did look through all of them) turned out to be way harder than I expected. There are FAR TOO MANY GOOD ONES. My short list alone had more than three hundred, and picking the top hundred nearly ended me. It was also so much fun! I considered myself something of a bird name connoisseur, but many of the top names were new to me and so strange and surprising that they left me speechless.

It was owned by a woman who shared the deed with her siblings. She did not seem eager to sell. Brand gave her a copy of his book How Buildings Learn and eventually she softened. She bought out her siblings, and in 2005 Brand and Phelan took over. They hired the Coffins to renovate the farmhouse. “There was no foundation,” says Steve Coffin, the dad. When they opened up the walls, they found newspaper clippings from the 1890s.

Lugano keeps growing slowly but steadily. Immigration outpaces departures, and the city remains strongly international — four in ten residents are foreign nationals, with Italy as the dominant country of origin. Baby-boom cohorts shape the age profile, while arrivals from the EU and beyond add to the mix.

The facility is twice the size of the 4.28 million sq ft main Boeing factory in Everett (WA), where Boeing produced the 747, 767 commercial airliner, 777, and 787. Today, the 777F Classic freighter, the 777X, and 767-based KC-46A aerial refueling tanker are produced here. The new North Line of the 737 MAX will begin operations on July 6. When Boeing begins rework on more than 30 777-9s in inventory following expected certification late this year, some of the rework will be done at the Everett facility.

Or we can choose to treat space as the warfighting domain that it is — and figure out how to win a space war.

To be specific: per mile, New York’s Second Avenue Subway cost more than ten times what Madrid pays, and East Side Access, at $11.2 billion, opened as the most expensive railway station ever built.1 As a consequence, despite its wealth, the country now builds very little transit indeed. Exhibit A is California’s high-speed rail line, whose projected cost has ballooned from $33 billion to more than $126 billion; with federal funding now clawed back and not a mile of usable track laid, whether the line will ever be built is an open question.

…..or maybe people here are just in a better general mood than people in Bernie Sanders’ home state

The solution for this is to construct a new gaseous nitrogen system to supplement the existing capacity, but the $25 million project is currently unfunded.

Rodriguez, the current lieutenant governor, took three donations from the corporate PAC of WEC Energy, the parent company of We Energies, totaling $13,800, between 2020 and 2023. 

The US grip on markets on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Behold the Aquilaceph, half-bald eagle and half-octopus. On the semiquincentennial 250th anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence, this imaginary beast is a metaphor for the continued US grip on financial markets. In this special issue we look at the details: US reserve currency status, capital flows, the much anticipated but still unprofitable “Sell America” trade, US corporate profitability and productivity in the age of AI, investing in Security & Resilience, equity market concentration, energy independence and the revival of the US IPO market. The biggest medium-term concerns for investors in US assets, other than the sustainability of the US Federal debt and cyclical inflationary pressures: the increased unpredictability in the rule of law, and government defunding of science and sidelining of scientific expertise.

“He carried on Wright’s tradition, but he also had architectural principles of his own,” Hession said to the Strib while promoting her 2015 book, John H. Howe: From Taliesin Apprentice to Master of Organic Design. “His architecture became very Minnesotan. It was designed for the specificity of this landscape and this climate, and some of the harsh realities of it.”

The interconnection process wasn’t created for today’s world. Grids use an inflexible first-come, first-served queue that leaves some of the most valuable projects stuck behind less important ones. They also evaluate according to rigid conditions that don’t reward plants for being willing to cover their own power needs for short periods. To prepare for the AI age, grid processes need to change.

Search Scripture by theme.

Blogging Can Just Be Stating The Obvious

German Bundestag appropriates EUR 70M/year to Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung in Berlin. Their own annual report: “This includes financing its foreign offices.“

Cumulative revenue of the New York office: $19.1 million over 13 years.

New York office employs Neal Meyer, who served as NYC-DSA’s treasurer and published DSA electoral strategy from the German foundation’s platform.

New York office’s director, born in East Germany and a former Bundestag member for the party that descends from the SED, publishes performance evaluations of a DSA mayor while claiming years of collaboration with his appointees.

Toyota And Nissan Admit Their American-Made Vehicles Aren’t Up To Japanese Standards
Japanese buyers are not used to buying new cars that might have thin paint, panel gaps, or leftover residue.

In Kansas City, the central library is a restored 1906 bank building with a film theater built into the original vault, thirty-five-ton steel doors and all.

Looking ahead, our research suggests that no data center will have meaningfully greater capacity than Colossus 2 until the second half of 2027. However, we expect a reversion to trend in late-2027/early-2028 when QTS Cedar Rapids and Meta Hyperion are projected to be completed. We believe our data captures most record-holding facilities from 2024 through 2028, though estimates of individual capacities and operational dates carry uncertainty.

To be honest, if the idea has had any sort of input from Lisa Nandy then it’s rubbish. She may have even less grasp of the topic than Nadine Dorries, which is as near to insanity as you can imagine.

If I have to end with a moral of the story it would be don’t judge the political environment, or the Democratic Party, from the vote in Manhattan. The DSA performance there is genuinely impressive, and a wing of the party is developing strength. But don’t let that dominate how you understand the party nationally. As I’ve posted in the past, the liberal and very liberal wing of the Democrats have grown over the past decade, but to a quarter of Democrats, which is still less than the size of moderates in the party. It is a heterogeneous party, and therein lies the uncertainty about where it is headed.

“The guy just got $70bn of funny money to play with to get us to space,” he said. “Of course, bond investors are not the same as equity investors. Equity investors, you can take them to Mars. Bond investors are, like, ‘where is my coupon?’. SpaceX received strong investor demand for the bond deal, allowing bankers to upsize it from $20bn to $25bn, but is having to pay a higher cost of borrowing than similarly rated companies. 

An office worker in her 50s who attended the meeting said, “I’m disappointed with the president’s handling,” adding, “I felt future strategy seems to be only on a day-to-day basis.”. “Mibe’s decision was late and he should hand over his post to a new president to revive the company’s business,” said a man in his 40s who works at a client company.

In the days that followed, Nike—which first outfitted Serena in 2004—rolled out more videos, a photoshoot, and an out-of-home advertising campaign. Wilson, by contrast, remained conspicuously quiet—not even posting on Instagram to mark the return of one of tennis’s greatest and most commercially valuable players, one who had been a face of their brand for decades. It left an obvious question: was Serena still working with the heritage racquet brand that had been in her hands for almost her entire professional career? Or was she planning to switch to another racquet manufacturer?

Now, as Washington tightens restrictions on Chinese technology, he is among more than 3,000 Americans urging federal regulators not to restrict equipment they consider essential to public safety and livelihoods. “We have had countless uses, successes and life-safety wins because of the drone being on scene,” Marsiglio wrote in a filing to the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in May.

The scans were acquired with high-resolution phase-contrast X-ray microtomography on the BM18 beamline at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble — an instrument able to resolve the wafer-thin, densely packed layers of a Herculaneum roll. The work was carried out in collaboration with the National Library of Naples “Vittorio Emanuele III”, which safeguards the Herculaneum papyri. From those volumes, the team reconstructed the scroll’s geometry, traced and flattened its surface into a readable sheet, and trained machine-learning models to detect ink that is almost indistinguishable from the carbonized papyrus beneath it. Each reading was then examined and transcribed by papyrologists.

I spoke about what it means to be a creative collaborator, and whether AI is or can ever be one. I started from the proposition that a human collaborator is not like a tool. He or she does not simply do what you want. Imagine Paul trying to ‘prompt’ John and expecting John to just give him what he asked for. The most productive human collaborations involve challenge, argument, and complex emotional dynamics, and they are not easily replicated with machines.

“The only thing you can do is cut costs, and the only significant cost reduction is excess capacity. And the most expensive capacity you have in the world by a long distance is [in] Germany,” said Citi analyst Harald Hendrikse. 

People are conditioned to look for negative signals, reckons Mr Gore. Explaining why things might go wrong is seen as more sophisticated than believing that things will turn out well. Loss aversion, a strong behavioural bias against giving up what you already have, means that the scales are already tipped against risk-taking. Mr Gore thinks that the trope of learning from failures is overdone; successes teach you more. Performance appraisals ought to focus on putting people in positions that play to their strengths rather than trying to fix their weaknesses. Pessimism has its place, but it is optimism that makes things happen.

“We ended up really with the square that nobody wanted,” said Francis De Wolf, the leading Belgian architect on the project, told Euractiv.

“It will be 100 aircraft a month at Airbus, 100 aircraft a month at Boeing long-term, so you will be doing 100 aircraft worth of engines, that’s 200 engines a month,” said Heelan. “If you’ve got 50 per cent market share that is an enormous volume requirement of what is a capital-intensive industry.”Industry bankers said the most obvious choice is Pratt & Whitney, its partner in the International Aero Engines group that also included Germany’s MTU Aero Engines and Japanese Aero Engines Corporation, which Rolls-Royce left in 2012.

Too late. I had accepted three baskets. Honor demanded each one be finished — an unfinished gift is an insult. By the time my actual food arrived, I was a ruined man.

Hello! Kindly note that we don’t have access to reservation systems on social media. We urge you to contact your nearest Oman Air office so our reservation agents can assist you further. You can find their contact information here omanair.com/en_om/contact-…

In the days of film there was a special “lag” we didn’t talk about much: the time before you pressed the shutter release while you considered whether it was economically wise to press the button. That’s both because every photo cost you money (film and developing, maybe printing), but also because we had a limited number of frames (24 or 36, typically) before we had to take the camera out of commission for a period of time while we rewound the film, pulled it from the camera and put it somewhere safe (and maybe labeled it), put in another roll, and started the process of it being loaded for use. 90% chance that pressing the shutter release doesn’t net a useful photo? Then you probably didn’t press the button. 90% change that it would be a useful photo? You almost certainly pressed the button. But there was always a short lag before you did because your brain needed to calculate the odds. 

The camera industry built itself for well over a 100 million camera units a year. Reality these days is more like 7 million units, plus another 10+ million if you include action and small sensor vlogging cameras, though those are now dominated by DJI, Insta360, and the covert-DJI company Xtra. The general approach in Japan in recent years was to take the remaining volume upscale (e.g. many more dollars per unit sold), which kept everyone’s coffers full for a time, but the industry is now faced with two critical questions:

But then again, there’s a valid lesson in this train wreck called “Luce” for the rest of the industry as well. And the True Believers in Design, Engineering and Product Development engaged in this business around the world understand this implicitly. If you don’t care enough about what you’re doing, you’re doomed to fail. Having the fundamental passion for what they do propels these people forward each and every day. There is no such thing as “phoning it in” or “going through the motions” with these True Believers; in fact, it’s anathema to their very existence.

“It seems like everybody is working hard to meet the company’s goals and Jeff just hasn’t delivered for us,” said one Blue Origin employee.

The core problem is that our clinical trial and drug approval system is slow and expensive. Getting a new drug to market in the US takes billions of dollars and a decade or more of clinical trials — and all of that before a company earns a single dollar. The consequence is drug lag and drug loss and also learning loss. Innovation is a dynamic process. You must build to build better.

Maybe they’re investigating you because your finances don’t add up? Or because your wife’s LLC received the deed to a $9.1 million home a week before the LLC was even created – while you still had your Fair Oaks home? How was that LLC capitalized?

Which Quebec hospital recently implemented software from Verona, WI based epic? Include french and english news sources in your response. – via Grok.

The Trump administration has warned more than 500 hospitals that they are failing to provide the public with basic pricing information — arguing that the lack of disclosure is keeping healthcare costs higher than they should be. The Associated Press obtained exclusively the list of hospitals that since April have either received letters of warning or, in more severe cases, requests to submit plans to provide transparent pricing. Failing to comply with the warnings comes with penalties as high as $2 million annually for each recipient that doesn’t create a plan to post clear pricing data.

He’s 66 and she’s 64, and they’ve raised six children.  “We’re just ready,” Janet Thongnuam said. “Our bodies get old. It’s hard work, it’s hard physical work.”

Nowhere does the article mention how Democrats fell in line with Gov. Tony Evers’ fanciful carbon-free by 2050 agenda. Nowhere does it mention how that support led to the closure of coal plants that were still viable, and that we still pay for. Nowhere does it mention how Democrats enabled the Public Service Commission (PSC) in the $2 billion in rate hikes the state has seen since 2019.  

Interesting focus group with 13 Wisconsin Biden to Trump voters. By Rich Thau who does great focus groups of swing voters around the country. Includes Iran deal and Social Security shortfall.

Axios didn’t mention that Humans First was incubated by the Center for AI Safety, an organization funded with millions from Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. Or that its original staff included a Sunrise Movement organizer who sat in at Pelosi’s office with AOC and a DSA member who organized for Kamala Harris.

The cooking of Panarea is the cuisine of a small island that has been fishing the same waters for 3,000 years and has learned, in the process, that the less one does to what the sea provides, the better. Dinner at the waterfront restaurants meant plates of swordfish carpaccio, sliced almost translucent and dressed with nothing but a thread of local oil and a scattering of salted capers. It meant grilled amberjack, spaghetti alle vongole of a piercing, briny intensity, and, most memorably, bottarga — the pressed and dried roe of the grey mullet — shaved over linguine with a rasp of lemon zest. Puddings tended to revolve around granitas of almond and lemon that recalled, in a single freezing mouthful, the Arab centuries embedded in the foundations of Aeolian culture.

“I try to remind myself regularly that there are a lot of ways to respond to stressful circumstances,” she told me, “and hysteria is never going to be a productive way of dealing with things.” 

Cook and several executives close to him had concluded that Apple had serious cultural, structural and leadership problems when it came to AI.

13. I strongly recommend taking marijuana while hiking through the Olympic National Park in the rain. You will never experience olfactory sensations like that in any other setting or mindstate.

Which brings us to the controversy that will ensue.  A perfectly corrected lens wil almost certainly be rejected by some as being “too clinical.” Sure, but the data being collected in the raw file will be more optimal, so I’m for it. Take it a step further, though: not only can you create a near perfect optical correction this way, you can create presets that render differently. Get ready for Lens Picture Controls (LPC). Want classic edge sharpness falloff with vignette? Use the Vintage LPC. 

In a sense, many professionals are an extension of the same idea. I could research my own real estate law, or my own insurance, whether business or personal, but I don’t because it would be too hard.

….here’s Kristen Welker obviously irked to have had to touch down in a flyover state. I can’t believe I came to this hellhole for you!

This complaint continues in today’s campaigns between the A320neo and the 737 MAX. Delta Air Lines often makes airplane fleet decisions based on obtaining a license for its Delta TechOps unit. Not only does Delta overhaul its own fleet engines, but it also contracts with other airlines to do the same. Boeing lost one order to Airbus because GE wouldn’t grant the license for the LEAP, and PW was willing to offer the GTF. (This has since changed. Delta now has a license for the LEAP.)

More damaging to liberal sensibilities is his argument that all parties, including European countries that have largely remained on the sidelines, emerge from the crisis with badly damaged reputations. As he sees it, the war was clearly a mistake from the outset, but this is no excuse for the passivity of European states and others in the face of Iran “waging war on the entire world” by blockading their imports.

Eileen Wang pleaded guilty to acting as a foreign agent. But what could Beijing want from the mayor of a small California city known as the “Chinese Beverly Hills”?

In 1990, when I was writing Snow Crash, we experienced all computer graphics through massive, heavy CRTs with terrible resolution. The images were flickery and blurry. Rendering pictures of three-dimensional scenes was in its infancy. It seemed entirely reasonable to think that the future would be all about head-mounted displays that could render stereoscopic (simulated three-dimensional) imagery. This is not actually what happened.

On a June morning in 1872, Japan’s entire railway was a single line between Shimbashi and Yokohama. A century and a half later the map carries more than nine thousand stations. Press play and watch the country fill in — one opening at a time.

My favorite Apple updates are not the flashy new features, but the quiet little touches: annoyances fixed, workflows made smoother, rough edges sanded down, and longstanding flaws thoughtfully reworked. To me, they’re the clearest sign of a company that cares about its craft.

SpaceX didn’t live off subsidies, it lived off contracts. The day it delivered, the American state became its first client. In France, the day you deliver, the state becomes your first problem.

Quick edit showing some of the intense moments today while documenting 8 tornadoes in northern Illinois into Indiana.

The Lakeland Times is reporting local police and agents from the State Department of Revenue Division of Alcoholic Beverages seized beer from Minocqua Brewing Co. today. State confirms an investigation.

China’s Techno-Industrial Strategy in the Xi Era. Producing Under Pressure.

A Fail Safe design of a structure is heavier, which is why the Comet was designed with Safe Life, as the jet engines at the time made the aircraft underpowered for takeoff. For areas that cannot be designed as a Fail Safe, a Safe Life must be designed with extensive knowledge of the load cases, etc., and a life limit for replacement of the part when it has reached the limit.

I invented a number called the Comfort Index. The standard seat scores a 4. The seat seven rows forward scores a 7. I made both numbers up, naturally. The difference between them is three inches, and I charge $79 for the three inches. That is value-based pricing, and the value is your spine.

In 2020 we borrowed $6.8 billion against my program. The appraisers valued it at $22 billion. The entire airline — every plane, every gate, every pilot — was worth $13 billion. My division owns no aircraft and is worth nine billion dollars more than the company that contains it.

Bangstad said he was working to come into compliance, and the department’s “lack of leniency in allowing us to come into compliance borders on malicious harassment.” He also suggested without evidence that Democratic Gov. Tony Evers was retaliating because of his past criticism of Evers.

When Freddy — a German soccer fan road tripping across the southern United States for the World Cup — arrived in Fairhope, Ala., this week, he wrote “I’m in a place right now that’s so beautiful I’m probably about to make 50 posts about it.”. Passing through Gainesville, Fla., he noted “the houses are insane wow.” He reviewed his 1 a.m. Waffle House stop:…

“It’s literally the gulag,” one of the employees claims. “You have zero purpose in life all of a sudden, you barely interact with anyone, you just have these tasks every week.”. Another employee describes some of the tasks—generating puzzles to test how reliably AI models from Meta and other companies can solve them—as easy compared to the software development work they had been doing previously. But the new projects feel menial, and “almost all” employees seem unhappy, they say. “Most people find the work soul-crushing,” the third employee says.

It is not just a chicken. It is a wound the merchant takes on purpose, so that anyone, on any day, with five dollars, eats like a lord. The bird is the message. The price is the vow.

Testing the WWI concrete ships and WWII concrete barges.

Countrywide, two birds of prey — hawk and eagle — get the most searches. They each take the No. 1 search spot in a dozen states. Duck comes in third nationally, but it has the broadest state-level interest, taking the top spot in 17 states.

ALPRs are a serious risk to your privacy and civil liberties. These systems continuously record your movements without a warrant, probable cause, or even reasonable suspicion. Your driving history is rarely confined to the town or city where the cameras are installed. It’s typically shared with thousands of other agencies nationwide (secretly). Once the data is out of your community, you have no control over how it’s used or what rules apply, leading to instances of misuse.

She’s supporting the people who are imploding Shorewood Hills though. She has really strange choice of friends….

“I was feeling that I’m getting old without enough achievement,” Son said this week. “I was wondering, why should I end my life not feeling satisfied?”

The simple estimate extends the latest four-week commercial crude draw rate toward the modern low-water mark. It is not a physical tank-bottom estimate. If inventories build instead of draw, no low-water retest is projected. Oil prices can react before or after physical stress appears, so the pressure window is a risk signal rather than a prediction.

Today there is much more variety in world oil and natural gas than during the 1970s. The shale revolution has transformed the U.S. from the world’s largest importer of oil to the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas and largest exporter of liquefied natural gas.  Overall, the Western Hemisphere now produces more oil than the Middle East did before the crisis. Canada is the world’s fourth-largest oil producer. Brazil produces four times as much oil as Venezuela; and in Guyana, where production began only seven years ago, output almost equals Venezuela’s. In Argentina’s Vaca Muerta region, shale oil production has grown sixfold since 2020. The current disruption will propel more oil and gas investment in the Western Hemisphere and Africa.

I have a camera gear collection problem and as part of my personal 12 step plan, I restrict myself from purchasing functioning lenses. This sounds illogical, and it frankly is, but it’s very hard for me to resist heavily discounted lenses. To keep my hat, I tend to only bid on lenses that are less than 1/4 of the going used sale prices and have little to no mechanical damage. In this case I’ve been eyeing the recently produced sigma I-series lenses that feature mostly aluminum construction. A broken 45mm f/2.8 lens popped up on ebay in January for a song and a dance, and I simply could not resist.

The remaining majority of companies are those that are going nowhere or those that are sliding back in that direction. Because trajectory, management, and quality of operations are strongly correlated, zero or negative growth typically signals that something is wrong or broken at a company, and it isn’t being fixed.¹ The company has some disconnect in the feedback loop between performance and accountability. These companies are not at the top of their game and the toughest challenges you’ll encounter at them are navigating the dysfunction without becoming jaded or burning out.

Over the years, the painting’s old varnishes yellowed, darkening the picture and obscuring Delacroix’s chromatic effects. Conservation treatment undertaken between May 2025 and April 2026 reinforced the structure of the work – the canvas was mounted back onto its restored stretcher – and removed timeworn varnishes and materials left behind from previous restoration efforts from the pictorial layer. A new, transparent varnish was then applied, and the small gaps in the paint were filled in.

Some examples: Wuhu sold a cement factory for 200M yuan, bought a used Ford engine line from the UK, poached engineers from state giant FAW, and reverse-engineered a VW platform. That scrappy startup? It became Chery—now China’s #2 automaker.

Clematis ‘Queen’s Nurse’ has two shades of colour to its flowers. The young ones on the upper growth have a big rose-pink central band against a lilac-pink background, a blend which is found only in a clematis. The flowers from the older wood underneath are solely rose pink. ‘Queen’s Nurse’ is restrained enough to grow well in a container in a small courtyard.

Argentina’s genuine case for Thiel rests on things that have nothing to do with Milei: a younger demographic than Europe, world-class human capital, abundant lithium and rare earths, and geographic isolation from great power conflict. He may be right for entirely the wrong reasons, on a longer timeline than he expects, through considerably more turbulence than the current narrative suggests. Argentina’s laid-back mentality is precisely what makes it exciting to foreigners. But as a project for civilizational renewal? Unless you’re talking about surviving a nuclear war, absolutely not.

Last year, touring colleges in London, a family friend asked me a version of the question Boeing’s own engineers asked each other before the crashes. Theirs was, “Would you put your family on a MAX simulator-trained aircraft?” The answer was no. Mine was simpler: would I put my daughter on streets policed by a two-tier system, where carrying pepper spray to defend herself is a crime but the men she fears walk free?

Public Domain Image Archive

In October 2024, about 100 Labour party members traveled to the US to openly campaign for Kamala Harris. Now Starmer is very concerned that a statement from the Vice President is “interfering in [their] democracy”

I love that !! Charlie was locked and loaded for That Question !!!

Over the past decade we have seen the concept of a ‘smart home’ collapse into a nightmare of abandoned IoT devices, subscription services, forced ads, privacy violations, and an increasingly more congested 2.4 GHz spectrum that everything from WiFi and Zigbee to Bluetooth and others ended up competing for, with a corresponding collapse in reliability of data transmissions

Is anyone working at least 4 hours daily on an Apple Vision Pro?

Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.

Toshifumi Suzuki, head of the giant Ito-Yokado Group of Japan, helped revolutionize his country’s retail sector, previously known for its inefficient, hidebound practices. He introduced franchising to the Japanese retail industry in 1974, as founder of Japan’s Seven-Eleven convenience stores, which eventually grew to a chain of over 10,000 units by 2003, many of them operating 24-hours a day. He pushed the franchise concept in new, creative directions, and then turned around in 1991 to rescue the U.S. company that originated the brand. He has been a pioneer in the gradual introduction of business-to-consumer e-commerce and a forceful public spokesman for economic liberalization and reform.

….. to become the kind of engineer they’ve spent their entire careers battling against. Worse still, the AI tooling mostly works. It’s not (yet) causing any kind of catastrophe⁶. The code isn’t quite as clean, and it’s a bit less well-understood, but it’s good enough (particularly in a world where companies are trying lots of new things and abandoning the ones that fail). So the just-say-no engineer faces not just a threat to their livelihood, but to their entire self-identity: they have to either insist that the apocalypse is right around the corner, or accept that their technical role was contingent on a really weird economic environment in the tech industry.

Family emergency page.

I typically don’t vent on styling, on the grounds that everything has to look like something. Vehicle design is subject to a host of requirements and regulations that constrain designers’ options; what’s left has to be approved by the company’s accountants and suppliers and signed off by the executive corps. Few flowers grow from this poisoned soil.

It literally is the ultimate level of narcissism and delusion of grandeur to think you can create God.”

The Commercialization Moment for Chinese AI Going Overseas.

I shall pursue either one with the best of my ability, but I cannot do both: 1.To train an army of uniformed British clerks in Spain for the benefit of the accountants and copy-boys in London or perchance. 2. To see to it that the forces of Napoleon are driven out of Spain. Your most obedient servant, Wellington

Six million antelope storm through a pocket of Africa that’s nearly impossible to get to, but the Journal caught them on camera

I miss characters such as Bunny Mellon. Her expenditure was actually quite disgusting. Her lifestyle unsustainable even when she was alive. But I do long for the silliness of people who choose to spend their millions on bejewelled sunflowers and suites of bespoke gardening hats and gloves.

The big question is how many tokens per hour can you get out of a local model. My M5 Max testing seems to be in the 10-40 tokens per second range for a serious model like Gemma4:31b. At 10 tokens per second that’s 36000 tokens per hour.

The chips with slight imperfections still function well. Apple has found ways to repurpose these chips in later product releases. For example, A18 Pro chips with 6 GPU cores originally appeared in 2024 in the iPhone 16 Pro models. Yet some of the chips only had 5 functioning GPU cores; these ones were put in a separate bin. The sixth, defective core was disabled, leaving a still good chip and allowing them to be used in the MacBook Neo.

Hoodmaps.com now also has crime data!

But furor in the village over Imes and various development proposals, including the Lodgic Building purchase, extends beyond the Village Board. As of April 20, there had been more public records requests filed in the village of roughly 2,100 people than there had been in the city of Madison. (The Cap Times has filed records requests with both municipalities.)

A great many of these company terms originate in one of the first books printed in English after the invention of the Gutenberg Press: the Boke of Seynt Albans [Book of Saint Albans], also known as The Book of Hawking, Hunting, and Blasing of Arms. Anonymously published in 1486 and written largely in verse, it was lauded as the work of “a gentleman of excellent gifts” — until it was discovered that the author was a woman named Juliana Barnes.

Almost a decade ago, Scott Wilson, the chief investment officer at Washington University in St. Louis, placed about $50 million of the school’s money in SpaceX.  That bet ultimately has surged to become more than 10% of the school’s now $17 billion of assets, most of which is its endowment. The stake was largely made through co-investments plus money in later rounds through outside private equity and venture capital managers.

It was Marty who first turned me on to the absolute degeneracy of the Health Care Swamp. While I was still spouting Republican talking points about how we have to protect the “free market” in health care (editor’s note: health care is neither free nor a market), he was exposing just how failed and distorted that market was. He was publishing on how doctors in different specialties were reimbursed for the volume of their procedures, not the quality of their care, at great cost and risk to patients. He and his team convened groups of expert physicians in every specialty and facilitated their development of a new type of quality metric, asking them to agree on the most indefensible types of overtreatment in their specialty and then using Medicare data to provide every doctor in that specialty his or her rate of that overtreatment. This idea morphed into his team’s creation of a powerful set of “appropriateness” measures that are now used across the country (including in my business helping employers steer their workers to high quality care).

She wanders around the warehouse, which is piled with suitcases, locates her own piece and then coolly makes her way back out. The workers in the warehouse seem to be not that interested in the strange figure rummaging among their shelves. Such is the grit and ingenuity of a woman who will not be parted from her Chanel slingbacks and Alaïa flats.

LA is worth saving. Vote Spencer Pratt.

A woman freezing eggs in much of Europe or Japan is likely to receive substantially less hormonal stimulation per cycle — often half or less — than a woman undergoing the same procedure in the United States, without good evidence that the American approach produces better outcomes per egg or per live birth. I went into this research expecting to confirm my own decision never to do egg freezing, and ended up doing embryo banking on a gentle protocol that I didn’t know existed when I started. Counter.

The Telegraph tests out AI-assisted nursing at the – mechanical – hands of a Japanese robot

This pacing gives him immense credibility with voters in Los Angeles. He has also lived in the Palisades for his whole life. This gives him credibility too. He sees the poor fire response, as well as the crime tolerance and general unsafe conditions in Los Angeles.

The 747-400 introduced a new glass cockpit designed for a flight crew of two instead of three, reducing the number of dials, gauges, and knobs from 971 to 365 through the use of electronics. This reduction speaks volumes about how dramatically the systems integration philosophy had matured.

“Our view is, don’t design anything,” added Michael O’Leary, the CEO of Ryanair Holdings Plc, Boeing’s biggest customer in Europe. “Historically, when Boeing and Airbus make a mess, it’s when they start designing new aircraft that the airlines don’t really need. We just need you to produce many more of them over the next decade so that we can fulfill the worldwide demand for air travel.” …. “The world is full of people who procrastinated and got obliterated,” he said.

“[AI] is how you get an artistic revolution,” he says. “Young voices making new kinds of stories that weren’t financially viable in the studio system.”

Now, if we allowed more units on the lot, that might be possible. A developer could likely fit 3-4 nice cottage homes on that lot, sell them for $500-700k, and make a profit. The people moving in next door would have tiny yards, but they’d probably share my preference for burger joints over face spas. But that isn’t allowed. Our zoning is single-family, and the lot can’t be split. At these land prices, that means the options are McMansion or bust.

It’s fun to ask yourself: “Could I remove some client-side JS and get a better overall experience?” If the answer is yes, I’ll bet you the development experience (and maintenance burden) is much improved too!

Ephesians 4:26-27 is one of best defenses against bitterness, “In your anger do not sin”: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold.”  Anger is a powerful emotion. It’s unrealistic to believe you will never get angry but once again, it’s how you master your emotions so they don’t control you.

Inducing Sustained Creativity and Diversity in Large Language Models. More.

The 32-year-old wellness guru added: “He has a mind of his own. If I could control him, I’d be married with a baby right now.”

Why? Because they hunt a singular monster in professional software development: complexity.Why? Because they hunt a singular monster in professional software development: complexity.

We currently have 4283 data centers listed, from 50 states in USA (America). Click on a state below, to explore its data center locations.

With data from @nytimes API, I analyzed all national+local coverage since 2000—224K articles— to see which topics in each state get covered out of proportion to the rest of the country. A portrait of how the paper of record sees America, one state per tweet, alphabetical. ?

Data centers are good

You’re welcome!

Vintage maps.