If anybody wants to play around with ideas in advance of the foldable iPhone, the previous-model Galaxy Z Fold seems to be widely available for like $600 now

Big Apple v. Epic news: the 9th circuit has seemingly unanimously denied their request for an en banc appeal, so absent an extremely unlikely Supreme Court intervention, it appears that the ruling that Apple can only charge a minimal amount reflecting their actual costs for link-outs will stand.

Yeah, the end game here is that Iran is going to end up substantially better off than they were pre-war, and if the US' goal is to minimize disruption to global trade they should figure out which set of concessions they can most easily live with

What is it about a bunch of rich misogynistic yahoos hyped up on fake Christianity making a bunch of bloody poorly-planned mostly-unsuccessful attempts at regime change in the Middle East that resonates with the current moment

Bluesky, where a literal Facebook cofounder keeps attempting to push back against our most notorious AI doomsayer and gets very little traction doing so

I feel like a lot of the Andy Weir dunking this weekend is from people who haven’t actually read any of his books and fail to appreciate just how popcorn-y they are

Project Hail Mary review: very solid, quite moving in places, practical effects are excellent though they couldn’t totally overcome the claustrophobia of setting it on a spaceship, also the non-IMAX 70mm print at Regal Union Square is gorgeous and a worthy alternative to overbooked IMAXes

With this administration, every announcement is fertilizer-related

I find it interesting that of the three genres people have tried to build cinematic universes around - superheroes, sci-fi and fantasy - fantasy has been far and away the least successful and there isn’t really even one successful attempt at it to date

This is why I think Epstein and the adjacent oligarch / billionaire / wealth tax stuff is so important - it’s a durable enemy that people won’t have forgotten the existence of by summer 2029

Writing has been on the wall for a while - heck, the Mac Pro itself never really made that much sense - but nevertheless the end of an era of full-size Apple PCs

So it turns out that Apple was correct not to build their own foundation model but wrong not to build their own TSMC

Asterisk Olympics

I’m currently reading my 10yo “Dungeon Crawler Carl” and it’s very similar to PHM (except that I have to clean up a LOT of stuff)

Relatedly, anybody who insists that Schumer and Gillibrand and Hochul and Jeffries were somehow foisted on New York by powers outside of our control needs to meet more New Yorkers

I wonder if anybody has ever added up how much the resulting shift towards everybody carrying on everything ended up costing airlines

It's like a joyless Disney live-action remake except cheaper-looking and without the original soundtrack

If they offer Trump a 10% commission on the Hormuz fees he’ll cheerfully approve of this arrangement

It’s working and we should keep doing it

So basically OpenAI is now desperately trying to copy the one category of LLM tool that seems to have a decent sized potential market, but for which their main competitor has now gotten to a point where they’re a default choice that customers have to be actively lured away from?

Private K-12 admissions apparently had a massive boom this year, and I don't know how to square that with the fact that it has become apparent in the last couple of years that "elites" are the dumbest f*cking people alive.

It sucks that Adams was too chickenshit to do anything about declining enrollment during his tenure, but honestly "hold harmless" benefits nobody - leaves some students at struggling moribund schools while taking money away from more popular ones - so I hope they do have a plan to wind it down.

Honestly for me booking flights is a 7-windows-open-at-the-same-time type deal, if you're just meekly typing a set of dates and locations into a little form on Kayak or whatever you're doing it wrong; I've got multiple websites, alternative itineraries, possible stopovers / open jaws...

It’s a nice system hardware-wise but there still aren’t a lot of compelling exclusives (Pokopia’s glowing reviews notwithstanding)

This has some good info about Liquid Glass - it sounds like it's here to stay but it is at least getting better in June.

If there’s anything small proud culturally-distinct countries love, it’s loudmouth foreigners weighing in on their elections

In all seriousness Paramount should offer to sell Star Trek to Apple; they need $, Apple has a streaming service with lots of SF but no tentpole, phenomenal brand synergy, and and there's no version of Trek that would both make money and not make the worst people on Earth yell at Ellison on Twitter

This company should never be allowed to do business in the US again

If it wasn’t for Iran I think Democrats would be panicking and agreeing to fund DHS without conditions; they might still do that, but now they have enough maneuvering room that they at least have a chance at a standalone TSA funding bill

We’ve seen in China that what actually happens when you constrain the supply of chips is that AI companies figure out how to do more with less, which is probably a good thing long term

Everybody always fixates on Henry VIII’s divorce, but that tends to obscure the fact that he pretty much pioneered the idea of using Protestantism as a tool to make Jesus serve the interests of rich assholes, a thread that has carried through to the present day

Nasty hobbitses saying we haven't met our goals in Iranses

New annoying AI educational use: my 7th grader's specials teachers seem like they might be using AI to *write* assignments, with weirdly ornate rubrics and impractical requirements in terms of (say) how much text they want to fit on a slide or the depth of knowledge they expect a 7th grader to have.

Chuck Norris doesn't die. He waits in his house at R'lyeh, dreaming of roundhouse kicks.

Canada has the good fortune to have elected a pragmatic international dealmaker as PM as precisely the moment when it needed one

If you’re not sure if it’s anti-Semitic, just don’t say it - there are plenty of other opinions you could be loudly sharing instead, pick one of those

I’m not optimistic about Democrats doing everything in 2029, but I’m pretty sure the combination of climate change and cheap solar/battery and AI and grid issues will let them pass the climate bill they should have passed in 2021

The source code for the PS3 C++ port of Minecraft is live and somebody wrote up some of the interesting bit-twiddling hacks (and they are indeed interesting bit-twiddling hacks)

It just occurred to me that this whole stupid discussion is the Western Hemisphere version of PRC versus Mainland versus China

I thought a France Libre was made with rum, lime juice, and Saint-Émilion

So that's officially $100B flushed down the drain; if Facebook was run like a normal company Zuckerberg would no longer be allowed within a mile of the place

VENEZUELA WINS

Looks like KatAbu is losing badly but Stratton just took a slim lead on the strength of a big vote dump from Cook County

Pretty much anything a human in a spacesuit can do, a robot can do, and it’s a lot easier to send back samples than people

well that went way deeper than I was expecting

a) This is excellent b) It's a Delaware Court of Chancery case, and ought to give you pause when entering into any corporate-structure-related agreements with a counterparty that's headquartered in a red state with less developed corporate laws than DE's

There are some interesting parallels between Leo and Zohran in that both of them have taken leadership roles in organizations that have put up with terrible people for way too long, people who they now need to purge in order to keep the larger organization healthy and viable

Schrodinger’s Ayatollah