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Ian McKellan quotes Shakespeare in response or ICE and other xenophobia
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Comic-Con bans AI
Thanks to a vocal contingent of creators, Comic Con will ban AI. Separate decisions by San Diego Comic-Con and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) illustrate the depth of AI opposition within some creative communities — though they’re certainly not the only ones, with music distribution platform Bandcamp also recently banning generative AI.
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Olympic ice-skating, the Minions soundtrack, and copyright clearance
A Spanish figure skater, wanted to use songs from the Minions soundtrack for his Olympic routine, but that was put into jeopardy due to copyright clearance. What makes clearance especially difficult for the Olympics is you have to get the song cleared for the entire world. In his post earlier this week where he lamented…
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Two cities under siege
I’ve thought about this often lately, how much does today compare to the years running up to the American Revolution, where British troops attempted to force compliance in its populace? Boston 1770 and Minneapolis 2026 share similarities. The rage from those pre-revolution clashes in Boston continued to linger for years into the Constitutional Convention, and…
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People who can see collapse before it happens
I found myself nodding along to nearly everything in this article about why certain people can foresee collapse before others. Basically, it comes down to be able to see patterns. Baron-Cohen’s work on hyper-systemising (2006) describes how autistic people naturally gravitate toward understanding structures, mechanisms, and causal patterns rather than social signalling. They notice inconsistencies,…
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10 things learned from AI code assistants
Benj Edwards tried numerous AI code assistants and came away with 10 lessons learned. Claude Code, Codex, and Google’s Gemini CLI, can seemingly perform software miracles on a small scale. They can spit out flashy prototypes of simple applications, user interfaces, and even games, but only as long as they borrow patterns from their training…
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The guilt of the inbox
A really great essay delving into a design pattern that needs to be reevaluated for possible alternatives. The original inbox was a wooden tray on a real desk. Papers arrived there because a person walked them over. The obligation was physics: it took up space, it had mass, someone had expended effort. You could see…
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Cows using tools
A cow using a stick to scratch an itch. For a cow, Veronika has had what might be considered an idyllic life. She lives in a picturesque town in Austria, surrounded by snow-capped mountains and glacial lakes. She is a beloved family pet, rather than a production animal, and spends her days ambling through tree-lined…
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A fully autonomous umbrella
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Jewish seniors are offering to hide their Haitian caregivers
The saying goes, “history doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes.” In Florida, Jewish seniors are offering to hide their Haitian caregivers. About 500 seniors live at Sinai Residences in Boca Raton, Florida, including many Holocaust survivors. Recently, some of them asked if they could hide the building’s Haitian staff in their apartments. “That reminds me of…