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In 1969-70, ITV color camera operators staged a “color strike,” switching off the red/green/blue tubes and leaving only a black-and-white luminance tube, effectively turning color cameras into B&W and disrupting color programming and ad revenue for about three months. The delay hit Upstairs/Downstairs, with six B&W episodes shot during the strike and later color episodes resumed. To suit American audiences, the pilot was rewritten and reshot; three pilot versions circulated (Sarah leaves in color, Sarah stays in color, Sarah stays in B&W), and the original B&W pilot is now lost. Some streaming platforms mix versions, creating a continuity nightmare.
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The article argues that bigger models and more data no longer reliably yield smarter AI. After Claude Fable 5 was banned for national-security reasons, labs are rethinking scale. A 753B-parameter GLM-5.2 rivals GPT-5.5 and Fable 5, while truly enormous models still hallucinate heavily (DeepSeek V4 Pro 94%, GPT-5.5 86%). In a Python test, GLM-5.2 exposed the impossibility of a single-threaded, non-yielding I/O task, while others hallucinated. It posits a trilemma—raw capability, uncertainty/hallucination calibration, and efficiency—and calls for moving beyond sheer size.
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Cosmin Stroe explains designing and drawing a backyard deck to secure a building permit. After buying a house with no deck, he used his drafting background to create 9 CAD drawings (site, framing, footings, railing, deck surface, beam details, ledger, stringers) and coordinated with a helpful inspector. He learned from errors (footings, post sizes) and built the deck largely himself: 42" deep, 12" diameter concrete footings, 6x6 posts, 20 ft beams, aided by a two-person auger. Total cost about $6k; maintenance needed every few years. Nine years later, the deck remains solid and plans helped the process.
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Arcade Heroes surveys soccer/football arcade games from pre-video pinball to modern redemption titles, tracing history across decades. It covers 1970s ball-and-paddle cabinets (Goal Kick, World Cup football), 1980s color cabinets (Exciting Soccer, Pro Soccer, Kick And Run), and a 1990s boom (Hat Trick Hero/Football Champ, World Cup, Virtua Striker, World Club Champion Football with cards). It notes evolving formats from Namco’s World Kicks to Konami’s Winning Eleven arcade and Sega’s Virtua Striker line, then the 2000s shift toward redemption/kicker games (Kick-It, Subsoccer, World Football Frenzy) and recent VR/modern takes. It ends with a wish for a joystick revival.
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Colors your screen can’t show exist in the real world. With three cone types, the brain infers color from signal strength, so displays only approximate spectra. The CIE diagram and sRGB/gamut limits leave vast cyan shades unattainable. In nature, color is sharpened by repeated filtering: through leaves, water, and thin-film structures in birds and butterflies. Bioluminescence, fluorescence, and lasers reveal purer colors. The piece invites noticing real color richness—like a turquoise-green traffic light—rather than relying on photos.
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An experimental satellite, Pulsar-0, mapped GNSS jamming across Europe and the Middle East from space, showing GPS signals weaken dramatically above Europe—from about 40 dB to as low as 10 dB—and that jamming disrupts positioning, timing, and ground operations. Ground interference endangers critical infrastructure and space operations, including imaging satellites and Starlink collision avoidance. Pulsar-0 tests Xona Space Systems’ Pulsar constellation of about 300 LEO satellites for a stronger, more resilient PNT service. Six satellites planned for launch in October; basic service expected early 2027 after a $170M Series C.
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3-30-300 is a simple urban benchmark: every home, school or office should see at least three trees, have 30% tree cover nearby, and be within 300 meters of a park. Florence and Fort Collins have adopted it, but across 862 European cities only about half meet the three-tree view and many areas miss 30% canopy, especially in southern Europe. Among eight major cities, only Singapore passes the full rule. The standard’s benefits include better mental health and cooler summers, prompting calls to expand tree planting to meet it.
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Tim Wehrle explores storing a tiny website inside a favicon by embedding its HTML as raw bytes in the favicon's RGB channels. He converts HTML to UTF-8 bytes, prepends a 4-byte length header, then maps bytes to pixel RGB values, yielding a 9x9 image (81 pixels) that holds 208 bytes of content. Reading back uses a canvas to extract pixels, reconstruct bytes, and decode the HTML. The catch: it needs a bootstrap JS to render; without JS it's just a PNG. Practicality is limited, but it's a boundary-pushing experiment.
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Neuroscientist Oswald Steward and colleagues won the 2026 Kavli Prize for showing that neurons synthesize proteins locally at synapses via messenger RNA, rather than only in the cell body. This local protein synthesis explains how specific synapses change during learning and memory, reshaping theories of memory formation and synaptic plasticity. The finding links to disorders like Fragile X and Alzheimer's and spurs potential therapies by targeting synaptic protein production. Steward notes the idea changed his career, remains skeptical about AI's ability to replicate discovery, and emphasizes the enduring mystery of the "spark" of new ideas.
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Snap's SPECS AR glasses are available for pre-order at $2,195, shipping Fall 2026. Available in Narrow (47mm) and Wide (52mm) with a see-through 16-million-color display, 51° FOV, adaptive tint lenses, dual Snapdragon processors, on-device processing, privacy indicator, and open-ear audio. Features include voice/gesture control, built-in battery with charging case, lightweight frames (132–136 g), prescription-ready lenses, and compatibility with iPhone XS+ iOS 18+ for a Virtual Try-On. Free shipping/returns, one-year warranty, financing via Klarna. Available for pre-order in US, UK, France; refundable deposit; pay balance later.
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Adrian Hon surveys Nikolai Evreinov, a Russian director who argued life is theatre. From The Beautiful Despot (1906) and The Ancient Theatre to parodies of Stanislavski, he pushed 'Theatre for Oneself' and theatrotherapy—personal role-play intended to reconstruct happiness—even staging the 1920 Winter Palace storming as mass spectacle. The piece then links Evreinov to Nathan Fielder, arguing they share a belief in illusion as a path to truth, though Fielder uses it to navigate neoliberal life. Evreinov’s elitism, impracticality, and influence on later performance studies are noted.
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Data Compression Explained surveys how to compress data, bridging theory and practice. It covers information theory (entropy, no universal compressor, Kolmogorov complexity), coding (Huffman, arithmetic/range coding, ABC), modeling (fixed/variable order, DMC/PPM/CTW, context mixing in PAQ/ZPAQ), transforms (RLE, LZ77/LZSS/Deflate/LZW, BWT, E8E9, precomp), archive formats, error detection and encryption, and lossy vs lossless approaches. It surveys benchmarks (Calgary corpus, Large Text enwik9, Hutter Prize), and argues that compression is prediction plus coding, bounded by computability and practical limits.
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Amy Deng, diagnosed with prolactinoma, shares a four-step AI-assisted method to solve mystery fatigue: Track symptoms and triggers; test with broad and targeted labs; analyze combined data with large language models to surface hypotheses; and experiment with diet, hydration, hormones, and medications under physician guidance. She used wearables, nutrition apps, CGMs, and spreadsheets, plus AI agents to organize data and pose questions to clinicians. While no model replaced her neuroendocrinologist, the AI-driven process outpaced PCP visits by generating hypotheses and tests, giving her agency and steady improvement over a month.
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A new documentary, How to Feed a Dictator, gathers five private chefs who cooked for Pol Pot, Kim Jong‑il, Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin and Augusto Pinochet. Using a tasting‑menu frame, it shows how food and hospitality became stages for power, danger and complicity. The cooks recount surveillance, manipulation, and moral compromise—from Amin’s regime and a near‑execution for a misstep to Pinochet’s loyal service. The film argues dictators rely on those who sustain them, even as they reveal the human cost behind opulent feasts.
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Could not summarize article.
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Kent Beck argues success hinges on future potential, not task count. Managers sort engineers into A, B, or C by signals beyond productivity: code quality, communication, learning, and impact. The priority is distinguishing B from C by whether work is reliable, well-documented, and doesn’t create extra work. If you’re a B, you can become an A by showing learning, better design, multiple implementations, incremental diffs, internal tools, and sharing lessons, even if it takes more time. The piece favors long-term thinking over rushing tasks.
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Aikido introduces Code Audit, a tool that sits between SAST and pentesting by applying pentest-grade reasoning to static source code to surface multi-step, intent-dependent vulnerabilities before release. It analyzes across repositories, feature flags, undeployed changes, and admin routes without live environments. It complements SAST and pentests, targeting logic flaws that rules-based scanners miss, including mobile apps and smart contracts. Benchmark: covers about 70-80% of full pentest findings at roughly 10x lower cost; early users find ~25 issues per codebase (median). Getting started: in Aikido, create an audit, select repos, pay credits, audits can finish in minutes.
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Attack on Arch's AUR involved mass creation of new accounts that adopted orphaned PKGBUILDs and pushed malicious updates to install malware via npm (later bun). About 1,500 packages were affected (mostly orphaned), official repos untouched. New registrations were paused; attackers exploited the open, trust-based AUR model. Some updates included an eBPF-based data-exfiltration payload. Suggestions include stricter account creation, better orphan handling, and more visible package-change warnings to deter future abuse.
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This work demonstrates that Age of Empires II is functionally complete and Turing complete, then constructs in-game implementations of a NAND gate, a one-bit perceptron, and an ansatz-based training circuit. Using goats as signal carriers and terrain features as logic rails, the gates realize an in-game perceptron with weights and inputs, where an XNOR-based inner product feeds an AND threshold. The training circuit updates weights from true labels and inputs. The author notes broader implications for modeling LLM attributes and provides artifacts and verilog tests.
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