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Alice Girard Guittard: Before recommendation algorithms were a thing, you had to decide what you would be doing on the computer. You didn’t really have one big app that you could open and order it to entertain you. Instead, you had a few dozen of bookmarks to websites, each with a specific idea in mind. A site for video game news, that one website with lots of tutorials, a blog about anime that didn’t update often enough, a wiki about a TV show from the 90s… Of course awful things existed on…

Katie Bo Lillis and Zachary Cohen at CNN: The intelligence report, circulated across the US military this spring in the midst of the war with Iran, immediately set off alarm bells: A Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program. The US military swung into action with plans to intercept the vessel, according to four sources familiar with the episode. According to two of the sources, armed members of the US military were preparing to board the ship.…

Krista Conger at Stanford Medicine: The new research finding shows that the human brain consists of two ancient nervous systems cleverly packaged together — a more primitive part that regulates our hearts’ beating, our breathing and other functions, and another that makes us distinctly human, capable of poetry, mathematics and wondering about our own origins. The discovery could help explain why scientists have struggled for decades to grow certain types of brain cells in the laboratory — and…

In my previous post about the iPhone Duo I speculated that there was more to the Apple Pencil support story: Regarding Apple Pencil support, I feel like we don't have the full story yet. Currently, Apple says iPhone Duo is compatible with only the USB-C Apple Pencil which has very few features compared to the Apple Pencil Pro. That's out of necessity; without the magnetic connection hardware, there's no way for the Apple Pencil Pro to pair or charge with iPhone Duo. But why is Apple Pencil…

If you missed it, please read my previous post about these features before continuing. John Gruber at Daring Fireball regarding Live Rewind and Siri Recap: Some people are objecting to the very existence of these features as privacy intrusive. I think they’re pretty reasonably thought out. There are surveillance cameras all over the place now. I was walking home from dinner here in Philadelphia a few weeks ago with a friend visiting from out of town, talking about this, and he stopped midway…

I'm really enjoying the stuff Mike Monteiro is writing lately: [...] An LLM will never write it like you told it. It might give you a reasonable facsimile, and the most dangerous thing about a facsimile is that it will eventually convince you that it’s the real thing. It’ll eventually convince you that its voice is your voice. So while the temptation to use this shit is understandable, the price is too high. Eventually your LLM will write your child a note and their LLM will write a reply and…

This is a screenshot I took on my iPhone this morning: This looks like it's straight out of a mirror universe episode of Star Trek, but sadly it's a real story: The US has confirmed it deployed a space weapon in Earth's orbit, the first time it has acknowledged such offensive capabilities. US Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink said the "on orbit" weapon was necessary to safeguard US forces against hostile enemy action. Speaking at the Air, Space and Cyber Conference on Monday, Meink said the…