adolph

See also earthworms facilitating spread of invasives:

  Invasive species of earthworms from the suborder Lumbricina have been 
  expanding their range in North America. . . . Their introduction to North 
  America has had marked effects on the nutrient cycles and soil profiles in 
  temperate forests. . . . Some species of trees and other plants may be 
  incapable of surviving such changes in available nutrients. This change in 
  the plant diversity in turn affects other organisms and often leads to 
  increased invasions of other exotic species as well as overall forest 
  decline. They are considered one of the most invasive animals in the 
  Midwestern United States along with feral swine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive_earthworms_of_North_A...

In other news, the Mac Pro Wheels Kit was also discontinued.

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/26/mac-pro-wheels-kit-disc...

I'd like to track down this sound for my sisters and me: Old Library Card Punch Machine. Finding the old library smell too would be a plus.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Library/comments/unek0c/old_library...

It is surprising to me that airports do not use an interlock system for deconflicting the various paths segments that may be occupied by a vehicle. Trains have used mechanical ones since the 1800s [0]. The story and comments seem to indicate the only thing preventing collisions is the mind of one person--that sounds insane.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlocking

Yes, from the article:

  The chief who set up the WiFi network, dubbed “STINKY,” definitely knew 
  better. Then-Command Senior Chief Grisel Marrero’s “background is in Navy 
  intelligence, and she earned a master’s degree in business administration 
  with a concentration in information security and digital management, 
  according to her biography,” Navy Times noted. She was later convicted at 
  court-martial earlier this year on charges related to the scheme.
  

For people who are unaware, "STINKY" was the default wifi ssid for at least a time. [0] It is a very distinct ssid, which plays into the discovery of the illicit Starlink: [1]

  Sailors on the ship then began finding the STINKY network and asking 
  questions about it. Some of these questions came to Marrero directly, but she 
  denied knowing anything about the network… and then privately changed its 
  Wi-Fi name to “another moniker that looked like a wireless printer—even 
  though no such general-use wireless printers were present on the ship, the 
  investigation found.”

0. https://www.rvmobileinternet.com/did-your-starlink-just-beco...

1. https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/09/sailors-hid-an-unau...

Or you come home from that Juggalo reunion concert:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47438675

Edit: and while the parent comment and this are made in at least part jest, the discovery of bugs and emergence of adversarial and secondary uses will be interesting.

For example, imagine being able to run gait analysis for neurological disorders against yourself from your own security cameras.

Along with the Strava secret base location leak, another interesting one was the ship with a contraband Starlink:

  As the Independence class Littoral Combat Ship USS Manchester plied the 
  waters of the West Pacific in 2023, it had a totally unauthorized Starlink 
  satellite internet antenna secretly installed on top of the ship by its gold 
  crew’s chiefs. That antenna and associated WiFi network were set up without 
  the knowledge of the ship’s captain, according to a fantastic Navy Times 
  story about this absolutely bizarre scheme. It presented such a huge security 
  risk, violating the basic tenets of operational security and cyber hygiene, 
  that it is hard to believe. 
  

https://www.twz.com/sea/the-story-of-sailors-secretly-instal...

Yeah, I never got into DN3D, maybe b/c it was Windows only? I might be misremembering, but I played UT on Mac with friends by setting up AppleTalk using rj11 adapters. My now-spouse called it the game before the game and it was perhaps more social than the actual game.

Question is, will the 15-minute wait time be replaced by a rubber duck?

https://rubberduckdebugging.com/

I'm glad to have opend that link. Brought back memories.

head-shot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKgyH9k1CSM

> This is a serious risk for the open source ecosystem and particularly the scientific ecosystem that over the last years has adopted many of these technologies.

At worst, it's just Anaconda II AI Boogaloo. The ecosystems will evolve and overcome, or will die and different ecosystems rise to meet the need going forward.

I anticipate OpenAI will get bored and ignore Astral's tools. Software entropy will do its thing and we will remember an actively developed uv as the good old days until something similar to cargo gets adopted as part of Python's standard distribution.

From BBC:

  The officials say it could have been created to redistribute the pyramid's 
  weight around the entrance or another as yet undiscovered chamber.

From TFA:

  Specialists have linked the corridor to the pyramid’s internal load 
  management. Its position near the entrance and behind the gabled stonework 
  suggests it may have helped redirect the immense weight pressing down from 
  above, much as the relieving chambers over the king’s chamber were designed 
  to protect spaces below. 

Yeah, looks like a "relieving chamber" [0] to me. It'd be interesting to take the densities from muon tomography and plug them into finite element analysis. A recent paper using the muon tomography data to inform comparisons of ramp styles [1] says that further data is needed:

  The possibility that the NFC functioned as a relieving chamber has been 
  previously suggested, though without consensus.  . . . where the NFC’s gabled 
  vault—an architecture well known for load redirection—could act as a 
  stress-moderating feature, limiting transmission toward the Descending 
  Passage. This interpretation remains hypothetical and does not imply 
  intentional design integration; it is based solely on geometric compatibility 
  and structural plausibility. Verifying a load-management role will require 
  dedicated finite-element analyses constrained by ERT geometry and improved 
  characterization of internal stratigraphy. 

0. https://engineering.stackexchange.com/questions/37189/engine...

1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s40494-026-02405-x

Yes, iirc the concept wasn't to decouple content and presentation but to decouple semantics from presentation in order to re-present content in different media in that medium's native representation of a particular semantic. However, many things are not much different in different media, a headline is a headline. And other things like "emphasis" can have cultural differences even within the same media, like being bold, italicized or even double-quotes.

Need an ack aside from the system since the response might take a few moments, maybe a "share and enjoy" in a voice that sounds like it is smiling.

Any thoughts on the Ploopy?

https://ploopy.co/headphones/

> In the end it looks like we are treading water, just like it was when computers got 1M times faster in a couple of decades, but we felt very little improvement in earnings or reduction in work.

I think this is a very important point. The hedonic treadmill means real gains are discounted. The novelty information cycle is like an Osborn Effect for improvements, like the semi-annual Popular Mechanic's flying car covers where there is an enticing future perpetually nearly here and at the same time disappointingly never materialized.

That looks like a very cool option and effort. Like the Chinese balloons that overflew the US in the last (few?) years, it would likely be challenging to shoot down. Otoh, it might cause some diplomatic disagreements about overflight.

  There are a number of competing theories in international law, with varying 
  criteria, to delineate the upper limit delineating airspace versus outer 
  space. This debate is unsettled. [0]

There may also be some technical challenges having to do with beamforming rf to the vehicle. Starshield like Starlink has the predictability of orbital vehicles for tracking. It would be interesting to understand how a ground station focuses on the solar glider.

0. https://opil.ouplaw.com/display/10.1093/law:epil/97801992316...

I wonder if the new displays with A19 processors have better heat dissipation. (and if they can be modified to run full iOS instead of the displayOS variant)

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/new-apple-studio-displa...

Given it’s a table, one would be able to iterate over each, “be wrong on the Internet” about the character and wait for said niche communities to swoop in to make a correction.

Recall back when Apple had the attention to detail required to implement a Blackberry style thumbwheel as the volume control in the Quicktime Player.

http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm

> Apple used to be good at cannibalizing its own product lines.

Arguably only iPhone from iPod.

Lisa to Mac wasn't an organization being "good" so much as corporate infighting ("after Steve Jobs was forced out of the Lisa project by Apple's board of directors, he appropriated the Macintosh project from Jef Raskin") [0].

Low End Mac's "Road Apple" features [1] list out many Apple products that were hobbled in one way or another to prevent a "consumer" product from cannibalizing higher margin "pro" products.

After 2012 Apple's pro desktops did encourage cannibalization by being rarely updated corporate vanity/art projects, which like Lisa to Mac isn't an example of being "good" at managing product transitions.

A more daring Apple would have freed the Watch from the iPhone in the same way they freed the iPhone from iTunes sync.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lisa

1. https://lowendmac.com/2014/road-apples-second-class-macs/

Something that repair enables is wealth in the sense that David Deutsch uses in "Beginning of Infinity:" the repertoire of physical transformations that they would be capable of causing

Shades of: Being strapped to the sponsons of an AH-64 is one wild, but potentially life-saving ride.

https://www.twz.com/38435/this-is-all-the-survival-gear-that...

  This style of camp was popularized as housing for men working in remote oil 
  fields.

Its kinda weird to not see temporary workforce housing as some recent phenomena, especially given a recent TV show (I havn't watched it) about a particular railroad construction camp. Work that occurs in remote places requires holistic logistics for the workforce, similar to expeditionary warfare.

  Hell on Wheels is an American Western television series about the 
  construction of the first transcontinental railroad across the United States
  [...]
  chronicles the Union Pacific Railroad and its laborers, mercenaries, 
  prostitutes, surveyors, and others who lived, worked, and died in the mobile 
  encampment, called "Hell on Wheels", that followed the railhead west across 
  the Great Plains.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_on_Wheels_(TV_series)

Between touch and watch for machine login and 1Password everywhere else, it is a rare day that I actually type in a password. On those rare occasions, I feel some gratitude to be forced to type it so that I don't forget it entirely.

Yes, Touch ID is faster to unlock in a desktop context. Watch auth works fast enough to unlock a Macbook by the time I open it in order to place a finger on Touch ID. Ymmv, this is me on reasonably updated and stock Air M1 and Pro M3 units.

The paper states it adjusts for "ENSO, volcanic eruptions, and solar variations" and not (afaict) the changes in shipping bunker fuel that reduced atmospheric SO2 (if that is what you mean by "reduced aerosols"). Below is a summary of the topic for those who are unaware. I withhold any opinion of validity of mechanism or effect.

  Sulphur particles contained in ships' exhaust fumes had been counteracting 
  some of the warming coming from greenhouse gases. Lowering the sulfur content 
  of marine fuel weakened this masking effect, effectively giving a boost to 
  warming.

> if you have an Apple Watch then you don’t need Touch ID

Yeah, the move to Watch auth reopened the Macbook to the good old PowerBook System 7 days as far as effortless use goes. Touch is still great for escalation, 1Password, etc, but being able to be logged in by the time the screen is open is significant.

  The difference is in the number of GPU cores. One chip has an 8-core GPU, while the other has a 10-core GPU.

I'm wondering why they would have a 2 GPU core option. Maybe the 6 GPU one is binned since it is only available with 16G RAM? But no, the 10 GPU core is also needed for any storage increase....

Yep, they have been on a 12 month cadence each March for the last two years. The M1 (Nov '20) and M2 (Jul '22) lasted 20 months each.

https://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#MacBook_Air