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scalziwhatever_feed
It seems to come earlier every year, doesn’t it?
There may be other things going on today, but if there are, I don’t want to know about them, I’ll just be here with my flag.
Also, congratulations to Knicks fans today, and condolences to Spurs fans.
I think that covers it!
— JS
smbc_comics_feed
Hovertext:
The notebook has feedback from a nurse, cowboy, and plumber.
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james_davis_nicoll
floggingbabel_feed.
I dreamed that an artist had solicited unmatched socks from women around the world. She then attached precise weights at top or bottom of each and placed them in the Arctic Ocean, near the surface. Then she donned scuba gear and filmed a voyage through the forest of lost socks. A most dreamlike dream.
I do not know if all the materials were biodegradable, or if they were gathered up afterward, or if the artist merely assumed that with all the trash in the oceans of the world, hers would be negligible. But the decision would say a lot about her and her culture.
*
darths_and_droids_feed
Switching up what's happening in a fight (or just before a fight) can be a fun way to add interest to what might be an otherwise routine action scene. Have something weird happen, something unexpected. Like extra weapons appearing from nowhere, or an earthquake striking. Or suddenly a stampede of rats passes through the area - what are they running from? Should you worry about that?
You probably should...
aurilee writes:
We haven't stumbled into another dream sequence thing, have we? I guess it's plausible Kylo asks Rey for help here and the lightsaber teleport is all that's manageable. And I suppose it's also plausible that Rey doesn't think that Palpatine is enough of a threat that giving away her lightsaber is a problem either. And perhaps I really did see some farm animals flying somewhat recently. It must make some sense with information I don't have. Like those pigs flying? Very likely once you learn they're toy animals.
I miss when fights made sense too, random guard person. I do like how this does make sense in context of a gaming group however. Help your fellow players out! (Except when obviously fighting against them.)
sorcyressdr_drang_feedI took a bike ride this morning on a portion of the I&M Canal Trail from Romeoville to Joliet and back. It’s a fairly short ride, eight miles each way, and that distance got me thinking about using Mathematica to do some calculations after I got back home.
The trail has mile markers with little snippets of information about the canal and the surrounding area. Here are the markers I passed this morning:
The mileage figures on the markers increase as you go south and west, which is downstream. There are several more markers in Lockport, where they’re graduated in tenths of a mile, but these will do for our purposes.
My ride started nearly a mile before Marker 27 and continued about a mile after Marker 31, which would lead you to believe I rode six miles, not eight. But the trip is definitely eight miles. I have my Fitness app set to record in kilometers, and it always tells me this trip is 13 kilometers one way. And as we know from the Fibonacci conversion, 13 km = 8 mi.
As I passed Marker 27 on the way south, I was reminded of this anomaly and decided to use the trip to figure out why the markers and the mileage don’t match up. I checked my Workout screen on my watch as I passed each marker and learned that there were two miles between Markers 28 and 29 and between Markers 30 and 31. After turning around in the parking lot of the Joliet Iron Works, I decided to take a photo of each marker on the way back north and use the photos to calculate distances.
I already knew about Mathematica’s GeoDistance function, and I figured it must have a way of extracting the latitude and longitude of photos from their EXIF data. That turned out to be the Import function, and I was able to put the two together to make this short notebook:
As you can see, the distances between the photos (and therefore between the markers) were:
| Markers | Distance |
|---|---|
| 27–28 | 1.019 mi |
| 28–29 | 1.886 mi |
| 29–30 | 1.041 mi |
| 30–31 | 1.939 mi |
These are geodesic or “as the crow flies” distances. The canal and its trail are pretty straight, but there are a couple of doglegs between Markers 28 and 29, which explains why the distance between them is over a tenth of a mile off from two miles.
As you can see near the bottom of the notebook, I used the GeoListPlot function to make a map with the marker positions on it. I combined that in Acorn with the map from my iPhone’s Fitness app to make this image:
It took some trial and error with the GeoRange option to get the scales to match up reasonably well, but I think it was worth it. You can see where the mile markers fall on my route, and it’s clear that the distances between Markers 28 and 29 and Markers 30 and 31 are about twice as far as the other distances. Also, you can see how the geodesic distance between Markers 28 and 29 cuts the corners, making it less than two miles.
So I’ve solved the six-mile/eight-mile mystery, but I still don’t understand why the mileage on the markers is wrong.
unsung_feedThis is a really nice set of transitions when pinching in and out in Photos in iOS 26.
This is trickier than it seems, because it’s not just a linear zoom (like it would be in Maps or Sketch, for example). It’s a zoom and reflow – from 3 items to 1 item per column – which makes things a lot more complicated.
Here are a few nice details about this transition:
Nikita Prokopov on his blog published other examples of problematic transitions, and it seems most of them are struggle in the same way, as transitions that cannot simply be linear. The above transition in iOS shows it’s possible to do it well if you care.
And it’s not just about smoothness or nice feelings. Prokopov:
[…] Desynchronization can lead to a lot of confusion. For example, in Photos, when switching between Crop and Adjust mode, picture snaps into place immediately but the crop border is animated.
This creates a false feeling that something subtly changes when you switch between modes. And you know what? I don’t want my UI to give me false feelings. I want it to be a precise instrument, not an animated toy.
The above iOS transition feels very precise to me.
jwz_org_feedbeyondthebundle_feed
Through Wednesday, June 24, jump-start your fantasy campaign with the all-new Dungeononomicon Bundle featuring hundreds of pages of system-neutral settings from Raging Swan Press. Want to run your own fantasy adventures, but you lack the time to prep? Grab one of more than 30 fully detailed, self-contained system-neutral adventure sites in The Dread Dungeononomicon – stock the dungeon with monsters, treasure, trinkets, and trash from Thingonomicon II – and set up your players’ base of exploration with any of the four dozen towns in four volumes of Village Backdrops. At the gaming table, keep the Miscellany of Many Things handy to drop in colorful characters, monsters, and treasure as needed. You’re good to go!
Functionally akin to a theater set before the cast arrives, the Raging Swan Backdrops occupy an unusual middle ground between short bullet-point fronts and detailed modules. Raging Swan owner and Dungeon Backdrops designer Creighton Broadhurst recounted his inspiration:
“The germ of the idea for the Dungeon Backdrop line was born in a conversation I had with a chum back in 2019. He’s a fellow GM, and an inveterate tinkerer and worldbuilder. He commented that he never ran a published adventure as written; often, he’d do a wholesale rewrite so it better suited his campaign’s setting and overall plot. Sometimes he’d use little more than the map. Of course, that’s fair enough – I’ve been ‘guilty’ of the same practice on many occasions – but it got me thinking.
“Assuming he wasn’t an outlier (and I don’t think he is, given the popularity of the Dungeon Backdrop line), it stood to reason other GMs also don’t want or need a fully detailed module – they just want a ready-to-go dungeon / ruined tower / whatever to serve as the setting for their own adventures. Thus, the Dungeon Backdrop line was born.
“Since we started publishing Dungeon Backdrops, I’ve used more than a few in my own campaigns. As a GM, I love how customizable and flexible they are. I don’t have to bother drawing the map (my most hated part of any design) or thinking about the place’s physicality – all I have to do is stuff it full of monsters and treasure. That cuts down on my prep time and lets me be more creative in the wider campaign. For me, that’s a double bonus.”
Pay just US$17.95 to get all eight complete system-neutral sourcebooks in our Dungeononomicon Collection (retail value $100.50) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including The Dread Dungeononomicon, plus its Markdown Files; The Thingonomicon II, a sequel to the original Thingonomicon we presented in October 2024 and again in December 2025; all four volumes of the GM’s Miscellany: Village Backdrops – Volume I, II, III, and IV; and a collection of Raging Swan’s “Sunday Supplement” blog posts, the Miscellany of Many Things.
Get this all-new Dungeononomicon offer before it vanishes into the Subterranean Study of the Pit of Unquiet Souls Wednesday, June 24.
beyondthebundle_feed
Through Monday, June 29 we present the Top Cow Bundle featuring digital science fiction and fantasy graphic albums from comics publisher Top Cow Productions. For more than 30 years Top Cow has created captivating stories for a diverse comic book community. Best known for its flagship titles Witchblade, The Darkness, and Cyber Force, the company also publishes hard science fiction and fantasy series of interest to every sf fan and tabletop fantasy roleplayer: Helm Greycastle, Eclipse, Punderworld, Port of Earth, Infinite Dark, Stairway, and many more. The 18 .PDF albums in this bundle present ten different series – not just their first volumes but long or complete runs, some spanning multiple volumes. Each album collects four or more issues of the original comics and adds variant covers, essays, and behind-the-scenes recollections.
Visit a city destroyed by sunlight, a port for galactic traders, alternate Mesoamericas, a rom-com Olympus, Antarctica, and the end of the universe, among other interesting locales, in this all-new Top Cow Bundle. Pay just US$9.95 to get all eight titles in our Starter Collection (retail value $82) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks:
And if you pay more than the threshold (average) price, which is set at $19.95 to start, you’ll level up and also get our entire Bonus Collection with ten more titles worth an additional $133:
This Top Cow offer goes missing in the Dark Sector of the voidship Orpheus at the end of the universe Monday, June 29.
daringfireball_feedJonathan Edwards reporting for The Washington Post:
President Donald Trump’s name is off the Kennedy Center.
Crews at the performing arts venue started removing it from the front of the building around 3 a.m., several hours after the center missed a federal judge’s two-week deadline to do so. The judge had ruled that the decision by the center’s board of trustees to rename it was illegal.
A perfect metaphor for the work ahead of us.
daringfireball_feedFrom Apple’s Developer site:
To ensure getting started with a large cloud model is as accessible as possible, developers in the App Store Small Business Program with fewer than two million first time App Store downloads will be able to use Apple Foundation Models running on Private Cloud Compute (PCC) with no cloud API cost. The model provides access to frontier level intelligence with unparalleled privacy protections. This makes it easy for small developers to get started building intelligent app experiences without upfront infrastructure costs.
Eligibility requirements
Access to PCC is available to developers who meet the following criteria:
- Are enrolled in the App Store Small Business Program.
- Have fewer than 2 million first-time app downloads from any of their apps on the App Store.
- Have the Private Cloud Compute entitlement assigned to their account.
Where Apple Intelligence is available, eligible developers can use PCC in their apps distributed on the App Store, and test PCC features via TestFlight or ad hoc distribution. Installs during testing are not counted as first-time app downloads.
If any app subsequently exceeds the 2 million first-time downloads threshold, or the developer is no longer enrolled in the App Store Small Business Program, the developer will be notified and must migrate to an alternative solution within 6 months. Information about first-time downloads is available in Analytics in App Store Connect.
These strict limits don’t seem to be getting as much attention as they should. It’s nice that for small developers who meet the above criteria, access to PCC has no cost. But there’s no way (yet?) to buy your way out of these limits. There are no paid API tiers for larger developers who exceed the above limits, or for developers who qualify now but release a hit app that grows to exceed them. (Users who pay for iCloud+ don’t have any extra quotas for PCC usage in third-party apps either.)
The “fewer than 2 million first-time app downloads from any of their apps” restriction is particularly notable. It’s not 2 million installations for apps that are using PCC, but 2 million downloads for any app the developer has ever released. Developer Gui Rambo writes:
So uhhhh… Apple should really rethink the Private Cloud Compute developer access limitation. I do happen to have an app that’s had more than 2 million downloads. That app is ChibiStudio, an app that’s been in the App Store for over 10 years. It’s not like I’m getting a million new users every year nowadays. And I’m also not making any real money with it 🥲
The bottom line is that — for the OS 27 cycle at least — PCC is primarily a feature for Apple itself to use in Siri AI. Granting access to PCC to any third-party developers at all is better than nothing, but this 2-million-download cap cuts off many developers who are in the Small Business Program. Apple should reconsider that. And I know there are a lot of developers who exceed the eligibility for the Small Business Program who would love to have access to the PCC APIs, even if access was paid. The lack of paid tiers says to me that Apple is worried enough about meeting demand from Siri AI users alone.
daringfireball_feedAnthropic:
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Anthropic models will not be affected.
We received the directive from the government today at 5:21pm (ET). The letter did not provide specific details of its national security concern. Our understanding is that the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or “jailbreaking” Fable 5. We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities all appear relatively simple, and we have found that other publicly-available models are able to discover them as well without requiring a bypass.
Fable 5 and Mythos 5 were announced on Tuesday — that post has detailed comparisons, from Anthropic, on the models’ capabilities.
Having the access ban extend all the way to “foreign national Anthropic employees” is, to say the least, aggressive. Whether that degree of restriction is truly warranted, I don’t think we, on the outside, can say. The Trump administration lacks credibility, to say the least, when it comes to foreign nationals. But it’s Anthropic itself that repeatedly compares the power of frontier models to nuclear weapons. Here’s CEO Dario Amodei, in an essay published just this month:
There may come a time, perhaps relatively soon, when we need to go beyond this, when the most powerful AI systems look less like airplanes or automobiles and more like weaponizable nuclear materials — a threat to humanity rather than “just” a threat to public safety. If that occurs, we may need more aggressive regulatory measures than those I have laid out.
If that occurs — or if it already has occurred — it’s obviously not the place of Anthropic (or OpenAI or Google) to render that judgment. Ben Thompson wrote about this presciently back in March, and linking to his post, I wrote:
Nilay Patel, quoting the same section of Thompson’s column I quoted above, sees it as “Ben Thompson making a full-throated case for fascism”. I see it as the case against corporatocracy. Who sets our defense policies? Our democratically elected leaders, or the CEOs of corporate defense contractors?
