One developer admits scrolling dev.to now feels like one long AI press release, MCP posts and token talk crowding out the CSS tips and dev resources that made the site interesting pre-2022. The author's own portfolio piece gave them fatigue reading it back, and they're asking what's left once AI gets subtracted from the conversation.

— via dev.to, FrancisTRᴅᴇᴠ

Concord police turn their own parking lot into a Halloween stop on Oct. 24, free and costume-friendly from 3 to 6 p.m. Even the department can't quite agree if it's the fourth or fifth year running.

— via Hoodline, Eileen Vargas

Ald. Brian Hopkins shelved his push to strip the Cortland Street bridge's landmark status after city transportation officials promised construction would finish by the end of 2028. The 124-year-old bridge has sat closed to cars since last September, rerouting buses and infuriating drivers.

— via Block Club Chicago, Quinn Myers

In 1954, Ontario registered 2,776 baby Marys; by 2023, just 44. Alberta's name registry shows why: births rose a third since 1980 but unique names nearly tripled, leaving today's kids with the least name-sharing on record.

— via The Conversation — Canada, Neil Guppy, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of British Columbia

Nail detachment hit 39% of people on Ozempic, Wegovy and similar GLP-1 drugs, versus 9% of nonusers, in the first controlled study of the side effect. Weight loss alone doesn't explain it, researchers say, and a companion study found hair loss and thinning were sharply more common too.

— via ScienceDaily

A 1-year-old was hit by flying glass after a stray bullet fragment shattered a parked Honda's window during a Bronx shootout that also wounded a 32-year-old man in the ankle. Surveillance video caught the gunman firing from the sidewalk, then vanishing before cops could make an arrest.

— via NY Post, Larry Celona, David DeTurris

Selma Blair faces federal assault charges after two flight attendants were injured aboard a Delta flight into JFK, authorities say. Police took her into custody at the gate; her representative says a medical emergency caused the alleged conduct.

— via PBS NewsHour, Michael R. Sisak, Associated Press

Fourteen meticulously captioned photo albums, decades of family life, and not a single picture of all four family members together. Sorting her late mother's apartment in Japan, the author finds what the camera left out says more than what it kept.

— via Psyche (Aeon sister), Sawa Kurotani

Meta finally ships a frontier model, and it's priced to match GPT-6 Sol: $4 per million input tokens, $20 per million output. The bigger pitch is memory: Wonder now beats Fable, Opus and Astra on a benchmark testing how well it recalls what users tell it.

— via TechCrunch, Russell Brandom

Clinicians often label it anxiety or anger. A psychologist argues what's actually happening to many Black men is chronic, misrecognized racial trauma, backed by Gallup data on fear and disrespect, mortality research on police killings, and Raj Chetty's findings on stalled income mobility.

— via Psyche (Aeon sister), Yamonte Cooper

In Niger, some civilians told U.S. Civil Affairs troops they'd join armed groups just to feed their families. With a severe El Niño locked in through February 2027 and WFP tracking 45 already food-insecure countries, the piece argues hunger data deserves treatment as a security early-warning system, not an afterthought.

— via Small Wars Journal, Nicholas Cassell

Medieval witch hunts rested on a strange contradiction: the accused were monstrous enough to kill but had no power of their own, only Satan's. Inquisitors used that logic to justify stripping, shaving and raping accused women under the guise of testing virginity.

— via Literary Hub, Eleanor Johnson

David Byrne spends his free time mining obscure academic journals, then turns the habit into a theory of progress: in an age drowning in information, the real creative edge comes from reviving forgotten ideas, not discovering new ones. His new book traces how Bach, Vermeer, continental drift and even hand-washing all had to be rediscovered before they mattered.

— via 3 Quarks Daily, S. Abbas Raza

An AI-detection tool flagged the 2026 Caine Prize winner's story as machine-written, making it the third major literary prize this year tangled in AI accusations. The board's chair says she wants human proof, not software, and the case echoes a French controversy where similar claims against a Black novelist proved politically convenient.

— via Literary Hub, James Folta

Backstage 1.55 adds crash recovery for scaffolder tasks but ships a pile of breaking changes: dropped catalog APIs, Elasticsearch 8 required, MkDocs plugins stripped unless allowlisted. One GitLab fix cuts a self-hosted merge-request action from 5-15 seconds to about 3 by skipping redundant API calls.

— via InfoQ, Mark Silvester

AnitaB.org has cancelled this year's Grace Hopper Celebration, citing registrations and sponsorships that came in "significantly below" expectations. It's the second major women-in-tech institution to collapse in two years, following Women Who Code, as company DEIB budgets keep shrinking.

— via dev.to, Jess Lee

Court filings show Character.ai burned up to $13.8 million a month on compute while subscription revenue sometimes dipped below $1 million. Cutting costs, ads and "lobotomized" models still left it losing $8-9 million a month before bankruptcy.

— via 404 Media, Jason Koebler

A new spectrum purchase sharpens the picture of SpaceX's push into mobile service, and the plan looks more plausible than skeptics assumed. Full breakdown of the strategy is for Stratechery Plus subscribers.

— via Stratechery, Ben Thompson

Doctors treated his BNP of 14 as simply "normal," missing the diagnosis that mattered. A standard heart-failure drug nearly killed him before an ultrasound caught the real problem: fluid crushing his heart.

— via The Conversation — Science, Amiran Baduashvili, Associate Professor of Medicine, University of Colorado Anschutz

Perseverance just broke Mars's all-time distance record, 28.10 miles, beating Opportunity's mark in under six years instead of nearly 15. Nearly all of that driving happened without human hands on the wheel, thanks to a self-navigating system NASA barely used before.

— via Popular Science, Andrew Paul

Philadelphia just renamed a street for Octavius Catto, the civil rights leader assassinated there 155 years ago on Election Day. He was already the first Black individual honored with a statue among the city's 1,500 public monuments.

— via The Conversation — History, Timothy Welbeck, Director of the Center for Anti-Racism, Temple University

A life-sized hologram of a Munsee teacher greets visitors with a wampum belt she made herself. More than 30 Indigenous artists fill the Museum of the City of New York's new show, forcing a reckoning with whose land the city was built on.

— via Hell Gate, Kelly Faircloth