Katie Zacharia failed the bar exam. She's still calling herself a lawyer, and a judge somewhere is probably taking notes alongside the one who just invoked the Lorax to smack down Trump's rushed tree removal.
— via Above the Law, Above the Law
A Scottish king mocked England as empty of soldiers, hours before his own army was routed outside Durham. Arrows, a five-hour standoff and a fight so brutal both sides stopped to lean on their weapons sealed his capture.
— via The Conversation — History, Alex Brown, Associate Professor of Medieval History, Durham University
Ukrainian engineers have swapped air-filled tires for 3D-printed airless wheels built around a flexing internal lattice, aiming to keep resupply and evacuation robots rolling after hitting shrapnel or barbed wire. The design is already on the front lines, and soldiers can swap damaged rims with hand tools instead of a repair shop.
— via Popular Science, Mack DeGeurin
A publicist wanted a hot take on "real rural America." Instead: a defense of JD Vance's graveyard, a Ph.D. in philosophy, and a hard pass on speaking for anyone but herself.
— via Literary Hub, Amy Olberding
New open-weight models from Reflection, Aleph Alpha and Mistral are pitched as secure alternatives to Chinese AI, but they still trail China's top systems on performance despite having more resources. Four of the five top-ranked models on OpenRouter's leaderboard last week were Chinese, and LiveBench found China's best models now lag U.S. rivals by just 3% on benchmarks.
— via Rest of World, Rina Chandran
The new Apple TV 4K adds far-field mics already found on HomePods, a faster chip whose gains show up mainly in gaming nobody mentions, and a remote feature that should've shipped in 2022. The real headline: the base price just jumped to $300.
— via Daring Fireball, John Gruber
San Jose hits 86 Thursday before a sharp reversal: highs drop to 80 Sunday, 70 Monday, then rain moves in Tuesday. Dry, breezy conditions are also raising fire-weather concerns in higher Bay Area elevations through Friday.
— via Hoodline, Eric Tanaka
The Canucks shipped Aatu Räty to Toronto and got back two 2002-born Canadians with B.C. roots. One of them scored a Frozen Four overtime winner in college and made his NHL debut subbing for an injured Matthew Knies.
— via Daily Hive Vancouver, Trevor Beggs
Stephen Cash, who started at Marshall Space Flight Center in 1982 and retired from NASA in 2016, is coming back to run it as center director starting Oct. 19. He takes over a workforce of more than 5,000 civil service and contractor employees, with the SLS rocket and the Human Landing System Program on his desk.
— via NASA Breaking News, Gerelle Q. Dodson
IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva compares AI's rapid rise to a Formula 1 car that could fly off the track and kill people, and Anthropic's Jack Clark says it's worse: no brakes, no lights, and less regulation than children's toys. The panel also sized up AI's jobs threat, with roughly 10% of work set for transformation.
— via PBS NewsHour, Elaine Kurtenbach, Associated Press
Weeks before prison, Elizabeth Holmes invited Nathan Fielder to film her. She still says she committed no crime, and the evidence she promised to prove she was misquoted never materializes.
— via TechCrunch, Amanda Silberling
Opponents of a California ballot measure that would levy a one-time 5 percent tax on residents worth more than a billion dollars have raised more than $340 million and are spending $1 million a day against it. The revenue would go mostly to health care, with some for education and food assistance.
— via The Stranger, Nathalie Graham
In 1988, inspectors found entire steel beams on the Williamsburg Bridge cut through by corrosion, forcing a three-month shutdown that stranded 250,000 daily riders and drivers. Now the city is soliciting plans to keep its four East River bridges standing for another 50 years, including an option to ban vehicles entirely.
— via Gothamist, Clayton Guse
Law requires 50 blackstart exercises a year at military installations, but speakers at the Atlantic Council's Energy & Defense Summit said none happen overseas. The Pentagon's resilience standard is fourteen days off-grid, and panelists said getting there on diesel generators alone isn't acceptable.
— via Small Wars Journal, SWJ Staff
Nearly $3 million in crypto-billionaire money has flooded one North Bay Assembly race, pitting a labor organizer against a Marin supervisor backed by Chris Larsen and Tim Draper. The district's high turnout makes it a test case for whether tech cash can outmuscle unions in Sacramento.
— via KQED, Steph Rodriguez
Wheat prices are already up 48.4 per cent and rice 38.9 per cent, and a researcher warns a looming super El Niño plus a weak loonie could push grocery bills even higher by 2027. Bread, rice, produce and sugar all made the watch list.
— via Daily Hive Vancouver, Natalia Buia
Days before Alberta's separation referendum, Mark Carney accused outside forces of trying to break Canada "so they can own us." About 5,000 people turned out to a Calgary rally where he called a vote against Canada "a dangerous bluff," not a message to Ottawa.
— via PBS NewsHour, Rob Gillies, Associated Press
QR codes and NFC links are easy to fake, so a startup called Veritas built a chip with tamper-detection wire that generates a new response every time it's tapped. Its latest version works on metal and glass, and it's already embedded in ATHLOS championship crowns and a pair of LeBron James's first Nikes.
— via TechCrunch, Ivan Mehta
A $300 million startup that hadn't shipped anything just launched a model built on a simple failure: AI can't tell who's winning a board game from a photo. Glimpse re-checks images mid-reasoning instead of guessing from memory, and Elorian says it beats GPT-6 Astra on chart reasoning despite running on a fraction of the hardware.
— via TechCrunch, Aditya Mehta
A Chicago-area school maintenance worker drove to meet "Caleb," a 15-year-old he'd been texting explicit messages. Caleb was never real, just an AI-generated face and a police unit using Clearview, Flock and license tracking to pull off the sting.
— via 404 Media, Samantha Cole
Palantir's CTO says the loudest AI safety warnings come from a "theological critique" rooted in effective altruism, not science. Shyam Sankar argues the roughly 2,000 AI researchers in America mostly share that worldview, and that the doomsayers' predictions so far have been wrong.
— via Daring Fireball, John Gruber
A weekend of low-fuss Seattle events runs from a goblin costume contest at the Goblin Guild Bazaar to Ounces' Fresh Hop Fest. Friday night, BOOTY.99 swaps booty for boobs with a pink-everything TITTY.99 party, with a portion of proceeds going to Sisters Network Inc.
— via The Stranger, EverOut Staff
A three-year European project built a simulation app that lets Volvo's R&D team test battery lifetime without physical prototypes. It started as a study of how laser welding affects cell degradation, then grew into a tool for designing the busbar connections in an electric truck's battery pack.
— via IEEE Spectrum, Brianne Costa
A 16-year-old with a gun killed three children and a teacher at Silver Rail Elementary in Bend, and OPB reports an armed community member followed him inside and fatally shot him. The same day, Portland police shot a man who allegedly assaulted two people with a box cutter downtown, the city's second police shooting in three weeks.
— via Portland Mercury, Jeremiah Hayden
A Brooklyn school bus carrying six nonverbal autistic children went missing for more than four hours last December, with parents tracking it by AirTag while the GPS sat broken. A city watchdog found fill-in staff, wrong addresses and a child left sitting in urine by the time the bus finally arrived.
— via Gothamist, Jessica Gould
