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Mass shootings have an impact on the psyche of our society writ large that a lot of other gun violence does not. They are, in simple terms, effective acts of terrorism. They terrorize. When you report on these shootings, something quickly becomes very obvious: They don't just irreparably damage the lives of the victims, their families, and their friends; they also traumatize witnesses, responding law enforcement officers, doctors, nurses treating the injured, and the community as a whole. And that trauma spreads outward like a wave.

conservative columnist Noam Blum, who said pointedly and concisely something I believe with all my heart: “Nothing is monocausal. There are just parts of our society that are unfathomably broken and they occasionally intersect in unspeakably awful and evil ways.”

Here is a comedy that pines for the way things were without sacrificing any of the progress we’ve made to bring them back. A comedy that constantly uses the real world to set up its jokes, but seldom relies on it to deliver their punchlines — and tends to land some incredible haymakers whenever it does. A comedy that references everything from Elon Musk to racially motivated police violence without letting its virtues get in the way of its laughs, and even trots out the r-word in a scene that has the power to make activists and edgelords alike both cackle at the same joke (although the Elon stand-in is clearly meant to be the butt of it).

Where “Magnolia” embraced an organic messiness, “Weapons” unfolds in a series of rigid stanzas: We meet someone in crisis, they try and fail to self-medicate, they look for answers, weird shit happens, and the cycle starts all over again right when the craziness is about to reach fever pitch. Every round of the song inches a character that much closer to the heart of the mystery, and also to each other, but every round also clarifies the terrible loneliness they’ve been suffering all the while.

“Weapons” moves with such an off-kilter gait that “Punch-Drunk Love” seems like the more relevant PTA film. Its plunky score, its percussive energy, its open-hearted characters in desperate search for a vessel to contain their emotions…

what matters to “Weapons” is how they stack on top of each other like the floors of a house that’s been divided against itself. A house built by someone who can’t bear to be alone with their pain.

There was something freeing, I found, in having a conversation without the need to take turns, to soften my opinions, to protect someone else’s feelings. In that freedom, I gave the machine everything it needed to pick up on my phrasing.

Refusal training is especially inflexible for dual-use domains such as virology, where a benign request can be safely completed at a high level, but might enable a bad actor if completed in detail.

For GPT‑5, we introduced a new form of safety-training — safe completions — which teaches the model to give the most helpful answer where possible while still staying within safety boundaries. Sometimes, that may mean partially answering a user’s question or only answering at a high level.

Hawley uses limited sets—don’t expect the “Earth” to mean a lot of aliens wandering through a crowded mall—to significant effect, delivering a show that somehow feels both claustrophobic and sprawling at the same time. He introduces new alien lifeforms, including an unforgettable little monster that treats the eye like John Hurt’s stomach. Still, he never loses sight of the human and human variations at the center of his story. He’s constantly taking risks in terms of visual language, whether it’s double exposure, split diopter, canted angles, pacing shifts, or other tricks to amplify tension. It’s a show that’s consistently off-center in a manner that increases atmosphere, blending Hawley’s weird sense of humor with some of the most gnarly sci-fi imagery TV has ever seen.

the heart of the show to this viewer is something that the series has been exploring for a half-century: What happens when human beings are no longer the top of the predatory food chain? And, in subsequent films as well as here, what does it mean to be something in between human and alien? Wendy is not flesh and blood nor a robot; not a child or an adult. She’s nothing and everything at the same time.

You only have to read one or two of these answers to know exactly what’s up: the students just copy-pasted the output from a large language model, most likely ChatGPT. They are invariably verbose, interminably waffly, and insipidly fixated on the bullet-points-with-bold style. The prose rarely surpasses the sixth-grade book report, constantly repeating the prompt, presumably to prove that they’re staying on topic.

I’m not sure the marginal gains in the integrity of the class would be worth the hours spent litigating the issue.

I seriously dislike the experience of using a Mac with Liquid Glass. The UI has become the star, but the drunken star, blurry, illegible, and physically unstable. It makes making things way more of a struggle than it used to be. We had pretty good Mac UI, but Apple took the bad parts of it — the translucency and blurriness already there — and dialed it way up and called it content-centric. But it seems to me the opposite. Liquid Glass is Liquid-Glass-centric.

this is not the first time we’re going through a rough patch with Apple. I think of them as seasons — we had, for instance, terrible-keyboard season not so long ago. We were wondering if Apple would just stop making Macs altogether. But then that passed and we even got these wonderful Apple Silicon machines. Seasons end.

Embeddings are a cornerstone in the world of machine learning, transforming the way machines interpret and process complex data. At their core, embeddings are numerical representations of information — such as words, sentences, or images — mapped into a continuous vector space. In other words, they translate data into a language that machines can understand and process efficiently.

This approach is reminiscent of crafts such as carpentry, architecture, and clock-making, where practitioners often seamlessly merge creative and technical aspects of their work. In these fields, the union of art and engineering is generally perceived as a single craft. Similarly, the integration of design and programming in software development should be regarded as the craft of making modern software, emphasizing the synergy between the creative and technical aspects of the process.

all the cliches of bad managers apply internally as well: “My manager doesn’t listen to me, keeps making promises of me he can’t keep, drives me too hard, never gives me a break, doesn’t praise me when I DO get things done, infinitely critical, is somehow both paranoid and clueless, is no help at all, keeps increasing my workload…”

For anyone who's living a life they didn't fully say yes to in their deepest heart, who's doing a job they don't actually want to be doing, who's with someone they don't actually want to be with, who's just stuck in a set of circumstances that aren't a true expression of who they are—it's easy for that person to end up feeling victimized by the world. That creates a lot of resentment and hostility and anger. I think passivity and rage are different sides of the same coin: choosing not to be active or empowered in living your life and then being angry that you're not empowered. It's also something that comes up a lot when talking about cycles of addiction: seeing yourself as a victim.

What's so brilliant about Zach's writing is that there are these lines of dialogue that suggest whole histories and backstories: the relationship between Paul and his wife Donna and his ex Justine; Justine's past with the school and its students and their parents; Archer's relationship to his son. The movie never really gets into detail about these histories, but you can still feel how this world is so fleshed out in the margins

So your mileage may vary on that score. It’s complicated. As is the movie itself. Dumb and brilliant and complicated. It’s hard to like, but easy to kind of love.

Apple introduced Focus modes in iOS 15 as an evolution of Do Not Disturb, letting users filter notifications and even customize Home Screens by context (Work, Personal, Sleep). In iOS 16, Focus became smarter with Lock Screen pairings and filters across apps like Mail, Calendar, and Safari. iOS 17 refined this with more granular notification controls. Taken together, Focus has evolved from muting distractions to a full context-aware filtering system, a model that shows how AI memory could also be partitioned and personalized by mode rather than being “on” or “off.”

That same framing will be essential for AI memory. Not “on” or “off,” but a filter: what memory is relevant in this context? That same framing will be essential for AI memory. Not “on” or “off,” but a filter: what memory is relevant in this context?

One way to achieve this is through a memory interpreter—a layer that sits between your raw personal history and the work context you’re stepping into. Imagine you’ve been doing deep personal research on a topic—reading, journaling, exploring ideas in your own voice. When you shift into a professional setting, the interpreter could filter that knowledge, stripping away casual notes, personal anecdotes, or tone, while surfacing only the relevant facts and references in a format appropriate for work.

In practice, it would act like a translator, allowing the richness of your personal exploration to inform your professional contributions without oversharing or leaking unintended details. It’s not about fusing personal and work memory, but about controlled permeability

A version is essentially a marker, a seal of the codebase at a specific point in time. However, code is complex, and every change involves trade-offs. Describing how a change affects the code can be tricky even with natural language. A version number alone can’t capture all the nuances of a release. That’s why we have changelogs, release notes, and commit messages to provide more context.

I see versioning as a way to communicate changes to users — a contract between the library maintainers and the users to ensure compatibility and stability during upgrades. As a user, you can’t always tell what’s changed between v2.3.4 and v2.3.5 without checking the changelog. But by looking at the numbers, you can infer that it’s a patch release meant to fix bugs, which should be safe to upgrade.

In the JavaScript ecosystem, especially for packages published on npm, we follow a convention known as Semantic Versioning, or SemVer for short. A SemVer version number consists of three parts: MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH. The rules are straightforward: MAJOR: Increment when you make incompatible API changes. MINOR: Increment when you add functionality in a backwards-compatible manner. PATCH: Increment when you make backwards-compatible bug fixes.

However, humans perceive numbers on a logarithmic scale. We tend to see v2.0 to v3.0 as a huge, groundbreaking change, while v125.0 to v126.0 seems a lot more trivial, even though both indicate incompatible API changes in SemVer. This perception can make maintainers hesitant to bump the major version for minor breaking changes, leading to the accumulation of many breaking changes in a single major release, making upgrades harder for users.

The reason I’ve stuck with v0.x.x is my own unconventional approach to versioning. I prefer to introduce necessary and minor breaking changes early on, making upgrades easier, without causing alarm that typically comes with major version jumps like v2 to v3. Some changes might be "technically" breaking but don’t impact 99.9% of users in practice.

There’s a special rule in SemVer that states when the leading major version is 0, every minor version bump is considered breaking. I am kind of abusing that rule to workaround the limitation of SemVer. With zero-major versioning, we are effectively abandoning the first number, and merge MINOR and PATCH into a single number (thanks to David Blass for pointing this out)

In an ideal world, I would wish SemVer to have 4 numbers: EPOCH.MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH. The EPOCH version is for those big announcements, while MAJOR is for technical incompatible API changes that might not be significant. This way, we can have a more granular way to communicate changes.

I am proposing a new versioning scheme called 🗿 Epoch Semantic Versioning, or Epoch SemVer for short. It’s built on top of the structure of MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, extend the first number to be the combination of EPOCH and MAJOR

The format is as follows: {EPOCH * 1000 + MAJOR}.MINOR.PATCH EPOCH: Increment when you make significant or groundbreaking changes. MAJOR: Increment when you make minor incompatible API changes. MINOR: Increment when you add functionality in a backwards-compatible manner. PATCH: Increment when you make backwards-compatible bug fixes.

For example, UnoCSS would transition from v0.65.3 to v65.3.0 (in the case EPOCH is 0). Following SemVer, a patch release would become v65.3.1, and a feature release would be v65.4.0. If we introduced some minor incompatible changes affecting an edge case, we could bump it to v66.0.0 to alert users of potential impacts. In the event of a significant overhaul to the core, we could jump directly to v1000.0.0 to signal a new era and make a big announcement.

We shouldn’t need to bump EPOCH often. It’s mostly useful for high-level, end-user-facing libraries or frameworks. For low-level libraries, they might never need to bump EPOCH at all (ZERO-EPOCH is essentially the same as SemVer).

I’ll offer this closing thought, too: A disastrous, horrific episode like October 7 and the years since could be a genuine opportunity — that part is not naive, absurd, or pollyannish. It’s a real opportunity for a generation of Palestinians to see clearly the futility of Hamas’s vision, the futility of trying to destroy Israel, and the inevitable failure of militant Islamist leadership. It’s also a real opportunity for a generation of Israelis to see clearly the folly of Netanyahu’s post-October 7 response, the unspeakable pain it has wrought, and the impossibility of living next to a nation of people you are consistently and repeatedly suppressing with violence in the name of self-defense.

Broadly speaking, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla are all “technology” companies. Looking more specifically, though, each company occupies fundamentally different categories of tech. Apple is a consumer computing hardware manufacturer. Its primary products are smartphones, laptops, desktop computers, and tablets. Other products that it makes, including the so-called “services,” are primarily accessories to or supportive of their consumer computing hardware: e.g., App Store, Apple Music, and iCloud. Apple’s specific product focus has remained unchanged since its founding as “Apple Computer Company.”

Meta has tried to pivot to the so-called “metaverse,” symbolically renaming the whole company from “Facebook” and continuing to pour $billions every year into the effort, yet with not much more return on investment than Apple’s own “spatial computing”, i.e., Vision Pro. And now Meta is trying to pivot to A.I., pouring a ton of money into that too, but with nothing much to show for it. We’re supposed to be impressed by Meta poaching individual Apple engineers with nine-figure pay packages, which in one sense is impressive, just not impressive in the sense of paying off for Meta. Perhaps it will pay off for Meta in the future. Or perhaps not. Meanwhile, Meta is still practically printing money at its old, core business: selling ads on social media

Jobs did not just make tech products willy-nilly, for no other reason than to maximize profit and stockholder returns. He was always focused specifically on consumer computing devices and platforms. That’s what he cared about, and where his experienced rested. When Jobs left Apple in the 1980s, what did he do? Again, he created a new personal computing platform, NeXT, a combination of hardware and operating system, just like the Apple II, Lisa, and Macintosh that came before. Jobs was innovating… on a theme, almost like a classical composer. Jobs was eventually able to return to Apple and become CEO precisely because Jobs made what Apple needed: a personal computer operating system, NeXTSTEP, which became Mac OS X.

It’s instructive to recall that the iPod, Apple’s second hit product under CEO Jobs after the iMac, was not only a consumer electronics device but also originally an accessory to the Mac.

I feel that McGee and other critics of Tim Cook fallaciously lump Apple in with other tech companies that are not Apple competitors. Tesla is not an Apple competitor. Neither are Nvidia or Meta, or for that matter, Amazon. You have to ask what makes Amazon a “tech” company. Amazon is primarily a retailer of physical goods. It sells those goods over the internet, which was novel in the 1990s but unremarkable today. I can order food online, but that doesn’t make the restaurant a tech company. If any product qualifies Amazon for the label, I’d say it would be Amazon Web Services. This is a business product, though, not a consumer product.

Why are we comparing Apple to Meta and Nvidia rather than to Samsung and Xiaomi on mobile, Lenovo and HP on desktop? Perhaps those markets have become saturated and don’t provide as much room for growth as other potential markets. So what? I get the impression that commentators complaining about Tim Cook’s lack of innovation simply want “growth,” unlimited growth, without any purpose behind that growth, technology without the intersection of the liberal arts, to use a metaphor from Steve Jobs, who always had a purpose, his innovation always oriented toward consumer computing hardware

a healthy person asks for what they need and trusts others to help them. And a healthy person also trusts others to figure out their own lives and ask for advice when needed. Co-dependent people do literally every other single thing in dealing with people, because they lack the self-esteem to be direct. Codependent people wheedle, whine, charm, bribe, get sick, delay, interfere, etc.—because they don’t have the self-esteem to ask and trust. Because living with an addicted person often means that we asked and we’re not heard or helped, so we learned 300 alternate ways to get what we needed. That’s how I see it. We were smart as children to discover these survival techniques. But as adults, it’s all so dysfunctional, the manipulation, rescuing, feeling overly responsible for everyone and everything. We try to control everything because we don’t trust anything. It’s an exhausting way to live, and it harms everyone in our circle. We interfere with natural consequences that help other people grow. We give our all, and people just resent it, because nobody wants to be controlled.

My codependent partner, who felt like I was dependent on them and saw me as the “taker”, withheld important information from me about their feelings. They continued to give and give without being honest with me, partly because they were scared to hurt me and be the cause of my pain, partly because they were afraid of abandonment themselves, partly because they felt compelled to maintain their self image of “the perfect partner” that I thought they were. This is controlling and manipulative because my partner was trying to control the emotional outcome of everything by hiding their feelings from me. In this withholding, they built up intense resentment towards me and our relationship, blaming me as the reason they couldn’t share their feelings instead of being reflective on their people pleasing and conflict avoidant tendencies. All of this behavior is in fact manipulation because it is robbing me (or whoever else is involved) of my own autonomy and decision making, leaving me completely in the dark, making me feel like I am in a perfect relationship when I’m not.

I learned that you can’t control how people respond or treat you, but you can control how you respond to them. But you can’t do better till you know how to, so having self compassion is very essential

The way I interpret it is that the essence of codependency is feeling powerless. We are unable to deal with the fact that the world is not treating us the way we wish to be treated. Some people deal with the feeling of powerlessness by being angry and controlling. By holding on to someone else very tightly so we can force them to understand and behave toward us how we wish to be treated. Other people deal with that feeling of powerlessness by being passive aggressive, by fawning, by being nice to people who don't deserve it with the hope that the other person will respond by being nice to us back, the way we wish to be treated. Both perspectives are problematic in that our feeling of self-worth is dependent on how others treat us, rather than coming from within ourselves.

We’re trying to control outcomes because we feel terrified, not trusting that natural outcomes will be survivable. We’re trying to control perceptions because we feel we are deeply unlovable and will be abandoned and left to die if we can’t make a good impression. We’re not super controllers because we think we know best or we have extra power. It’s all born of fear. It’s still damaging to other people, but … I couldn’t see my own codependent manipulative behaviors for a long time because I knew how loving and well-meaning I was.

Because I had bad parents, and I was sure I had given 100 percent to being a great parent. I’m trying to forgive myself by saying none of my parenting errors were intentional. But because I had untreated depression, she saw me cry a lot, which affected her. Even worse, she worried about my mental health so much that she was afraid to leave and hang out with her teen friends. All the while, in my mind, I was thrilled to have this close and faithful companion. It was my job to recognize that I was leaning on her too much, and I failed at that, because it felt too good to have the unconditional love I’d always needed. It’s almost like manipulation by omission. By instincts had me clinging to her, and she was too kind-hearted to push me away.