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ApplePay vs. Alternative Payment Services

by Marc Stibane Thought experiment Imagine an airport which issues a frequent traveller card which millions of passengers have signed up for. This Airport demands from the shops in the airport mall to either only offer their traveller card for payments, or any other payment method, but not both. So if merchants offer alternative payment […]

Cops in [Spain] think everyone using a Google Pixel must be a drug dealer

C. Scott Brown / Android Authority TL;DR Pixel phones are apparently the phone of choice for criminals, drug dealers, and gang members in Spain’s Catalonia. Police say every time they spot someone with a Pixel, they think they must be a drug dealer. The popularity of Pixels among the wrong crowd has little to do […]

Goodbye to All That – My Resignation from the FBI

On May 31 of this year, in a series of phone calls beginning at nine in the morning and ending that afternoon, the newly installed Special Agent in Charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Norfolk Field Office, Dominique Evans, made clear to me that, at the direction of Dan Bongino, my career with the […]

Local-First Software Is Easier to Scale

The title of this post is somewhat misleading. Local-first software rarely needs to be scaled at all. Harper recently received a massive increase in both traffic and user count. How? By making it to the front page of Hacker News. If you couldn’t tell by the extent to which I talk about this, I’m thrilled. […]

Heart attacks aren’t as fatal as they used to be

A day before my 47th birthday last month, I took the subway to Manhattan’s Upper East Side for a coronary artery calcium scan (CAC). For those who haven’t entered the valley of middle age, a CAC is a specialized CT scan that looks for calcium deposits in the heart and its arteries. Unlike in your […]

‘Positive review only’: Researchers hide AI prompts in papers

TOKYO — Research papers from 14 academic institutions in eight countries — including Japan, South Korea and China — contained hidden prompts directing artificial intelligence tools to give them good reviews, Nikkei has found. Nikkei looked at English-language preprints — manuscripts that have yet to undergo formal peer review — on the academic research platform arXiv. It […]

Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud

It’s amazing how easily we can collaborate online nowadays. We use Google Docs to collaborate on documents, spreadsheets and presentations; in Figma we work together on user interface designs; we communicate with colleagues using Slack; we track tasks in Trello; and so on. We depend on these and many other online services, e.g. for taking […]

Europe’s first geostationary sounder satellite is launched

Extreme weather events like storms, flooding, and heatwaves have caused hundreds of billions of euros in damage and claimed tens of thousands of lives across Europe in the past decades. Launched on 1 July 2025, MTG-S1 will provide Europe’s national meteorological services with high-frequency data on temperature, humidity and trace gases throughout the atmosphere – […]

Large language models are improving exponentially?

02 Jul 2025 2 min read Glenn Zorpette is editorial director for content development at IEEE Spectrum. Large Language Models are improving at an exponential rate. If the pace continues until 2030, they will be able to complete, in hours, tasks that takes a human a month (167 working hours). Model Evaluation & Threat Research […]

What ‘Project Hail Mary’ teaches us about the PlanetScale vs. Neon debate

Lately I have been observing the constant picking of Neon, mainly I presume for its performance from Planetscale’s CEO, and the X/Twitter community. Here are some of the many tweets I have encountered, but I didn’t save them, so a simple search resulted on the following list, just to get the gist of it. This […]