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Sleepovers are one of the most exciting experiences for kids and teenagers. Whether it's a birthday celebration, a weekend get-together or just an excuse to hang out in sleeping bags all night, there are endless fun things to do.

DNA-testing company 23andMe has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection [non-paywalled source] in Missouri and announced CEO Anne Wojcicki's immediate resignation, weeks after rejecting her proposal to buy back the business she co-founded. The bankruptcy filing represents "the best path forward to maximize the value of the business," said Mark Jensen, board member and special committee chair. Further reading: DNA of 15 Million People for Sale in 23andMe Bankruptcy.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's "live-recording the World Wide Web," according to NPR, with a digital library that includes "hundreds of billions of copies of government websites, news articles and data." They described the 29-year-old nonprofit Internet Archive as "more relevant than ever." Every day, about 100 terabytes of material are uploaded to the Internet Archive, or about a billion URLs, with the assistance of automated crawlers. Most of that ends up in the Wayback Machine, while the rest is digitized analog media — books, television, radio, academic papers — scanned and stored on servers. As one of the few large-scale archivists to back up the web, the Internet Archive finds itself in a particularly unique position right now... Thousands of [U.S. government] datasets were wiped — mostly at agencies focused on science and the environment — in the days following Trump's return to the White House... The Internet Archive is among the few efforts that exist to catch the stuff that falls through the digital cracks, while also making that information accessible to the public. Six weeks into the new administration, Wayback Machine director [Mark] Graham said, the Internet Archive had cataloged some 73,000 web pages that had existed on U.S. government websites that were expunged after Trump's inauguration... According to Graham, based on the big jump in page views he's observed over the past two months, the Internet Archive is drawing many more visitors than usual to its services — journalists, researchers and other inquiring minds. Some want to consult the archive for information lost or changed in the purge, while others aim to contribute to the archival process.... "People are coming and rallying behind us," said Brewster Kahle, [the founder and current director of the Internet Archive], "by using it, by pointing at things, helping organize things, by submitting content to be archived — data sets that are under threat or have been taken down...." A behemoth of link rot repair, the Internet Archive rescues a daily average of 10,000 dead links that appear on Wikipedia pages. In total, it's fixed more than 23 million rotten links on Wikipedia alone, according to the organization. Though it receives some money for its preservation work for libraries, museums, and other organizations, it's also funded by donations. "From the beginning, it was important for the Internet Archive to be a nonprofit, because it was working for the people," explains founder Brewster Kahle on its donations page: Its motives had to be transparent; it had to last a long time. That's why we don't charge for access, sell user data, or run ads, even while we offer free resources to citizens everywhere. We rely on the generosity of individuals like you to pay for servers, staff, and preservation projects. If you can't imagine a future without the Internet Archive, please consider supporting our work. We promise to put your donation to good use as we continue to store over 99 petabytes of data, including 625 billion webpages, 38 million texts, and 14 million audio recordings. Two interesting statistics from NPR's article: "A Pew Research Center study published last year found that roughly 38% of web pages on the internet that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible as of 2023." "According to a Harvard Law Review study published in 2014, about half of all links cited in U.S. Supreme Court opinions no longer led to the original source material." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader jtotheh for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) writes: A recent paper on ArXiv reports a novel idea about the central regions of "our" galaxy. Remember the hoopla a few years ago about radio-astronomical observations producing an "image" of our central black hole — or rather, an image of the accretion disc around the black hole — long designated by astronomers as "Sagittarius A*" (or SGR-A*)? If you remember the image published then, one thing should be striking — it's not very symmetrical. If you think about viewing a spinning object, then you'd expect to see something with a "mirror" symmetry plane where we would see the rotation axis (if someone had marked it). If anything, that published image has three bright spots on a fainter ring. And the spots are not even approximately the same brightness. This paper suggests that the image we see is the result of the light (radio waves) from SGR-A* being "lensed" by another black hole, near (but not quite on) the line of sight between SGR-A* and us. By various modelling approaches, they then refine this idea to a "best-fit" of a black hole with mass around 1000 times the Sun, orbiting between the distance of the closest-observed star to SGR-A* ("S2" — most imaginative name, ever!), and around 10 times that distance. That's far enough to make a strong interaction with "S2" unlikely within the lifetime of S2 before it's accretion onto SGR-A*.) The region around SGR-A* is crowded. Within 25 parsecs (~80 light years, the distance to Regulus [in the constellation Leo] or Merak [in the Great Bear]) there is around 4 times more mass in several millions of "normal" stars than in the SGR-A* black hole. Finding a large (not "super massive") black hole in such a concentration of matter shouldn't surprise anyone. This proposed black hole is larger than anything which has been detected by gravitational waves (yet) ; but not immensely larger — only a factor of 15 or so. (The authors also anticipate the "what about these big black holes spiralling together?" question : quote "and the amplitude of gravitational waves generated by the binary black holes is negligible.") Being so close to SGR-A*, the proposed black hole is likely to be moving rapidly across our line of sight. At the distance of "S2" it's orbital period would be around 26 years (but the "new" black hole is probably further out than than that). Which might be an explanation for some of the variability and "flickering" reported for SGR-A* ever since it's discovery. As always, more observations are needed. Which, for SGR-A* are frequently being taken, so improving (or ruling out) this explanation should happen fairly quickly. But it's a very interesting, and fun, idea.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MG Siegler returns to the show to talk about the drama surrounding Siri and Apple Intelligence.

Sponsored by:

• WorkOS: The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS — free up to 1 million monthly active users. Check out their latest features from Launch Week.
• BetterHelp: Give online therapy a try at BetterHelp and get on your way to being your best self.
• OpenCase: MagSafe perfected that’s thinner, lighter, and more secure. Save 10% with code TALKSHOW.

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How has your week been? My week was ... busy. That includes a new episode of The Talk Show recorded yesterday, dropping in your favorite podcast app soon. Amidst all the writing (and talking) I’ve been doing, I’m also working on filling up open weeks on the sponsorship schedule for Q2.

After a very full February and March, I’ve got a bunch of openings in the next few months — and openings for the next two weeks, starting with this Monday. Update: The coming week just sold, but the next week, starting March 31, remains open.

Weekly sponsorships have been the top source of revenue for Daring Fireball ever since I started selling them back in 2007. They’ve succeeded, I think, because they make everyone happy. They generate good money. There’s only one sponsor per week and the sponsors are always relevant to at least some sizable portion of the DF audience, so you, the reader, are never annoyed and hopefully often intrigued by them. And, from the sponsors’ perspective, they work. My favorite thing about them is how many sponsors return for subsequent weeks after seeing the results.

If you’ve got a product or service you think would be of interest to DF’s audience of people obsessed with high quality and good design, get in touch.

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My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring DF, once again, this last week. This has been WorkOS’s Launch Week, and they’ve got a slew of new features to show. Honestly, though, you should check out their Launch Week page just to look at it — it’s beautiful, fun retro-modern pixel-art goodness. Great typography too. I wish every website looked even half this cool.

New features launched just this week include:

• WorkOS Connect — “Sign in with [Your App]”
• WorkOS Vault — Encryption Key Management (EKM) and Bring-Your-Own-Key (BYOK)
• AuthKit Integrations — Native support for several new identity providers including LinkedIn, Slack, GitLab, BitBucket, Intuit, and more.

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Ookla, the company behind the Speedtest download/upload bandwidth testing app:

Although it’s early in the adoption curve for the iPhone 16e, we analyzed the performance of the new device from March 1st through March 12th, and compared it to the performance of iPhone 16, which has a similar design and the same 6.1” screen. Both devices run on the same Apple-designed A18 SoC.

When we compare Speedtest Intelligence data from the top 90th percentile (those with the highest performance experience) of iPhone 16e and iPhone 16 users from all three of the top U.S. operators, we see the iPhone 16 performing better in download speeds. However, at the opposite end, with the 10th percentile of users (those who experience the lowest performance) we see the iPhone 16e performing better than the iPhone 16.

There are some differences, but overall the 16e’s cellular performance seems great for the frequencies it supports. And given the efficiency claims from Apple, it might be the better overall modem. (I also think the frequencies it doesn’t support don’t really matter all that much in real-world practice. If you know that you really make use of the crazy-high speeds of mmWave from Verizon, then you know the C1 modem is not for you.)

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Emma Roth, The Verge:

TechCrunch has a new owner, again. Yahoo has sold the tech news site to the private equity firm Regent for an undisclosed sum, according to an announcement on Friday.

Regent is the same company that snapped up Foundry, the firm behind outlets like PCWorld, Macworld, and TechAdvisor on Thursday. Founded in 2005, TechCrunch has experienced many shakeups in ownership after AOL acquired the site in 2010.

A lot of shakeups in a lot of media companies’ ownership lately. Steady as she goes here at The Daring Fireball Company, a subsidiary of Fedora World Media Industries.

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By: Rich Moseson, W2VU

Some 175 scientists, students, professors, and amateur radio operators from around the world gathered in person and virtually on March 14 and 15 to share research, educate each other, and network at the annual HamSCI Workshop. HamSCI, the Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation program, aims to promote collaboration between science, amateur radio, and education. The 2025 w...

Dozens of amateur radio clubs have made plans to host an ARRL Ham Radio Open House in April. The nationwide event is centered around World Amateur Radio Day on April 18. 2025 is the 100th anniversary of the founding of the International Amateur Radio Union (IARU).

While we’ve been using radio for well over 100 years, amateur radio operators continue to be on the cutting edge of innovation in ele...

Matthew Belloni has a very good take on Apple TV+ at Puck (that’s a gift link that should get you through their paywall — but which requires you creating a free account, sorry):

All of which fed into the self-centered fears of my lunch date. What, if anything, does the current state of Apple mean for its entertainment business? After all, more than five years into the Apple TV+ experiment, it’s never been entirely clear what C.E.O. Tim Cook and services chief Eddy Cue are up to in Hollywood. Certainly not making money, at least not in the traditional sense. The Information reported today that Apple lost $1 billion on Apple TV+ last year, following a Bloomberg report that more than $20 billion has been shoveled into making original shows and movies since 2019. That’s not nothing, even for a company worth $3 trillion.

The “loss” number is a bit misleading, of course, considering Apple has always said that a key goal is to leverage Leo DiCaprio and Reese Witherspoon to thicken its brand halo and the device “ecosystem,” ultimately boosting its other businesses. But still… for all its billions, Apple TV+ has accumulated only about 45 million subscribers worldwide, according to today’s Information report and other estimates.

That’s far less than Disney+, Max, and Paramount+, all of which launched around the same time. Those rival services are attached to legacy studios with rich libraries, but they’re not attached to a company with $65 billion in cash on hand and a device in the pockets of 1 billion people that also delivers bundle-friendly music, news, and games. Apple declined to confirm or comment on any numbers, but a source there suggested the subscriber number is higher than 45 million and that the global nature of the sub base is being undercounted by U.S.-oriented research firms. Maybe. The company reveals zero performance data beyond B.S. “biggest weekend ever!” press releases that the trades accept without skepticism and producers like Ben Stiller and David Ellison post with “blessed” emojis on their social media. No one outside the company really knows how the Apple TV+ business is performing.

One interesting nugget is this chart, which suggests that subscriptions to TV+ have boomed since Apple and Amazon worked out a deal to sell TV+ subscriptions through Amazon Channels in Prime Video at the end of last year. That deal has, seemingly, moved the needle. Another interesting nugget is that TV+ seems to suffer from a higher churn rate than other streaming services. Said Belloni’s Puck colleague Julia Alexander, “Fewer than 35 percent of all subscribers keep the service for longer than six months.”

That’s kind of crazy. I’d think TV+ would have less churn, not more, than the industry average — that the Apple TV+ audience is small but loyal. Perhaps this is the unsurprising side effect of Apple giving away 3-month trials when you purchase new devices. But I also truly wonder if TV+ subscriptions are the hardest for industry groups to measure, because so many people who do subscribe watch through tvOS (or, on their phones, on iOS) where everything is private. Belloni hints at this, and says little birdies at Apple told him the TV+ subscriber base is larger than they’re getting credit for.

And how do you count Apple One subscribers toward TV+’s subscriber base? My vague theory about Cue and Cook’s thinking about getting into this business has been about making it one leg among several on the stool of reasons to subscribe to Apple One. That Apple will take subscribers who are only subscribed to TV+, or only subscribed to TV+ and Apple Music, but what they really want is to get people to subscribe to Apple One, which, because it includes iCloud storage, almost certainly has very little churn.

Belloni closes thus:

Apple wouldn’t be the first tech powerhouse to dabble in professionally produced content only to retreat. [...] Neither Cook nor Cue has suggested anything like that, and Apple, in just over five years, has become a reliable partner and a high-quality buyer for Hollywood shows and movies. In some ways, it’s remarkable how fast Apple TV+ became part of the entertainment community. Whether that lasts is the question.

Here’s where I will point out that Apple isn’t like other tech companies. Apple isn’t a move fast and break things company. They’re a measure twice, cut once company. When they commit to something, they tend to stay committed. And they’re very, very good at playing long games that require patience, especially when entering new markets. Look at Apple Pay. 10 years ago, it was widely panned as a flop after a slow first year. Now it’s everywhere.

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Solar activity reached moderate levels due to an isolated M1.5/1n
flare on March 19 at 2040 UTC from Region AR4031.  Regions AR4028,
AR4034, and AR4035 exhibited slight growth.

Region AR4026 re-emerged in the Southwest quadrant. Regions in the
Northwest quadrant, including AR4020, AR4022, AR4025, and AR4031 all
appeared to be in a decay phase.

No Earth-directed CMEs were detected in available coronag...

Jill Goldsmith, Deadline:

Apple is losing more than $1 billion a year on streamer Apple TV+, according to a report in the Information that cited two people familiar with the matter. The tech giant has spent over $5 billion a year on content since launching Apple TV+ in 2019 but trimmed that by about $500 million last year, the report said.

The headline on Wayne Ma’s report at The Information set the framework: “Apple Streaming Losses Top $1 Billion a Year” — the story got picked up widely, and almost everyone who did framed it in terms of losing or a loss. But is it a loss when Apple expected the business to be unprofitable for a decade or more? From Scharon Harding’s paraphrasing at Ars Technica of Ma’s paywalled report:

Apple TV+ being Apple’s only service not turning a profit isn’t good, but it’s also expected. Like other streaming services, Apple TV+ wasn’t expected to be profitable until years after its launch. An Apple TV+ employee that The Information said reviewed the streaming service’s business plan said Apple TV+ is expected to lose $15 billion to $20 billion during its first 10 years.

For comparison, Disney’s direct-to-consumer streaming business had operating losses of $11.4 billion between the launch of Disney+ in fall 2020 and April 2024. Disney’s streaming business became profitable for the first time in its fiscal quarter ending on June 29, 2024.

The above two paragraphs of essential context are buried 13 paragraphs down. If Apple expected TV+ to operate in the red, to the tune of $15–20 billion over its first decade, and halfway through that decade (TV+ debuted in November 2019) it operated in the red to the tune of $1 billion for the year — doesn’t that mean costs are exactly in line with their expectations?

The insinuation here is that Apple’s pissing this money away and doesn’t know what they’re doing. Maybe they are! But if so it was exactly Eddy Cue and Tim Cook’s strategy to piss this money away. If Apple had expected TV+ to be profitable or break-even in 2024, then a $1 billion operating loss would be a story. But as it stands it’s just a cost. How much did Apple “lose” on electricity bills last year?

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Juli Clover, writing for MacRumors last week:

With new iOS software updates, Apple has been automatically turning Apple Intelligence on again even for users who have disabled it, a decision that has become increasingly frustrating for those that don’t want to use Apple Intelligence .

After installing iOS 18.3.2, iPhone users have noticed that Apple Intelligence is automatically turned on, regardless of whether it was turned off prior to the update being installed. There is an Apple Intelligence splash screen that comes up after updating, and there is no option other than tapping “Continue,” which turns on Apple Intelligence .

If you’ve updated to iOS 18.3.2 and do not want Apple Intelligence enabled, you will need to go the Settings app, tap on Apple Intelligence, and then toggle it off. When Apple Intelligence is enabled, it consumes up to 7GB of storage space for local AI models, which is an inconvenience when storage space is limited.

I’d been seeing complaints about this, including from some friends who are developers and/or had previously worked on iOS as engineers at Apple. A bunch of regular DF readers have written to complain about it too. I wouldn’t call it a deluge, but I’ve gotten an unusual number of complaints about this. (And at CNet, Jeff Carlson reports the same thing happening with MacOS 15.3.2.)

I hadn’t experienced it personally because I have Apple Intelligence enabled on my iPhone. But my year-old iPhone 15 Pro was still running iOS 18.2. So I disabled Apple Intelligence on that phone, then updated it to 18.3.2. When it finished, Apple Intelligence was re-enabled. I also tried this on my iPhone 16e review unit, which was still running iOS 18.3.1 (albeit a version of 18.3.1 with a unique build number for the 16e). I turned Apple Intelligence off, upgraded to 18.3.2, and on that iPhone, Apple Intelligence remained off after the software upgrade completed.

So I don’t know if this is a bug that only affects some iPhones, or a deliberate growth hacking decision from Apple to keep turning this back on for people who have explicitly turned it off. But it’s definitely happening.

And while the 7 GB of storage space required for the model is a legitimate technical reason to turn it off, I think (judging from my email from DF readers) the main reason people disable Apple Intelligence is that they don’t like it, don’t trust it, and to some degree object to it. It could take up no additional storage space at all and they’d still want it disabled on their devices, and they are fucking angry that Apple’s own software updates keep turning it back on. Put aside the quality or utility of Apple Intelligence as it stands today, and there are people who object to the whole thing on principle or, I don’t know, just vibes alone. Feelings are strong about this. Turning it back on automatically, after a user had turned it off manually, leads those users to correctly distrust Apple Intelligence specifically and Apple in general.

If it’s a bug, it’s a bug that makes Apple look like a bunch of gross shysters. If it’s not a bug, it means Apple is a bunch of gross shysters. I’d wager on bug — especially after seeing it not happen on my 16e review unit. I’m thinking it’s something where it’s supposed to be enabled by default, once, for people who’ve never explicitly turned Apple Intelligence on or off previously, but that for some devices where it has been turned off explicitly, somehow the software update is mistaking it for the setting never having been touched. Apple needs to get it together on this one.

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Ina Fried, reporting for Axios:

The suit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in San Jose, seeks class action status and unspecified financial damages on behalf of those who purchased Apple Intelligence-capable iPhones and other devices.

“Apple’s advertisements saturated the internet, television, and other airwaves to cultivate a clear and reasonable consumer expectation that these transformative features would be available upon the iPhone’s release,” the suit reads. “This drove unprecedented excitement in the market, even for Apple, as the company knew it would, and as part of Apple’s ongoing effort to convince consumers to upgrade at a premium price and to distinguish itself from competitors deemed to be winning the AI-arms race.”

Most of these class action lawsuits are bullshit, but it’s hard to argue with the basic premise of this one.

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The most colorful birds come in such dazzling hues that they are often the subject of artists and photographers.

Solfeggio frequencies are specific sound frequencies that have been around for centuries and are believed to have powerful effects on the human body and mind. Many claim that these six measurable tones can stimulate healing, reduce stress, and even awaken intuition. But what does the science actually say?