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These floofs have been living alongside humans for thousands of years. But when were cats domesticated to become our adorable yet aloof companions?

These spinning columns of air are some of the most violent storms on Earth, capable of tearing apart entire towns in seconds. The most powerful winds ever recorded have been associated with intense tornadoes, making them one of nature's most destructive forces.

Removing car window tint might seem like a tricky job, but with the right tools and patience, you can get it done yourself. Whether your tint film is bubbling, fading, or peeling, taking it off properly will prevent damage to your glass and give the car a fresh appearance.

Here’s an update I just appended to my post yesterday, after linking to Gus Mueller’s suggestion that Apple open up a semantic index to third-party AI apps:

HealthKit already works a lot like what Mueller is suggesting here (for, say, “SemanticKit”). With explicit user permission — that can be revoked at any time — third party apps can both read from and write to your Health data. Apple does a lot of that itself, both through Apple Watch and from the various activity-related things an iPhone can track, but third-party apps and devices are welcome participants, in a private, easily-understood way.

Nobody is suggesting Apple should give up on AI. Quite the opposite. They really need to go from being a joke to being good at it, fast. But there’s no reason at all they should build out a strategy that relies on Apple doing all of it themselves, and Apple users relying solely on Apple’s own AI. Do it like Health — a model that has proven to be:

• profitable (for Apple itself, selling devices like Watches);
• popular (with users, who actually use it, understand it, and like it);
• private;
• and open to third-party developers, device makers, and medical service providers.

(Thanks to Bill Welense for the suggestion.)

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Today we're diving into the eerie concept of memento mori. In Latin, the phrase memento mori literally means "remember that you must die," and it has been a central theme in religious thought, art and philosophy for centuries.

Build an internet-connected Moon Phase clock displaying the current moon cycle on a 3D printed topographical relief of the lunar surface!

Guide: https://learn.adafruit.com/moon-phase

Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!

LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord

Adafruit on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adafruit

Shop for parts to build your own DIY projects http://adafru.it/3dprinting

3D Printing Projects Playlist:

3D Hangout Show Playlist:

Layer by Layer CAD Tutorials Playlist:

Timelapse Tuesday Playlist:

Connect with Noe and Pedro on Social Media:

Noe’s Twitter / Instagram: http://instagram.com/ecken

Pedro’s Twitter / Instagram: http://instagram.com/videopixil

Last March, when Apple introduced the then new M3 MacBook Airs, they moved the base model 13-inch M2 MacBook Air into the magic $999 spot in their own lineup, replacing the M1 MacBook Air. But mid-March it was announced that Walmart would begin selling the M1 MacBook Air — in one tech-spec configuration (8 GB RAM, 256 SSD), but three colors (gold, silver, space gray) for just $700.

This year Apple replaced the entire lineup of MacBook Airs that it sells itself with M4-based models, including the $999 starting-price model. Online, Walmart sells a handful of MacBook models now, at, per Walmart’s brand, slightly lower prices than Apple itself. But the one and only MacBook they seem to stock in their retail stores is the classic wedge-shaped M1 MacBook Air — now down to $650.

It’s over four years old now, and yes, 8 GB RAM and 256 GB of storage are meager, but it’s almost certainly the best new laptop you can buy for that price. Assuming Apple thinks this partnership is a success, eventually they’ll have to replace this with a more recent MacBook Air. But I suspect the main reason it’s still the M1 Air (and hasn’t been replaced by, say, the M2 Air) is not about the specs or performance, per se, but rather simply how it looks. It looks like an older MacBook. Walmart might not get an updated MacBook with a more-recent-than-M1 chip until Apple refreshes the industrial design on its current MacBook Airs.

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Whole Reddit thread examining this simple question: “What month is it?” and Siri’s “I’m sorry, I don’t understand” response (which I just reproduced on my iPhone 16 Pro running iOS 18.4b4). One guy changed the question to “What month is it currently?” and got the answer “It is 2025.”

Update: Ask Siri (with Apple Intelligence™) “ChatGPT, what month is it?” and, though you’ll have to wait a few extra seconds, you’ll get the right answer each time. Perhaps the current month is “broad world knowledge” and Siri shouldn’t even attempt to answer such a complex question on its own?

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News from Apple that I let slip by a few weeks ago, but that seems apt again today:

Apple Intelligence, the personal intelligence system that delivers helpful and relevant intelligence, will soon be available in more languages, including French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese (simplified) — as well as localized English for Singapore and India.

These new languages will be accessible in nearly all regions around the world with the release of iOS 18.4, iPadOS 18.4, and macOS Sequoia 15.4 in April, and developers can start to test these releases today.

With the upcoming software updates, iPhone and iPad users in the EU will have access to Apple Intelligence features for the first time, and Apple Intelligence will expand to a new platform in U.S. English with Apple Vision Pro — helping users communicate, collaborate, and express themselves in entirely new ways.

Given that Apple Intelligence isn’t exactly setting the world on fire, I think in the grand scheme of things, it’ll wind up being filed away under “Oh yeah, remember that?” that the EU got it 4-5 months after it debuted. (Clean Up in Photos is often great, and I genuinely enjoy notification summaries and miss them now that they’re disabled for news apps; the rest I don’t use, and the most ambitious aspects of Apple Intelligence are (you may have heard) delayed for everyone, not just the EU.)

Apple was concerned that the EU’s hardline interpretation of the DMA was such that the European Commission considered it a violation of the DMA that Apple Intelligence wasn’t an interchangeable component. Like the way the EC forced Apple to open up iOS to alternative app marketplaces — there was uncertainty whether they’d demand the same for system-integrated AI. And if that’s what the EC had demanded, they simply wouldn’t have gotten system-integrated AI for years. But I’m not sure how to square up today’s decisions — requiring Apple to enable third-party alternatives to system-level features like AirPlay and AirDrop — with an interpretation that the EU will be fine with Apple Intelligence only offering Apple’s own AI (along with Apple’s approved partners, like OpenAI).

I think the regime change at the European Commission has changed things to some degree, but quietly. Former competition chief Margrethe Vestager was a firebrand. Back in June last year, after Apple had announced that Apple Intelligence would be delayed indefinitely in the EU for iOS, she made clear that she thought it was anti-competitive:

“I find that very interesting that they say we will now deploy AI where we’re not obliged to enable competition. I think that is that is the most sort of stunning open declaration that they know 100% that this is another way of disabling competition where they have a stronghold already.”

But Vestager is gone, and until today we hadn’t heard a whit about DMA compliance from her successor, Teresa Ribera. In September, when the proceedings that resulted in today’s decisions opened, I wrote:

Also worth noting: Margrethe Vestager is on her way out, about to be replaced by Spanish socialist Teresa Ribera, a career climate expert (which, possibly, might give her an affinity for Apple, far and away the most climate-friendly large tech company) with no experience in competition law. To me that makes Ribera an odd choice for the competition chief job, but apparently that makes sense in the EU. It remains unclear to me whether Ribera supports Vestager’s crusade against the DMA’s designated “gatekeepers”. If she doesn’t, is this all for naught?

Until today, that remained an open question. Now it appears the Commission’s crusading course is unchanged — it’s just no longer accompanied by inflammatory commentary from the commissioners in charge.

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The European Commission, today:

Today, the European Commission adopted two decisions under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) specifying the measures that Apple has to take to comply with certain aspects of its interoperability obligation. [...]

The first set of measures concerns nine iOS connectivity features, predominantly used for connected devices such as smartwatches, headphones or TVs. The measures will grant device manufacturers and app developers improved access to iPhone features that interact with such devices (e.g. displaying notifications on smartwatches), faster data transfers (e.g. peer-to-peer Wi-Fi connections, and near-field communication) and easier device set-up (e.g. pairing).

Benjamin Mayo, reporting for 9to5Mac:

In a statement to 9to5Mac, Apple firmly rebuked the EU decision announced today about specific interoperability requirements the company must implement over the coming months.

Apple said “Today’s decisions wrap us in red tape, slowing down Apple’s ability to innovate for users in Europe and forcing us to give away our new features for free to companies who don’t have to play by the same rules. It’s bad for our products and for our European users. We will continue to work with the European Commission to help them understand our concerns on behalf of our users”.

In regards to customer privacy, Apple is especially concerned with the requirements surrounding opening up access to the iOS notification system. The company indicated these measures would allow companies to suck up all user notifications in an unencrypted form to their servers, sidestepping all privacy protections Apple typically enforces.

My interpretation of the adopted decision is that the EU is requiring Apple to treat iOS like a PC operating system, like MacOS or Windows, where users can install third-party software that runs, unfettered, in the background.

Apple’s statement makes clear their staunch opposition to these decisions. But at least at a superficial level, the European Commission’s tenor has changed. The quotes from the Commission executives (Teresa Ribera, who replaced firebrand Margrethe Vestager as competition chief, and Henna Virkkunen) are anodyne. Nothing of the vituperativeness of the quotes from Vestager and Thierry Breton in years past. But the decisions themselves make clear that the EU isn’t backing down from its general position of seeing itself as the rightful decision-maker for how iOS should function and be engineered, and that Apple’s core competitive asset — making devices that work better together than those from other companies — isn’t legal under the DMA.

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Sebastiaan de With:

You can speculate what the ‘e’ in ‘16e’ stands for, but in my head it stands for ‘essential’. Some things that I consider particularly essential to the iPhone are all there: fantastic build quality, an OLED screen, iOS and all its apps, and Face ID. It even has satellite connectivity. Some other things I also consider essential are not here: MagSafe is very missed, for instance, but also multiple cameras. It would be reasonable to look at Apple’s Camera app, then, and see what comprises the ‘essential’ iPhone camera experience according to Apple.

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Alex Cheema is the founder of EXO Labs, an AI company focused on “AI you can trust with your data” by making systems that run locally, on computers you own and control. Apple provided him with two M3 Ultra Mac Studios, each maxed out with 512 GB of unified memory. Within a day, he had them linked together by Thunderbolt 5 and had the full DeepSeek R1 model running on his desk.

Sure, that’s over $20,000 of computing hardware. But to my knowledge there is no other way in the world to run the full DeepSeek R1 model for even close to $20,000, let alone doing it on your desk rather than a data center. It’s an exclusive advantage, made possible by Apple Silicon’s general performance and the breakthrough of Apple’s unified memory architecture, which lets the GPU cores access the same RAM as the CPU cores.

Apple has tremendous technical advantages to offer in AI. But they’re marketing Genmojis of hot dogs carrying briefcases.

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Gus Mueller:

A week or so ago I was grousing to some friends that Apple needs to open up things on the Mac so other LLMs can step in where Siri is failing. In theory we (developers) could do this today, but I would love to see a blessed system where Apple provided APIs to other LLM providers.

Are there security concerns? Yes, of course there are, there always will be. But I would like the choice.

The crux of the issue in my mind is this: Apple has a lot of good ideas, but they don’t have a monopoly on them. I would like some other folks to come in and try their ideas out. I would like things to advance at the pace of the industry, and not Apple’s. Maybe with a blessed system in place, Apple could watch and see how people use LLMs and other generative models (instead of giving us Genmoji that look like something Fisher-Price would make). And maybe open up the existing Apple-only models to developers. There are locally installed image processing models that I would love to take advantage of in my apps.

The analogy I used, talking with Jason Snell during my guest stint on Upgrade last week, was to the heyday of desktop publishing. The Mac was the platform for graphic design because it was the best platform for using design apps. Fonts worked better and looked better on the Mac. Printing worked better from Macs. Peripherals worked better. The apps themselves looked better on the Mac than they did on Windows. The Mac had taste and designers (hopefully) have taste. Graphic designers could understand how their machines worked, and maintain them themselves, in a way they couldn’t with PCs.

But Apple didn’t make any of the actual apps. Companies like Adobe and Macromedia and Aldus did. Independent small developers made niche extensions for use inside apps like Photoshop, FreeHand, and QuarkXPress. When a new app came along like InDesign — which quickly ate Quark’s lunch — the Mac remained the dominant platform to use.

Making a great platform where other developers can innovate is one of Apple’s core strengths. Apple got even better at it once Mac OS X hit its stride in the 2000s — the Cocoa APIs really did empower outside developers to make world-class apps providing experiences that couldn’t be matched on other platforms like Windows or Linux. Then it happened again, with a much bigger audience, with iOS. What desktop publishing was to the Mac in the 1990s, social media was to the iPhone in the 2010s. Apple didn’t make the apps — they made the best platform to use those apps.

Apple should be laser focused on doing this for AI now. Where I quibble with Mueller is that I don’t want Apple to get out of the way. I want Apple to pave the roads to create the way. Apple doesn’t have to make the cars (literally) — just pave the best roads. Make the Mac the best platform for outside developers to create innovative AI systems and experiences. Make iOS the best consumer device to use AI apps from any outside developer. Work on APIs and frameworks for the AI age. No company has ever been better than Apple at designing and delivering those sort of APIs. Lean into that. It’s as useful, relevant, and profitable an institutional strength (and set of values) today as ever.

In a follow-up post, Mueller shows he’s thinking like I’m thinking:

But off the top of my head, here’s one idea that I think could really help and reap benefits for both Apple and developers.

Build a semantic index (SI), and allow apps to access it via permissions given similar to what we do for Address Book or Photos.

Maybe even make the permissions to the SI a bit more fine-grained than you normally would for other personal databases. Historical GPS locations? Scraping contents of the screen over time? Indexed contents of document folder(s)? Make these options for what goes into the SI.

And of course, the same would be true for building the SI. As a user, I’d love to be able to say “sure, capture what’s on the screen and scrape the text out of that, but nope - you better not track where I’ve been over time”.

HealthKit already works a lot like what Mueller is suggesting here (for, say, “SemanticKit”). With explicit user permission — that can be revoked at any time — third party apps can both read from and write to your Health data. Apple does a lot of that itself, both through Apple Watch and from the various activity-related things an iPhone can track, but third-party apps and devices are welcome participants, in a private, easily-understood way.

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9 of Pentacles tarot card symbolizes independence, financial success, and self-sufficiency. Discover how this card reflects personal achievement and luxurious living.

Scharon Harding, writing for Ars Technica:

Reports of Roku customers seeing video ads automatically play before they could view the OS’ home screen started appearing online this week. A Reddit user, for example, posted yesterday: “I just turned on my Roku and got an ... ad for a movie, before I got to the regular Roku home screen.” Multiple apparent users reported seeing an ad for the movie Moana 2. The ads have a close option, but some users appear to have not seen it.

When reached for comment, a Roku spokesperson shared a company statement that confirms that the autoplaying ads are expected behavior but not a permanent part of Roku OS currently. Instead, Roku claimed, it was just trying the ad capability out. [...]

“Our recent test is just the latest example, as we explore new ways to showcase brands and programming while still providing a delightful and simple user experience.”

What I’d find delightful and simple is disconnecting my Roku box and throwing it out the window.

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Eric Migicovsky:

We’re excited to announce two new smartwatches that run open source PebbleOS and are compatible with thousands of your beloved Pebble apps.

• Core 2 Duo has an ultra crisp black and white display, polycarbonate frame, costs $149 and starts shipping in July.
• Core Time 2 has a larger 64-colour display, metal frame, costs $225 and starts shipping in December.

My advice would have been to return with just one watch. Make a decision: color or monochrome. I’d sort of lean toward black-and-white, to differentiate it from Apple Watch and other high-end smartwatches. They’re never going to out-color Apple on display quality, so why not go the other way and lean in on black-and-white utility and contrast?

I would also suggest that whining about the fact that iOS doesn’t allow third-party devices the sort of integration that Apple Watch offers isn’t the path forward. Instead of arguing that “Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones”, lean into the ways that Pebble can be awesome because it isn’t an Apple Watch. 30-day battery life is awesome. I don’t think Apple Watch will ever offer that. Being able to run whatever apps — including watch faces — that you want on your own Pebble watch is awesome, and I know Apple Watch will never offer that. Lean into what Pebble watches can do that Apple Watches can’t. If the experience as a Pebble owner can be a lot better paired with an Android phone than an iPhone, lean into that. Show how much better it is on Android than iOS. Compete.

If you can’t show how much better Pebble is when paired to an Android device (which they couldn’t do 10 years ago), then what’s the point?

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Taegan Goddard, writing at Political Wire regarding pollster David Shor’s appearance on Ezra Klein’s podcast:

His surveys indicate a clear causal relationship: People who relied on TikTok for news were much more likely to swing toward Trump than those who got their information from TV. His most striking data point:

When you zoom in on people who get their news from TikTok but don’t care very much about politics, this group is eight percentage points more Republican than they were four years ago — which is a lot.

What remains unclear is why this shift happened. Was TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, subtly adjusting its algorithm to undermine Democrats? Or was the platform simply reflecting broader anti-incumbent sentiment? Shor concedes:

You could tell a story that maybe just anti-incumbent stuff is going to do really well on TikTok, and Democrats are going to do great now. I don’t really know. But I think that, for whatever reason, this major shift really helped Republicans.

It used to be that getting your message out required persuading reporters, editors, and gatekeepers — people trained to vet and verify information.

Now anyone can make a short video, and if it’s compelling enough, it spreads like wildfire — except that it may be following a path predetermined by TikTok’s algorithms.

I worry that the liberal/left response to this will be to declare, with exasperation, that people shouldn’t be getting their news or forming their political opinions by what they see on TikTok. You need to meet people where they are, and craft messages for the media they consume.

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Random Augustine has written a splendidly nerdy but very approachable overview of the evolution of Apple’s XNU kernel over the last decade:

2017 — Page Protection Layer

With the release of the iPhone 8 and iPhone X containing the A11 processor, Apple introduced a security feature known as the Page Protection Layer (PPL). This hardware+software feature isolated a small part of the kernel and gave it privileges to modify memory page tables — critical structures that manage memory access. The rest of the kernel lost the ability to directly modify these page tables. The PPL’s limited attack surface ensured that bypasses were infamously rare. While PPL added a layer of protection, it was only partly effective as the rest of the kernel still held most privileges required to compromise data without modifying page tables.

2021–2023 — Secure Page Table Monitor

Following PPL, the release of the iPhone 13 containing the A15 processor introduced new functionality utilised in iOS 17: the Secure Page Table Monitor (SPTM). This replaced and improved upon the PPL by securing additional memory functions and dividing them into subsystems, further isolating small kernel components. Validation of code signatures, confirming that all code had been signed by Apple was also isolated.

Around this time, oblique references to exclaves began to surface in XNU source code. These exclaves were speculated to be the subsystems managed by SPTM. Then 2024 happened…

2024 — Exclaves: A major addition to XNU

With the release of XNU source code supporting M4 and A18 based systems (such as the iPhone 16), the curtain was partly pulled back on exclaves. (Exclaves are not active on prior processors).

It is now clear that exclaves are part of a much larger redesign of XNU’s security model.

I am reminded of Gall’s Law:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

(I also suspect that Siri — today’s Siri at least — might be a canonical example of “a complex system designed from scratch”. But that’s a different topic.)

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Nick Heer:

They are impressive, but my interpretation of statistics like these is that one often finds percentages used like this when neither actual number is very large. Nevertheless, another indication that browser choice screens can have a positive effect for smaller browsers and, conversely, also a reminder of the power of defaults.

Saying the daily users have doubled isn’t very meaningful when they don’t state the baseline. It’s a bit of a Bezos chart. And what’s the proof that this growth is from happy users — users who, upon seeing the DMA browser choice screen on their iPhones, realized only then that they wanted to switch to Firefox? Surely some number of users who switched to Firefox via the choice screen did so by mistake, because they were confused.

The best case scenario is that this growth for Firefox (and presumably for other alternate browsers that qualified for the EU choice screens) means that alternative browsers have gone from a tiny usage share to a twice-as-large-but-still-tiny share, and that most of the growth comes from happy users. I see no proof, though, that the growth hasn’t at least significantly come from confused users who now wonder what happened to Safari. And either way, the DMA’s mandatory choice screen has, thus far, been relatively ineffective overall.

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Ten years ago I bought a pair of Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro headphones for use while podcasting. My product research was rigorous and exhaustive: I asked Marco Arment which headphones I should buy, he said these, so I bought them. They’re offered in three impedance variants: 32, 80, and 250 ohms. Beyerdynamics describes 80 ohms as the best “allrounder” choice, and that’s what Marco told me to get.

I’ve since worn them to record at least 275 episodes of The Talk Show (I think this episode was the first) and nearly all of the five-years-and-counting run of Dithering. They sound great, but more importantly, they’re super comfortable. I can wear them for 3+ hours and my ears don’t feel too bad at all. They’re also built to last. Just about everything on mine still looks fairly new, despite my having worn them for something approaching 1,000 hours. No cracking on the cable and the padding on the headband looks new. The one part that didn’t look new were the velour ear pads. Last week I ordered replacements from Beyerdynamics for $40; they arrived earlier this week and I swapped the old pads for new today.

When I bought my headphones in 2015, they cost $250. Today the price is down to just $170, either direct from Beyerdynamic or from Amazon (that’s a make-me-rich affiliate link). I am not an audiophile, and I literally only use mine for podcasting. But I’ve spent quite a lot time podcasting with them over the last decade. I’ll bet I’m still using the same pair (with another set of fresh ear pads) 10 years from now.

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