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Volume 2, The Engine of Empire follows Marcus and his master Gaius as Pompeii’s destruction triggers ruin and famine in Campania. With wool workers killed or injured and wool rotting, Marcus turns to Ulysses and designs the first machines, boosting production speed. The community is saved, but the new industrial scale creates a surplus the old world isn’t prepared to handle.
Plasma Bigscreen is a free, open-source desktop environment for Linux, designed for TVs, HTPCs, and set-top boxes. It runs on any Linux OS and supports input from remotes, game controllers, keyboards/mice, or KDE Connect on phones. It’s highly customizable: install apps (Steam, Kodi, Jellyfin, YouTube via VacuumTube) via your distro or Flathub, and tailor the homescreen and appearance. Built on KDE Plasma/KWin/Qt/Kirigami, it emphasizes openness, privacy, and community contributions, with a TV-friendly settings app and a home overlay.
TechCrunch's Extra Crunch Daily examines why startups may skip Form D filings despite SEC exemptions. The authors note Patreon had raised over $100M without public SEC filings, suggesting a trend toward avoiding disclosure to evade scrutiny. They outline reasons: internal compensation and regulatory pressures, security and competitive concerns, investor timing, flat/down rounds, and incomplete rounds. They explain Form D's purpose and loopholes. The piece also delves into SoftBank's looming telecom IPO, the debt-heavy Vision Fund, and loan-backed underwriting dynamics, signaling ongoing exploration of disclosure norms.
The article shows why Dapper queries on varchar columns can slow to a crawl: passing C# strings as anonymous parameters makes ADO.NET send nvarchar, triggering CONVERT_IMPLICIT and full index scans. It uses an example where a simple WHERE on ProductCode becomes CPU-heavy due to implicit conversion. The fix is simple: tell Dapper the parameter is varchar via DbType.AnsiString (and matching size) using DynamicParameters, or use DbString. This preserves index seeks, reducing CPU drastically. Also, how to detect (Query Store, execution plans) and the importance of documenting the change.
Math Notepad (v0.11.7) reports that JavaScript is disabled and required to run. The UI lists file actions (New, Open, Save, Rename, Share, Delete, Docs) and credits Jos de Jong; powered by mathjs.org.
Art Bits from HyperCard documents a fan-made archive of the original 'Art Bits' two-color clip-art included with Apple’s HyperCard. The author has clipped out over 700 PNGs and placed them on a page for use in stacks, noting the collection is under 300 KB once optimized and may load slowly. Images are organized into sections (Beasts, Buildings, Communication and media, HyperCard miscellany, Icon ideas, Macintosh miscellany, Nature and science, Odds and ends, People, Small treasures, Transportation). The piece also recalls HyperCard’s legacy for the Web (JavaScript, wikis, link cues, Myst).
Nintendo of America filed a complaint in the U.S. Court of International Trade challenging IEEPA-based tariffs imposed under multiple executive orders (Canada, Mexico, China, Liberation Day, Brazil, Russia/India). It says the IEEPA does not authorize the duties, noting rulings in V.O.S. Selections and Learning Resources, and the Supreme Court’s Feb. 20, 2026 decision striking them down. The case notes that President Trump’s Feb. 2026 IEEPA Duties Termination EO did not address refunds. Nintendo seeks prompt refunds with interest and other remedies, asserting exclusive jurisdiction for challenges to IEEPA duties, and claims over $200 billion collected.
Scott Galloway argues Warner Bros. Discovery is a cautionary tale of overpaying for legacy media. The Ellison bid to fuse Paramount with WBD misreads synergies between premium content and scale, funded by heavy debt. He traces a string of failures—Time Warner, AOL-Time Warner, AT&T-WarnerMedia, Discovery—each marred by culture clashes and vanishing value. Netflix walked away, saving a $3B breakup fee; Disney’s IP, parks, and cash flow set a stronger benchmark. The future hinges on unbundling, AI, and asset sales, with the “Death Star” likely to collapse under debt.
An experimental meditation on typography and voice: using CSS to render body text in lowercase while keeping code blocks intact, and the tension between presenting as human and masking identity. It chronicles attempts to alter writing style and the emotional stakes of authentic expression. The piece also documents practical experimentation: editing a font to adjust em dashes, deliberately misspelling words, and applying Peter Norvig’s spelling-corrector approach to compare and replace rare words. The author interleaves code fragments and notes about AI-assisted drafting and typographic hacks.
Microsoft announces TypeScript 6.0 RC. It’s a transition release toward a Go-based native compiler for TypeScript 7.0, bridging 5.9 to 7.0. Highlights include: improved type inference for contextually sensitive functions; extended deprecation of import assertions to import() calls; updated DOM types; Temporal types; Map upsert/getOrInsert; RegExp.escape; dom lib consolidation; Node subpath imports (#/); es2025 target/lib support; --stableTypeOrdering for 6.0→7.0 migrations; moduleResolution bundler/nodenext; defaults: strict true, module esnext, target es2025, rootDir, types: []. Deprecations: baseUrl, moduleResolution node, esModuleInterop/allowSyntheticDefaultImports, --outFile; deprecated legacy module syntax and import asserts; no-default-lib directive; and CLI behavior when tsconfig.json exists. Try RC and nightly builds ahead of TS7.0.
primitive-playground is a web app (WebAssembly) that reconstructs any image using only primitive shapes, ported from fogleman/primitive. It runs entirely in the browser with on‑device processing. The algorithm iteratively adds shapes to minimize error with the input image. Access at primitive-playground.taiseiue.jp. Config options: number of shapes (default 100), mode (Triangle by default; other shapes available), alpha (128 when using Combo), input size (256px), output size (1024px), and preview interval (10). Licensed MIT.
A traveler with a spinal cord implant says TSA forced her to pass through an Advanced Imaging Technology scanner at Atlanta's Hartsfield International Airport on May 21, 2024, after she asked for a pat-down to avoid the device. The electromagnetic charge damaged her implant, causing pain and requiring surgery. She filed a 12-page lawsuit against the TSA seeking damages for physical and mental pain, medical costs, lost earnings, and more. TSA guidelines advise pat-downs for internal devices; the complaint alleges staff ignored these rules. The outcome is unresolved.
Anthropic reports a Mozilla collaboration where Claude Opus 4.6 identified 22 vulnerabilities in Firefox over two weeks, 14 of which were high-severity. The effort scanned nearly 6,000 C++ files, resulting in 112 unique reports; most fixes landed in Firefox 148.0. The team reproduced many historical Firefox CVEs in a realism test, then sought novel bugs in the current code, focusing on the JavaScript engine. They tested exploit potential; Claude could exploit only in two cases, at considerable cost, and only in a sandboxed/testing environment. They advocate task verifiers, rapid patching, and broader AI-driven security work, including Linux kernel work and Code Security.
Fivetran CEO George Fraser argues Slack holds a vast tribal knowledge base hampered by poor data-access policies. He calls for a new Slack built by Anthropic, with Claude (and Claude Code) as first-class group-chat participants, solving 1:1 limitations and data-access issues. He suggests a bundled NewSlack+Claude for every employee to counter high prices and weak network effects, and urges Anthropic to commit to open data access and interoperability to foster a more open enterprise-data ecosystem.
Scientists explore why pooping times are similar across animals. In a study with 34 mammal species at Zoo Atlanta, researchers measured feces density and viscosity with rheometers. They found bigger animals produce longer feces but defecate faster (elephant ~6 cm/s; human ~2 cm/s). Strikingly, defecation duration is roughly constant across species—about 12 seconds ±7 despite volume differences. The answer is a ultra-thin mucus layer lining the colon, which is slippery and less viscous than feces, enabling feces to move as a plug. Speed hinges on mucus; mucus changes link to constipation. NASA used this to design astronaut diapers.
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CNN, reporting by Isobel Yeung, presents new imagery suggesting the United States carried out the strike on an elementary school in southern Iran, killing scores of children and marking the deadliest civilian toll so far in the US-Israel war against Iran.
Apache Otava (incubating) is an ASF project for change-detection in continuous performance engineering. It statistically analyzes performance test results stored in CSV files, PostgreSQL, BigQuery, or Graphite to identify change-points and notify about potential performance regressions. Source code is available. The project remains in ASF incubation as part of its governance and stabilization process.
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