In September, GRIC is planning to break ground on another experimental effort to conserve water while generating electricity: floating solar. Between its canal canopies and the new project that would float photovoltaic panels on a reservoir it is building, GRIC hopes to one day power all of its canal and irrigation operations with solar electricity, transforming itself into one of the most innovative and closely watched water users in the West in the process.

As someone in Arizona that spends a lot of time walking the canals, there’s one that runs close to my house, a great place to walk the dog or for jogging, I think this is a great idea.

There may never be an iOS 19 or a macOS 16, according to reporting from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. At its Worldwide Developers Conference next month, Apple reportedly plans to shift toward version numbers based on years rather than the current numbering system. This is intended to unify the company’s current maze of version numbers; instead of iOS 19, iPadOS 19, macOS 16, tvOS 19, watchOS 11, and visionOS 3, we’ll get iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, watchOS, and visionOS 26.

That’s a nice quality of life update.

Starting today, CarPlay Ultra, the next generation of CarPlay, is available with new Aston Martin vehicle orders in the U.S. and Canada, and will be available for existing models that feature the brand’s next-generation infotainment system through a software update in the coming weeks

Announced in 2022 initially, and now finally available.

“Therefore, I have concluded that permanent ineligibility ends upon the passing of the disciplined individual, and Mr. Rose will be removed from the permanently ineligible list.”

Manfred’s decision ends the ban that Rose accepted from then-commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti in August 1989, following an MLB investigation that determined the 17-time All-Star had bet on games while managing the Cincinnati Reds.

Wow. While I’m not much of a baseball fan these days. The idea of ending Pete Rose and Joe “shoeless” Jackson is just nuts. I didn’t think I’d ever see the day.

“The new rules profoundly undercut the integrated iOS ecosystem that this Court sustained as lawful and that is the foundation of user trust and confidence in the App Store,” Apple’s motion reads. Compliance with the order would cost “hundreds of millions to billions” of dollars, “which Apple can never recoup,” Apple argues.

Hahahahahhahahahah. 😂 Apple playing the “woe is me, we’re losing so much money, we wouldn’t be able to survive?!?” card is, in itself, hilarious.

Comcast executives apparently realized something that customers have known and complained about for years: The Internet provider’s prices aren’t transparent enough and rise too frequently.

This might not have mattered much to cable executives as long as the total number of subscribers met their targets. But after reporting a net loss of 183,000 residential broadband customers in Q1 2025, Comcast President Mike Cavanagh said the company isn’t “winning in the marketplace” during an earnings call today. The Q1 2025 customer loss was over three times larger than the net loss in Q1 2024.

Shocking. 🙄

Life has changed a bit for Mauch since he became an Internet provider. “I’m definitely a lot more well-known by all my neighbors… I’m saved in people’s cell phones as ‘fiber cable guy,'” he said. “The world around me has gotten a lot smaller, I’ve gotten to know a lot more people.”

I’d be open to running a neighborhood network for cheap reliable fiber to the home.

TSMC, or Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., is the world’s biggest chipmaker and announced a $100 billion investment in US chipmaking last month. It began producing chips using the 4nm process at its Arizona factory in January and has plans to make chips with the more efficient 2nm technology by the end of the decade.

Well that’s impressive that they are producing 4nm and not legacy nodes and planning 2nm in the years ahead.

“We believe this is due to the scarcity of data representing sequential decision-making behavior (e.g., debugging traces) in the current LLM training corpus,” the blog post says. “However, the significant performance improvement… validates that this is a promising research direction.”

This initial report is just the start of the efforts, the post claims.  The next step is to “fine-tune an info-seeking model specialized in gathering the necessary information to resolve bugs.” If the model is large, the best move to save inference costs may be to “build a smaller info-seeking model that can provide relevant information to the larger one.”

Safe for now I guess. 😉

Barring a sharp correction, Apple looks increasingly likely to miss out on a generation of developers conditioned to first reach for tools like Cursor, Replit, or v0—especially as Apple’s own AI tooling remains notably absent. This goes well beyond enabling new entrants to “vibe code”—experienced mobile developers who, despite history with Xcode and a predilection for building native apps, are begrudgingly swapping out their tools in acknowledgement of the inarguable productivity benefits.

I would say the tipping point has passed Apple by. As an institution they are unable or unwilling to self correct. High profit margins and market pressures won’t kick in until it’s far too late. (See Intel’s last decade of record profits before their recent collapse) The product of AI has come and passed Apple by. As a platform juggernaut they will use those platform and duopoly powers to hold tight and remain relevant.

Apple has stopped offering its end-to-end encrypted iCloud storage, Advanced Data Protection (ADP), to new users in the UK, and will require existing users to disable the feature at some point in the future. The move comes following reports earlier this month that UK security services requested Apple grant them backdoor access to worldwide users’ encrypted backups.

What the shit?!?!?

The most effective and broadly-understand articulation of this idea is the phrase, “the purpose of a system is what it does”, often abbreviated as POSIWID. The term comes to us from the field of cybernetics, and the work of Stafford Beer, but this is one of those wonderful areas where you really don’t have to read a lot of theory or study a lot of the literature to immediately get value out of the concept. (Though if you have time, do dig into the decades of research here; you’ll enjoy it!)

The system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as it was designed to. What to change to the system. Change its desired outcome, its incentives to be successful. That where the correction is needed.

What we have right now in America is a society that is increasingly marrying European levels of stasis to American levels of social welfare policy, and that is the worst of both worlds. We’re not helping people go where the opportunities are and we don’t help them where they’re living either. And that strikes me as dangerous and unsustainable and also inhumane. And so it’s a real choice that America faces at this moment to decide which of those two models it wants to pursue.

AAA’s study also points out how difficult it will be to fix some of the contributors to this problem. In many places, the built environment needs to be changed, but it’s expensive, and American society is just too accepting of traffic deaths to demand it happen. There are clashes between local and state governments—the latter often owns the arterial roads where these deaths are happening, leaving the cities powerless to take action themselves.

It’s a long slow path back from the car centric cities we’ve built. The time to start is now.

There’s absolutely nothing fundamental in the App Store concept that requires it to be the only pathway for software on the iPhone. But limiting things to the App Store gave Apple complete control of its new software platform, which in those early days was very much still under construction. I understand why Apple had that impulse, why it wanted to protect what it was building, and why it didn’t want the iPhone to be defined by software in any way that Apple didn’t agree with.

But over time, the inevitable happened: Apple used the exclusivity of the App Store and its total control over the platform to extract money through rent-seeking and to bar businesses from admitting that the web existed outside their apps. Perhaps worst of all, the App Store’s exclusivity allowed Apple to essentially treat app developers as Apple employees, forcing them to follow Apple’s guidelines and please Apple’s approval apparatus before their apps would be allowed to be seen by the public. Whole classes of apps were banned entirely, some publicly, some silently.

Enough said.

We then handle user requests by using the embedding model to create an embedding for the query. We use that embedding with a ANN similarity search on the vector store to retrieve matching fragments. Next we use the RAG prompt template to combine the results with the original query, and send the complete input to the LLM.

A nice quick rundown of RAG implementation.

Transportation. I don’t think individuals should plan and build their own highways. I’d like a government to do that. I also think every American owning their own car that sits parked 95% of the time is a waste of money and space, even if it does make the GDP chart go up. You need a big extra room to store cars at home and a downtown filled with concrete ramps to store cars at work. Or an enormous parking lot to store cars at the store. Is this not a form waste? There’s no way a train makes money and is a profitable business… but more trains equals less traffic. We know adding new ten million dollar a mile lanes to an already impossibly wide interstate creates more traffic, more road rage, and more traffic deaths. That is folly and an inefficiency governments can step in and solve.

100% agree with every word.

Technically, Dell had already required its sales, manufacturing, and lab engineers to return to office. The email cites the “new speed, energy, and passion” from those teams as a reason for implementing it company-wide globally. For previously remote workers who don’t live near an office, Dell says they can continue to work remotely.

Image living an hour away from the office, and now spending 2 hours each day in the car simply traveling to and from the office. Doesn’t sound more productive.

If you want to stop spaghetti code, you’re better served investing in good documentation and developer discipline.

Nailed it.

“The truth is that we’re gonna have to upgrade people’s Hardware 3 computer for those who have bought Full Self Driving, and that is the honest answer,“ Musk said during yesterday’s earnings call, adding that it will be “absolutely painful and difficult.”

Ouch 🤕

This guide is a living document, which means I’ll be updating it regularly with new content and examples. I’m here to help you learn and answer any questions you might have. So, let’s get started!

Marked for the future. A great resource.

When contacted for a statement, an Apple spokesperson told Ars:

Apple Intelligence is designed to help users get everyday tasks done faster and more easily. This includes optional notification summaries, which provide users who choose to opt in a way to briefly view information from apps and tap into the full details whenever they choose. These are identified by a summarization icon, and the original content is a quick tap away. Apple Intelligence features are in beta and we are continuously making improvements with the help of user feedback. A software update in the coming weeks will further clarify when the text being displayed is summarization provided by Apple Intelligence. We encourage users to report a concern if they view an unexpected notification summary.

Gonna need a lot more than a subtle icon change to clean up this mess.

I have been very productive with my side projects, quickly building the tools or projects I need and deploying them for others to use—in other words, finishing the v1 of each project.

I’ve been using Cursor for several weeks now and can say I’ve been pretty productive.

Disable Docker x86_64/amd64 emulation

As a last step, try disabling the x86_64/amd64 emulation using Rosetta on Apple Silicon in your Docker Desktop General settings.

For three years, its proposal would block Google from signing deals that link licenses for Chrome, Search, and its Android app store, Google Play, with placement or preinstallation of its other apps, including Chrome, Google Assistant, or the Gemini AI assistant.

It would also still allow Google to pay for default search placement in browsers but allow for multiple deals across different platforms or browsing modes and require the ability to revisit the deals at least once a year.

Not even the bare minimum.