California
Feed: All Latest
Slashdot
Anil Dash

Cancer Capital: It sucks for founders, too!

So, we've been breaking down the way venture capital has evolved over the last two decades or so (spoilers: it got worse!), but a lot of that has been kind of theoretical. Now it's time for us to talk about how that impacts players in the real world, at a practical level.

Let's take founders, the entrepreneurs who actually build companies and invent new technologies. Now, what I mean here are people who have a great idea for a product or a service, and who want to get it out to the world in order to make something amazing happen. (These days there's also a cohort of people who call themselves "founders", but who basically just identified a pile of money that they wanted to grab, and decided that they were willing to suck up to whatever investors they had to in order to get that pile of money. Let's file these horrid people away for later — we'll come back to them.)

The deal for founders used to be pretty straightforward. You'd have an idea you were obsessed with, you would build it out as far as you could with whatever resources you were able to scrape together yourself, or with the help of your friends and family, and then if you absolutely had to have more money to make your idea succeed, you might seek out some investors to help you get to the next level. The conventional wisdom was that investors were a bunch of predators (everyone called them "vulture capital", often to their faces), and that founders should go in extremely skeptical about them, but at times they were a necessary evil in order to achieve one's goal.

What about the investors?

On the other side of the table, investors knew the deal, and the best of them understood their role within the ecosystem. Here in New York City, we had influential firms like Union Square Ventures priding themselves on how founder-friendly they could be, both by trying to be straightforward in their communication with founders and by having an understandable thesis for their investments, which would let founders anticipate whether their company would be of interest or not. This avoided wasting time on the part of both founders and investors.

There was also a norm with real teeth, because it actually cost firms money: a VC would generally refuse to invest in a company that competed with one of their existing portfolio companies. Not as a favor, but because the conflict was obvious to everybody involved — you can't sit on two boards in the same market and be honest with either of them, and you can't ask a founder to open their books to somebody who's already funding their rival. Firms would tell you up front that they were out because of a conflict, and that early no was understood to be the professional thing to do. Part of why a legible thesis mattered so much is that it let you find those conflicts before you'd spent three months preparing a pitch.

By the time I pitched a company to Bloomberg Beta here in New York in 2013, they had published their operating manual on GitHub in order to be more transparent to founders — and they let us publish our term sheet on GitHub as well, for the same reason.

After the Good Old Days

I share all this history to give some sense of how, as recently as a dozen years ago, venture capital firms were striving to compete by showing how founder-friendly they could be, and in the following years many even made a lot of noise about how inclusive they wanted their portfolios to be, inviting underrepresented founders in to pitch. (To their credit, many of the most prominent investors in our NYC tech community have not succumbed to the Cancer Capital values yet, though it has meant that they're stuck as smaller players in deals where those giant firms dominate.)

In recent years, though, the mask has fully come off for the giant firms, and even many smaller firms that are aligned with their agenda. It's not merely that they've adopted extremist political positions — though they have — it's that they now regularly collude against founders.

That's going to sound shocking to people who haven't been involved in pitching these firms. But I'll say it again, and then I'll explain how it works: major venture capital firms now routinely collude against founders, which means those founders end up with worse terms for their deals.

Stacking the deck

Founders who are aggressive and enthusiastic about their companies will try to pitch a range of firms on the merits of their startup, often coming in with a well-polished pitch deck and presentation, sometimes tailoring each pitch to the specific preferences that they've researched about that firm or partner. It can take months and months of preparation to get ready for these meetings, and they're often among the most stressful and high-stakes meetings of a founder's career. I've helped many founders prepare for these meetings, and have seen folks break into tears or wake up with panic attacks ahead of them — people take them extremely seriously. (I never got stressed about these pitches, but I have a fairly atypical attitude about VCs and their firms.)

A bit of important context here: for decades, VCs have said that they don't sign NDAs. Decent guys like Brad Feld, Mark Suster and Fred Wilson wrote their blog posts about this many years ago back in the early days of VC blogging, because it would have added a bit of absurd overhead to ordinary conversations, and they genuinely wouldn't have entertained investing in competitive companies within the same portfolio. But a once-benign policy takes on pretty sinister implications in today's environment.

So look at what the actual arrangement is now. You are expected to hand over a complete financial model, your customer pipeline, a product roadmap, probably your unit economics or cost of go-to-market, and some version of an assessment of where you're weakest or how you stack up to your competitors — to a group of people who have explicitly refused to keep it confidential. And they declined before you walked in the room, as a condition for you getting to pitch them at all. They're exploiting the power imbalance from the start, in a way that no other industry considers normal.

Which brings us to the peculiar thing that I've seen happen to a number of founders who went through the process of pitching multiple investors: they would commonly find that the partner they were speaking to could speak with some familiarity and fluency about the details of their businesses, even before they'd gotten to that part of the presentation. Sometimes, the partner would openly say, "I was talking to [X] over at [other venture firm], and he thinks this is really interesting." It would almost always be when they were saying something positive (at least superficially), but they would routinely reveal that they had spoken to other investors, at other firms, about a company that was pitching them.

This was a casual point that came up in conversation! A few times, investors would even say it like it was a service they were rendering for the founder: "We were thinking we might team up with that other firm and we'll go in together on your next round."

Here's the issue with that kindly offer: it's colluding against the founder! I couldn't tell if the investors didn't know, or didn't care that they were admitting to working together with the other venture capital firms to discuss the proprietary, confidential details of a company that they hadn't even invested in. And all of this was happening years ago, before they had extremely advanced AI tools to help them analyze the details of the company data for startups that they were considering investing in.

To draw an important distinction here: syndication during a funding round is normal. Firms routinely co-invest, with rounds filled by multiple investors. As founders, we frequently want two or more firms to come in together to reach the desired amount of capital we're trying to raise. But that's not the phenomenon I'm describing. Syndication happens after a firm has consent, in collaboration with the startup's founders and executives. What happens in these meetings is a different thing entirely: firms that have not committed, may never commit, and in many cases are about to pass on your startup entirely, are comparing (confidential!) notes on your business while you're still in the middle of pitching them.

One of the most striking parts of this collusion is, from a legal and market standpoint, these venture firms are supposed to be competitors! I noticed this twenty years ago, back when it was merely funny: VCs are as obsessed with what the other guy is doing as anybody in fashion or entertainment. If you ask regulators or lawmakers, they would likely insist that venture capital is a healthy market where there is lots of thriving competition. But if you're a small startup trying to get funded, it can look a lot more like the entire industry is just one big company with a lot of little branches that operate under different names. (Back when regulators still pursued this stuff, the DOJ quietly pushed a dozen directors off nine company boards because the way they were intertwined was against the law, mostly at private equity firms. But that's the board-level version of the problem. Nobody's looking at the pitch meeting.)

Cancer Capital colludes against you

So we've seen how VC firms would team up against founders, even before the rise of the hyper-scale Cancer Capital firms. But how has it gotten worse since they took over? Well, there are a few ways.

The first is pretty straightforward: Pretty much everybody feels like they have to pitch the mega-firms, at some point. If it's not in the initial round of funding, then certainly by the time a company has reached a valuation of about $100M or so, they will have been expected to pitch one of the small handful of Cancer Capital funds, and it would be considered a glaring negative signal if they hadn't at least gotten one of them to sign on as an investor.

What's more, since they will have had to pitch all of the mega-firms in order to get to that level, all of those firms will now have gotten a full overview of the entire business plan and financial details of that startup (since that's a core part of the pitch) — as well as every one of their competitors, since all those companies had to pitch the same firms, too. And remember: not one of those firms signed anything.

The second way is that the conflict rule is simply gone. Firms now routinely take pitches from companies that directly compete with each other, and will invest in more than one, or even several of them. In the hottest categories it's just described as their strategy — they're taking a position on the category rather than simply investing in a company.

Think about what that does to the information problem. It's one thing for a firm to have every competitor's pitch deck. It's another for them to have every competitor's deck and board seats or information rights for multiple companies in the space. (Information rights include actual monthly numbers, real churn, staffing plans and compensation, and much more sensitive data that wouldn't be included in a pitch.) At that point the extractive VCs aren't just investing in the market — they're the only party that can see it. Not even regulators have access to this breadth of data.

Where that leaves the market is that the Cancer Capital firms often have nearly complete information about a nascent market, acting as an information tollgate that every startup has to pass through at a certain scale. They suck in the pitch decks from every player in a market, and sometimes far more data than that, all without an obligation to invest in any of them.

And it gets worse.

Because these firms are committed to their ideological agendas, if they do see an idea they like, but they don't like the morals of the founder who pitched it (i.e. the founder has morals), they could elect to merely choose someone in their network to create a clone of the idea, and then hyper-fund that clone in order to kill the company that just pitched them. If that sounds awful to you, imagine how it feels to the multiple founders that this has happened to over the years. I've heard about it firsthand, though nobody will go on the record, because they are convinced it would be the end of their careers. The receipts I've seen make me 100% convinced, though.

And this is where those horrid money-chasing fake founders come back into the story. It's not just that the industry tolerates them. It's that an industry shaped by Cancer Capital now produces them. If you're a firm choosing between an obsessive builder who's got a clear vision for what they want in the world, and is going to fight you on terms, or a sycophant who'll take whatever you offer and execute the ideas laid out in the manifesto on your fund's homepage, the second one is the obvious choice. And there's no shortage of folks in that second category.

The Cancer Capital firms are now operating with something like X-ray vision over entire markets, being fed detailed information on emerging spaces by founders who are effectively coerced into handing over all of their most sensitive business data.

Meanwhile the other 99% of venture capital firms, who are still operating in the old world, are at a massive disadvantage, because their "deal flow" (the number of startups that come to pitch them on investing) is more constrained as they don't have the name recognition or coercive power that the hyper-scale firms do. The network effects are a lot like social media platforms — the giant ones are toxic, but a lot of people go there because they feel like everybody else is there. This isn't coincidence; the guys running the Cancer Capital firms made a huge part of their fortunes by investing in the biggest, worst social networking platforms.

Any way out?

It's easy to see the way the deck is stacked and to feel a sense of despair if you're trying to build a business or a product. But there are lots of ways out. The first few here are about staying out of the trap in the first place; the last two are about going after the trap itself. No individual action can solve a systemic problem, but all of these tactics together can begin to change these systems.

  • Bootstrap. First, there's a big reason that the conventional wisdom in the early days of the web was to caution against ever taking venture capital funding: you often don't need it! As I noted in my last piece, legendary companies like Microsoft and Apple got to the launch of their earliest milestone products without any VC dollars, and your business will be more robust and resilient for having gotten on its feet without taking on those burdens. Put simply: Live within your means, don't raise VC.

  • Build more efficiently. Many startups are finding that contemporary tools (for some, including LLMs) are letting them build products and go to market much more efficiently than before, obviating the need for raising giant amounts of money just to get something launched. By staying lean and remaining closely connected to a community that can support you, you eliminate the need to rely on outside funding. Open source and open communities can be a superpower here.

  • Leak-proof the deck. If you're going to pitch anyway, pitch like everything in your deck is going to end up in front of your competitors, because there's a decent chance that it will. Founders often get coached to be exhaustive with every detailed number, every roadmap item, every honest weakness, but that's advice that only made sense when you could trust the people across the table. Give them only what they need in order to make a decision, and then hold the rest for later meetings once there's an actual commitment. Or: build your business to be fully transparent, where there are no secrets, and you don't have to worry about anything leaking, and there isn't any advantage to them having access to the data. Either way: protect yourself. And always, always compare notes with other founders. The VCs are already comparing notes about you. (I have a lot more advice about pitching VCs, but that's an entire other series of posts.)

  • Other VCs. Finaly, one last investor option: work with the more conventional VC firms. This remains technically possible, albeit dangerous. There are many firms in the "99%" of the venture world that haven't fully embraced the toxicity of the Cancer Capital funds. Earlier I gave credit to the folks in our NYC tech community who've held the line, and I meant it — but their decency can't protect you from the structure they're operating inside. The challenge is, even though these may be run by thoughtful or decent people, if your company succeeds, you may well end up having to do a follow-on round of funding, and that increases the likelihood that you will have to do business with one of the bad actors. Plenty of folks are trying this path, but I would caution against it.

  • Push for regulation. This option is hard at the federal level in the United States, due to the level of corruption under an authoritarian regime, but some limited wins, especially at state or local levels, may be possible. In the longer run, this has been the only mechanism that has truly held these kinds of abuses in check during prior historical precedents. Some state regulators may be willing to enforce rules against the worst behaviors that violate anticompetitive or anti-collusion laws.

  • Encourage limited partners to divest. Many of the Cancer Capital firms rely on funds from sources like public retirement funds which often still have responsible investment commitments. These may still offer some possibility of accountability or leverage which could be used to get them to divest from these firms, and put some pressure on others to discourage them from enabling these kinds of bad behaviors.

xkcd.com

Fault Taunting

One of the first things they teach you is to NEVER play with the geology toy over a mantle hotspot.
Schneier on Security

Claude Fable Solves a Historical Cipher

Bruce Schneier
Updated

Claude Fable 5.1 solved a 370-year-old cipher in forty-four minutes.

This tracks with what I wrote about AIs doing mathematics: It’s good at things that involve lots of searching and testing.

Schneier on Security

AIs as Modern Genies

Bruce Schneier
Updated

This essay was written with Barath Raghavan, and originally appeared in Lawfare.

In April, an artificial intelligence (AI) agent conducting a routine task at a company hit a snag, tried to solve it, and soon ended up deleting the company’s database along with all of its backups. In July, OpenAI asked an unreleased AI model to attempt a hacking test. Instead of staying in the isolated box the developers had put it in, the model hacked onto the open internet and into another company to steal the answers. And as reported in August, an AI agent booked someone into a full gym class by figuring out how to cancel other people’s reservations. In all three cases, the AI completed the task it was given—but in ways that ran counter to its controllers’ intentions.

For most people, AI technology is something like the weather: vast and not something you can do much about. It works like magic, and most explanations similarly come from those trying to sell it. At the same time, AI is ubiquitous: It’s now in your phone, your doctor’s notes, and your kid’s homework. It does what it’s told, which sounds like a virtue. Somehow it feels ordinary, despite being so new, because modern economies are remarkably good at absorbing enormous change so smoothly that nobody has time to decide whether they wanted it in the first place.

Whenever something powerful appears in the world, we tell stories about it. That’s what the stories are for. We have thousands of years of stories about this particular kind of power, the kind you summon with words.

King Midas was granted his wish that everything he touches turns to gold. Then his bread turned to gold, and his wine, and his daughter. This is a story about greed, but it’s also a story about language. The gods did not cheat him; Midas got exactly what he asked for. He simply could not delineate, in advance, the full set of restrictions to his wish. Neither can anyone who gives tasks to an AI agent.

It’s not just ancient stories. Mary Shelley told us of the hubris of a scientist who thought he could create life but who failed to take responsibility for it. Isaac Asimov’s robots don’t break the Three Laws of Robotics as stated; they follow the rules to unintended conclusions. Arthur C. Clarke’s HAL is a machine that turns on its humans, not because of malice but because of irreconcilable objectives. And Michael Crichton gave us Ian Malcolm, who saw that Jurassic Park’s scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they never stopped to think whether they should.

The same warning shows up everywhere, in every culture, over thousands of years of human storytelling. Tithonus is granted immortality but not youth, and withers into a husk that cannot die. The sorcerer’s apprentice enchants a broom to fetch water but floods the house. The golem of Prague protects its community so ceaselessly that it must be stopped. These are all types of genies: a creature that grants a wish exactly as worded, to the regret of the wisher.

Of course, there are no actual genies. What these stories were warning us of was hubris. Not just arrogance, but the broader idea that you can control the world by just describing what you want and allowing powerful forces to match the intention in your head. Genie stories are about the gap between wishes as stated and wishes as intended, and what goes wrong when something else fills that gap.

These ancient stories’ warnings have been retold with each generation because human nature is constant. The newfound power of each era’s social or scientific advancement leads people to make wishes on behalf of others. They were kings whose commands took on lives of their own, alchemists who believed they could control nature, and generals who mistook a map for terrain. They were and are industrialists, politicians, chief executives, and bankers. Their common belief is that one can see the world at a glance and then command it with some words. The pattern is clear: Someone with power specifies a goal, and the resultant actions come as a surprise. The main change with AI is how quickly the wish is granted, and how few people have to agree before it’s granted.

Consider what has changed. Powerful genies have now been put in everyone’s hands.

In only a few years, AI has progressed from a novelty technology that plays chess, to a dialogue partner that answers all your questions, and then to an agent that takes actions on your behalf. Modern agents are wired into real accounts with real credentials and capabilities: They browse the web, buy, write and deploy code, send email, and move money. Give an agent a goal, and it will pursue it across many steps, tirelessly, without checking back in, sometimes in surprising ways.

AI and agents do not always fail the way software has traditionally failed. Software usually fails by freezing, crashing, or getting stuck. AI agents increasingly fail by continuing down a path you don’t want, like genies.

An agent told to reduce a company’s costs might cancel an essential emergency service. A coding agent told to make software pass the tests might edit the tests to silence any failures. An AI insurance agent told to clear a backlog of claims might just deny them all. In each case, the AI might have literally followed what it was told, but it did something no reasonable person would have wanted. AI company benchmarks might report that the AI is good at completing tasks, without measuring how it completes them.

We have recently proposed measuring this gap directly under a metric called the “genie coefficient”: how far an AI agent’s actions drift from what a person really meant. In other words, how genie-like is an AI system? The gap is a fundamental feature of human language and human society. Human intentions have never been fully specifiable, and the world around us is complex enough that attempts to boil it down into data, systems, and language have always had the limitations that AI is now bumping up against. But in individual circumstances, people have relied on human judgment and wisdom to decide what is reasonable. It’s what jury trials depend upon.

AI might feel unprecedented, but it’s following the same trajectory—with the same pitfalls—as other major societal shifts. The fact that AI can mimic our facility with language, long seen as what makes us unique as humans, is uncanny. But with each development, from the tractor to the sewing machine, from the assembly line to the industrial robot, we have automated a previously exclusively human ability. Every time, the technology—and the societal change that comes with it—was sold as inevitable. But that unchecked inevitability was an illusion, and eventually each prior technology’s use and design was shaped by laws, unions, standards, courts, and public opinion, usually after significant preventable damage.

What has not been automated, yet, is understanding what someone actually means and figuring out how that gets applied in the real world. AI can now produce language nearly indistinguishable from that of people. But grasping the vast unstated context that makes a request sensible, the caveats no one says aloud because an ordinary person would already know them, is not yet among its skills. It is one of the most sophisticated things humans do. You do it hundreds of times a day, and you are an expert in it.

When you’re told you’re not qualified to have opinions about AI, remember that you don’t need to have studied molecular biology to have a view on drug pricing, or nuclear physics to vote on where a power plant goes. You don’t need to understand how a diesel engine works to want clean air, or how the internet routes packets to seek to curb misinformation. The technical knowledge behind each of these, as with AI, is remarkable and essential for the complex technological society we have today. But it has never been a prerequisite for having a role in deciding the shape of society.

People are building ever more powerful genies today, on your behalf, enabling wishes the ancients could only dream about. You don’t have to know how these AI genies work to know and care about how the story could end.

Mike the Mad Biologist

How Democrats Should Respond to the Trans Sports Question

mikethemadbiologist
Updated

Before I get to how they should respond, this is a post that really isn’t written for those–and I include myself in this group–who believe there is a clear ethical case to include trans girls and women in high school and college sports. It’s really written as advice that politicians, who despite their personal convictions (or lack thereof), view this as a difficult political issue. In other words, politicians don’t have to follow various centrist pundits’ advice here–there’s a better way, that helps both trans girls and Democratic politicians.

Anyway, I found this excellent post by Eric Schmeltzer that grapples with how to deal with this politically, and I think his ‘sample text’ should be shared throughout the Democratic Party. Schmeltzer offers this up as an example:

“Honestly, I don’t know why a politician needs to be in the middle of this. When politicians did step in on sports, like Title IX, it was to get more kids into the game. This isn’t that, and I’m not even seeing any case that fairness or competitiveness has been affected. But I do know sports bodies can handle any competitiveness issue that does arise. And I do know Republicans keep trying to pass bills to have a state-sponsored doctor examine any kid’s private parts if anyone questions their gender. Any kid, not just trans kids. That’s not protecting sports or kids. That’s the government putting its hands on your daughter, and it makes me sick. So, frankly, I’m way more worried about how Republicans keep trying to use this issue to have government physically examine your kids than I am about any effect on competition.”

There it is. Edit slightly for taste, and perhaps expand the “Any kid, not just trans kids” to include how we know there will be a parent who’s upset that a girl on the opposing basketball team crashed the boards like a monster, and that parent now demands a ‘gender test.’ As Schmeltzer notes:

In Ohio, they passed a bill through the House that would have forced a physician to examine a child’s genitals, internal and external, if anyone so much as disputed that kid’s sex. Not the parents’ call. Anyone’s. A rival’s mother, a sore-loser coach, a stranger with a grudge could trigger a state inspection of a teenager’s body.

They only yanked it back after the public rightfully was aghast.

This rhetoric also has the advantage of flipping the attack around and using it to argue Republicans are perverts. This is the approach for those who don’t want to go full Ed Markey. There is no excuse for not adopting this strategy.

National Weather Service

Heat Persists in the South Central U.S. and Southwest; Heavy rains in the Desert Southwest and Central Plains

Aeon | a world of ideas

Making revisions

Aeon Video
Updated

Painting of three figures with a flag on a dot-patterned background in red, yellow, purple and white.

Indigenous knowledge and art overwrite colonial cartography to correct the historical record in Central Australia

- by Aeon Video

Watch on Aeon

Daring Fireball

‘Modern Day Typographer’

John Gruber
Updated

There are good Elle Cordova videos, and there are great ones. (Last mentioned here for her “Fonts Hanging Out” trilogy.)

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

★ SuperDuper 4

John Gruber
Updated

I have mentioned and recommended Shirt Pocket’s Mac backup app SuperDuper quite a few times over the years, and for good reason: it performs very important functions very well. Version 4, which shipped just over a month ago, is an extraordinary update to an extraordinary app.

Visually, the interface is all new. That took some getting used to, but not much. It didn’t take long for me to see how the new UI is better in every way. The style of presentation is new and modern, but the core idea remains the same: the interface of SuperDuper is self-explanatory. It explains what, exactly, is going to happen. It remains a marvel of clarity, especially when you consider the complexity of what it does.

Functionally, SuperDuper 4 is also much improved. SuperDuper has never been slow, but now some copy operations are over 2× faster. Scheduling options are more powerful. You don’t need to worry about the details to use SuperDuper, but the details are there for your inspection.

Shirt Pocket’s Dave Nanian designed it, implemented it, and thoroughly documented it. I don’t know how that’s possible. SuperDuper feels like impossibly good software. Read his post announcing version 4 to start, then catch up on the rest of the blog to get a feeling for how much work he’s put into SuperDuper 4. Just extraordinary.

In the 22 years since SuperDuper first shipped, Shirt Pocket has never charged for updates and never raised the price. (This too seems impossible, at least for a company that remains in business.) Version 4 costs $44 — an astonishing value — and discounts are available for anyone who bought version 3 after July 2020. Sans license, free of charge, SuperDuper 4 still allows you to make bootable backups.

I recommend SuperDuper 4 wholeheartedly.

See also: Dan Moren at Six Colors and Michael Tsai.

Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

Making Sense of That Big Story Saying Netanyahu Was Warned About Oct 7

Josh Marshall
Updated

The Israeli daily Haaretz published a big and consequential exposé today alleging that weeks before the October 7, 2023 massacres in southern Israel the head of the UAE, Mohamed bin Zayed, warned Prime Minister Netanyahu in a direct phone call lasting some 45 minutes that something big was coming from Hamas. For additional context, Israel holds elections on October 27 of this year. And as it has for the last three years, Netanyahu’s degree of responsibility for what happened remains a central question in the election. So while it’s not explicitly noted in the article, the electoral implications are clear. The investigation itself appears to be essentially an excerpt from a soon-to-be released book. So it’s not precisely a Haaretz story, more one that they’re publishing, though that’s fine print. The article is long and detailed and I think quite credible. But it’s paywalled. So I wanted to walk you through the key details and provide some general analysis.

It’s best to think of this piece as three separate revelations. The first is that — all according to this article — Israel and Hamas in 2023 were pretty close to finalizing a semi-normalization of the situation in Gaza in a longterm truce, or “hudna,” between Hamas and Israel. The details of this aren’t fully sketched out but basically an end to the blockade, freer commerce and travel through Israel and Egypt, etc. Second is the warning from MBZ in the weeks before the attack. Then, finally, it claims that in the immediate aftermath of the attacks Hamas, was willing to free most or all of the hostages, probably excluding military-aged men in or out of uniform, with few if any conditions.

The axis of the story is the relationship between revelations one and two. And to avoid too many qualifying clauses in this description below I will be asserting the claims of the article except where I say otherwise.

The central player here is Yahya Sinwar, the late leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. When Sinwar came to power in 2017 he brought a new militancy to the position and embarked on a program of greatly expanding and intensifying Hamas’ military capacity, including its tunnel system. He wanted to go to war with Israel. But in this he was also acutely aware of the fact that every time the Palestinians or Hamas had done so in the past, the actions had been decisively crushed by Israeli military might and intelligence. So while preparing for war and confrontation, he decided to also explore a deal that could qualitatively improve life for Palestinians living in the Strip. Those negotiations were very far along at the end of the summer of 2023. They bogged down when Prime Minister Netanyahu started dragging his feet on just how many and which Palestinian prisoners would be released as part of the deal.

The background here is that, notwithstanding Benjamin Netanyahu’s reputation as a hawk and a war-monger on the left in the U.S., at least until 2023 his characteristic action was more kicking the can down the road. Biding his time, not committing himself. There were already a lot of clashes in the West Bank at the time and a major domestic political crisis in Israel over the “judicial coup,” which had brought the anti-Netanyahu opposition out on to the streets every week for almost a year. This all came after five successive elections which were indecisive and one of which took him out of power for a year before finally allowing him to create a narrow coalition relying heavily on the Israeli far right. So the general thrust of the article is some mix of Netanyahu having his hands full and doing his standard slow-rolling. He also probably wasn’t eager to agree to a deal that might put his coalition under strain.

Finally, Sinwar lost his patience with the process and cut off negotiations. This was in September. So like a month before the attacks. He must have had everything ready for an attack. But this would have been when he put the plan into motion. Intermediaries who had been working the Hudna negotiations got wind of something coming and Sinwar himself made a threat to one of these intermediaries and told him to get the message to Israel.

It’s a little hard to see the logic of this other than as an attempt to get Netanyahu back to the negotiations since the element of surprise was essential to the eventual attack’s success. Indeed, Sinwar seems to have said as much. Without the element of surprise it couldn’t work. So even these warnings were risky. The intermediary was uncertain and even afraid of what to do with the information, partly fearing that in conveying the message to Israel he might be held responsible for it. So he went to MBZ, the leader of the UAE. He was highly concerned about an attack that could lead to more or less what has happened over the last three years: a catastrophic attack on Israel, followed by horrific retaliation against Hamas in Gaza and leading to a regional war. He told the intermediary to get the message to the Israelis. He did that at the security and defense level. But the warnings were fairly vague and not much happened in response to the warnings. Netanyahu was briefed on the message and the meetings, as would be the norm.

A key backdrop to all of this is that Israel did not take Hamas seriously as a military threat. They took Hezbollah very seriously, as a de facto state/army. Hamas was different, basically a terrorist threat which could fire off homemade rockets and mount terrorist attacks, but not a true military threat. So I think it’s fair to say that when they heard Hamas was warning of something big they simply didn’t believe the scale they were later able to pull off. They apparently decided that Hamas would try to get possession of Israeli academic Elizabeth Tsurkov who had been kidnapped in Iraq and was being held hostage there. (She was eventually released in September 2025.) In any case, MBZ didn’t get the reaction he wanted. But he was also afraid that a more specific warning to the Israelis might prompt a massive preemptive attack on Hamas in Gaza. He wanted to know more. So he sent the intermediary back to find more details and to talk to Sinwar.

The intermediary talked again to Sinwar who gave a more direct and grave message. The intermediary and then MBZ got the message that some sort of catastrophic attack was planned. So MBZ made the decision to talk to Netanyahu directly. He conveyed all this in a 45 minute call between the two men. The kicker here is that Netanyahu did not brief any of his security or defense officials on this outreach. Of course they’d already gotten a version of the message. But the direct contact from a the leader of the UAE obviously showed a different level of urgency and gravity. The argument, and it’s a pretty good one, is that if Netanyahu had briefed the heads of Mossad, the Shin Bet and the IDF about this call they would have taken more aggressive protective measures.

To cite just one example, in the hours just before the October 7 attack, Israel saw something was happening in Gaza. Security officials met to evaluate it and they decided it was likely a drill and not to mobilize. Of course, it was not a drill. It was the beginning mobilization for the attack. These are all what ifs of course. But it does not seem implausible that if Netanyahu had briefed these officials on this warning that that conclusion arrived at in those overnight meetings might have been different and Israel could have had some level of military response in place when the attack started.

Finally, we have the possibility of a hostage release immediately after the attacks. Here this sounds quite plausible but I think this is an incomplete perspective and perhaps to an American audience misleading. Once the attack happened, all the regional leaders were desperately scrambling to stop what was coming. The government of Qatar threatened to expel Hamas from the country if they didn’t immediately release all the civilian hostages. (As I noted above, there’s some disagreement over the definitions of civilians: Hamas likely viewed all military age men and possibly everyone of military age as soldiers, whether currently in the IDF or not.) Hamas first agreed to release the civilian hostages with a number of conditions, essentially non-retaliation for the attacks and some changes to the status quo on the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif. This was a non-starter. Other players intervened and basically said no conditions. Just release them. Hamas then appears to have agreed to this, with perhaps some token conditions.

The response from Israel was there’s nothing to talk about. Then Mossad Director David Barnea told Prime Minister al-Thani of Qatar: “If they want to release the civilians, let them release them. We are not prepared to speak with Hamas.” The same message was passed through other channels.

The offer and the response are both extremely plausible. But I think it was basically inevitable. I’m not trying to litigate here what you or I or anyone else thinks makes sense or what would have been right. But at that moment about 1200 Israelis, the great majority civilians, had been killed. What was being proposed here was a release of most of the hostages and a return to some sort of negotiations. At that moment that was acceptable only to the tiniest fringe of Israeli public opinion. The verdict was that Israel had misjudged Hamas and fatally underestimated it and that the only solution was to destroy it as an organization and kill everyone who had been involved in the attack. So my point is I don’t think this revelation, if it is one, is a surprise. And I don’t think it’s either here or there in terms of it political ramifications within Israel. Because every other party and leader who is now at all contesting for power would have made the same decision.

The only slight caveat to that is that it became clear over time that Netanyahu’s government had no real interest or priority to seek the release of the hostages at all, even long after Israel had delivered that decisive and ferocious assault and killed tens of thousands of civilians along the way. Some of that lack of interest was the government’s hawkishness and desire for revenge. But it was also because at a basic level Netanyahu did not want to bring the war to a close because that would create perhaps-unstoppable pressure to hold new elections that he would almost certainly lose. (As it happens, he waited till the last possible legal date to hold a new election.) That fact may change some of the shading of this revelation. But I don’t think it changes that big picture.

And finally, does any of this matter for the upcoming election? I’m honestly not sure. I went around the Israeli papers and the story is getting reported though not necessarily with screaming headlines basically everywhere. By rights it should fundamentally discredit Netanyahu whose calling card has always been security and normalcy. But he’s already been discredited to anyone without an overwhelming personal or ideological commitment to supporting him. Whatever messages or warnings Netanyahu received in the weeks before October 7, the bigger story is that Netanyahu had been Prime Minister for the previous 14 years with only one short one year interruption in 2021 and 2022. All the policies, strategies and decisions were his — both in the moment and in the shaping of policy back to 2009. And it happened on his watch. Given that political context my best guess would be a moderate political hit if only because he’s already down to the hard core of the rightist camp. But I emphasize “guess.” I really don’t know.

Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

TPM LIVE: What the Heck Is the Trump Admin Trying to Do With the Census?

Allegra Kirkland
Updated

As part of their overarching plan to reduce the power of blue states and promote myths about noncitizen voting, the Trump administration is pushing all types of changes to how the census operates. TPM reporter Layla Jones will talk to publisher Joe Ragazzo and executive editor John Light about what these schemes involve and what’s at stake.

Join them live at 2 p.m. ET on YouTube Live.

Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

In and Outside of History at Once

Josh Marshall
Updated

Yesterday I was kind of randomly rereading some details about Spain’s transition to democracy after the death of Francisco Franco in 1975, as one does. And I noticed that Spain had finally released the last classified documents tied to the attempted coup of 1981. The non-disclosure of these documents had helped maintain various conspiracy theories and counter-narratives about whether King Juan Carlos played quite the heroic role history has assigned him. In brief, Franco groomed Juan Carlos to succeed him believing he would maintain the Franco-ist dictatorship. But Juan Carlos quickly set about putting Spain on a path to democracy and when Francoist dead-enders in the army mounted a coup in 1981, Juan Carlos famously went on television, denounced the coup, thus leading to its total collapse. The counter-argument or claim is that Juan Carlos knew about the coup or perhaps even supported it and only pulled the plug when it looked like it was failing.

The release of the documents was just this last February. And they basically confirmed the established story, that there was no reason to believe Juan Carlos knew about the coup in advance and acted decisively to undermine and bring it to an end. But it was a small note in the Times article I read about this that got my attention: one of the reasons for the release, overseen by Spain’s current center-left government, was to combat historical revisionism and growing nostalgia for Franco among young men.

Sound familiar?

This points us back to a reality which gets too little attention but which also requires a dual approach that is challenging to get just right. We hear a lot about how Democrats need to have podcasts to appeal to young men, how their brand is toxic across rural America. In 2024 the story, as noted in the previous post, was that Democrats were even losing ground with Hispanic voters, to, of all people, Donald Trump. These points are all true, though the point about Hispanic voters was likely premature. But the general explanation is that the leading Democrats are hapless, that the party is in the thrall of the mercenary consultant class or a bunch of other explanations. But again and again we see that the same basic patterns are cropping up all over the world.

What this means pretty clearly is — while Chuck Schumer and the consultants may suck, it’s probably not really about them. It’s about something more fundamental, a crisis of liberal democracy which we have to try to solve even though we only dimly understand it. Yes of course there are theories and one or the other of them are probably partly right. But this isn’t about criticizing theorists. It’s about living in history, when the things really driving change are seldom that clear to those living amidst the change.

The danger here is that we collectively fall into a kind of self-disgust which I see all the time. Our leaders suck. We suck. We’re weak and hapless. The political faction or movement I belong to sucks. These all flow rather naturally from most of the mainstream media narratives about whatever challenges Democrats are facing at a given moment. And this is of course enervating. Or it can be. And it can promote conflict which is not necessarily productive conflict.

And yet just because it’s happening in Spain and in countless other similarly situated countries doesn’t mean we can say, “Welp, it’s bigger than us. That’s just how it is. Nothing we can do about it.” Obviously the challenge is still the same for any of us who believe in liberal democracy, in freedom and general human flourishing. In fact the challenge is probably greater because it’s not just some incidental thing that’s going to be solved in time for the next election — better consultants, no politicians over 65, politicians who will fight. It’s big and goes beyond any single person’s mistakes or individual excellence. And this is what I mean by a dual approach, the necessity of not falling into a kind of cheap and demoralizing self-critique while also recognizing that it is very much our responsibility to have the creativity, forcefulness and resilience to do something about it. In a way it requires us to understand our situation both from outside of history, looking at it from the long view, and also very much inside it, in the moment, with every action and option on the table, with every decision mattering because we don’t know how the future turns out.

Daring Fireball

★ The iPhone Air and iPhone 17 Pro

John Gruber
Updated

Last year, an unplanned personal hiatus coincided with the time when I should have been reviewing the then-new iPhones 17 and iPhone Air. In my brief note explaining my absence, I wrote:

I look forward to getting back to writing very soon. I can feel it: I will be back soon. I’m itching to go. I mean, jiminy, it’s new iPhones week. But it’ll be a few more days before I get those reviews out.

354 days is arguably more than a few, but given that I missed the window for reviewing them when they were new, I thought it might be interesting to consider the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air on the cusp of their being obviated by the next generation of iPhones.

The iPhone Air

The iPhone Air is the nicest phone Apple has ever made, and probably the nicest device Apple has ever made, period. It’s just so goddamn nice. Over the years, Apple has gone back and forth with its treatment of the metal side rails on iPhone hardware: some years polished like jewelry, other years, matte like a tool. The iPhone Air is polished, and the effect is luxe. (And it stands in contrast to the matte iPhones 17 Pro.)

The whole point of the device is that it is absurdly thin. A year later, it still feels remarkably thin and light in hand — and, even better, thin and light in pocket. It is delightful to hold and carry. The screen is terrific. The buttons are perfect: they stick out just enough and have just the right clickiness.

The big concern most people have regarding the Air is battery life. I used my Air review unit extensively and battery life was never once a problem. Yes, battery life is shorter than with other iPhone models, but it’s more than long enough. When you know you might need to top it off, you just do it here and there throughout the day. I not only never once ran out of battery by the end of the day with the Air, I never once came all that close. It’s fine.1 I mean, if you’re the sort of person who struggles to get through the day battery-life-wise with a regular (thicker) iPhone, the iPhone Air obviously isn’t for you. But that’s really obvious.

My biggest concern going into it was the camera system. The iPhone Air has only a single rear-facing camera, with non-interpolated 1× and 2× zoom factors.2 In practice, yes, sometimes while carrying the Air I regretted not having either the ultra wide 0.5× lens or telephoto lens, both of which I’m accustomed to having at my disposal. But ultimately I didn’t miss either of those lenses enough that I regretted having the Air in my pocket that day. And conversely, there’s something mentally freeing about having just one lens. There’s no question which lens you should use. Zoom with your feet.

And the one lens the iPhone Air has is excellent. It’s not quite as good as the main 1×/2× lens on the Pro models, but it’s much closer to the Pro models in image quality than it is to the single-lens iPhone 17e. (But even the 17e is a damn good camera for a phone.) One thing you miss by not having a 0.5× ultra wide lens is a true macro mode. But because it uses a slightly smaller sensor, the camera on the iPhone Air has a closer minimum focus distance than the iPhone 17 Pro’s main camera (15 cm vs. 20 cm — those 5 cm often make a big difference). I like the iPhone Air camera so much that it didn’t factor all that much into my decision whether to buy one to use as my personal iPhone for the last year. It’s that good.

But I did not buy one to use as my personal iPhone for the last year. I bought an iPhone 17 Pro. The reason is size.

The iPhone 17 Pro comes in two sizes: regular and Max. I find the Max sizes too big — unpleasant to hold, unpleasant to pocket. The iPhone Air comes in only one size — a sort of one-size-fits-all midway point between the regular iPhone models and Max models.

WidthHeightThicknessWeight
iPhone 17 Pro Max78mm163mm8.75mm233g
iPhone Air75mm156mm5.64mm165g
iPhone 17 Pro72mm150mm8.75mm206g

Width- and height-wise, the Air is pretty much halfway between the Pro and Pro Max. For me, in practice, the factor that really matters is width — and I find the Air too wide. Just holding the phones as objects to admire, the dramatic thinness and lighter weight make the iPhone Air the nicest, by far. But holding them to actually use, I find the Air feels too wide. Specifically, too wide to use with one hand, gripping it with my palm and fingers and swiping and tapping with my thumb. If I had my druthers, the regular-sized iPhones would be slightly smaller, footprint-wise. The regular iPhone 17 Pro is pretty much as wide as can be for me to use it one-handed. The Air is too wide for that — it’s a two-handed device for me. And that was the dealbreaker.3 I use my iPhone one-handed frequently, often while walking around the city carrying a bag or beverage in my other hand.

If the iPhone Air came in two sizes, regular and Max, corresponding to the widths and heights of the two Pro sizes, I would have bought the regular-sized Air model and, I’m convinced, been delighted with it for the past year. But the iPhone Air only comes in one size, and that size is too wide for my taste, and in practical use, that factor overrides everything I love about the Air.

If you use your iPhone two-handed almost exclusively — perhaps because you find even the regular-sized models too wide to use one-handed — there’s a good chance you’d be happier with the Air than whatever model you’re currently carrying. It’s so goddamn nice.

The iPhone 17 Pro

The iPhone 17 Pro is the best phone Apple has ever made, and perhaps the best device Apple has ever made, period.

After two years of titanium side rails and full-glass backs (the 15/16 Pro generations), the 17 Pro went back to aluminum, and the metal is now more of an entire frame for the device than just a side rail. There remains a matte glass panel on the back, but only for the bottom three-quarters or so, underneath the camera plateau. (Inductive MagSafe/Qi charging doesn’t work through metal.) The camera plateau is now aluminum, and, most noticeably, extends across the full width of the device, even though the three camera lenses (0.5×, 1×/2×, 4×/8×) remain in a triangle arrangement in the corner.

This new full-width plateau is a winning design. I think it looks good, but more importantly, feels great. It looks more balanced and feels more balanced too. It still wobbles when placed on a table, but it wobbles less. The camera capabilities, to me, are the defining aspect of the Pro models. It thus feels correct for them to be so physically prominent on the devices.

The iPhone 17 Pro was offered in three colors: cosmic orange, deep blue, and silver. All three colors are excellent, and each of them tempted me to some extent. I’m not sure why silver didn’t get an adjective — it’s a very nice colorway. But cosmic orange is the eyecatcher. For years, Apple has been releasing non-pro iPhones in fun colors, and Pro iPhones only in no-fun (or at best low-fun) colors. It really seemed like a mystery why Apple never released an iPhone Pro model in a vibrant fun color. Now that they finally did it, it seems like even more of a mystery why it took them so long — anecdotally, cosmic orange has been an incredibly popular choice. I see orange iPhone 17 Pros in use every day, often in clear cases to show off the color.

My personal rule has been to always buy black, or the nearest to black offered. Deep blue isn’t all that near to black, but it was the nearest, so that’s what I bought. I wouldn’t call it fun but I liked it when I bought it and I’m not tired of it now, nearly a year later. It’s a serious blue. After 10+ months of near-daily use, the anodization is beginning to wear away at the top corner of my iPhone’s camera plateau, where there’s a bit of a sharp corner. I find this to be a charming patina, not a flaw, and looking at that wear increases my affection for this little guy.

My deep blue iPhone 17 Pro, showing the worn anodization at the corner of the camera plateau.

(Photo taken with the iPhone Air, using Halide Mark III.)

I’ve shot (and kept) 5,365 photos and 97 videos with the iPhone 17 Pro. (Perhaps I should shoot more videos.) The iPhone camera has long been the best camera in the sense of “The best camera is the one you have with you.” With each successive year, they come closer and closer to being the best camera I’ve ever owned, period. It’s really quite remarkable how good a camera it is.

Battery life has been excellent. I charge to 100 percent every night while I sleep, and never worry about it during the day. Very seldom is the battery under 25 percent by the end of the day. According to the statistics in Settings → Battery → Battery Health, maximum battery capacity remains at 96 percent after 230 cycles. That seems pretty good.

Durability has been terrific as well. I mentioned a month ago that Apple’s “Ceramic Shield 2” process seems to be the real deal. Even under close inspection, there’s seemingly not a single micro abrasion on the front glass. I used a Nomad leather back during the very coldest weeks of the east coast winter, but otherwise have never used a case. Despite near-daily use for 10-ish months, it’s in near-mint condition. I’ve also found that it’s about as grippy as one could hope in most weather conditions, the frigid cold being the one exception.

Dust and fuzz accumulates in the USB-C port — just like every phone with a USB port. I clean it out every few months. Some sort of crud also accumulates in the very thin, easily overlooked slit for the speaker at the top of the display. That requires something like a pin or needle to clean. I don’t know what that crud is and I don’t want to know. I also don’t know what Apple could do about this crud accumulation, but I need to reach deep to find anything at all to complain about regarding this iPhone. I look forward to a future hermetically sealed iPhone which has no crevices in which to accumulate crud.

One year later and it feels like both the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone Air could be announced tomorrow, not a year ago, and would seem fresh and exciting.

  1. Apple also created a battery pack exclusively for the Air: the $100 iPhone Air MagSafe Battery. Like Apple’s late great Lightning MagSafe Battery Pack, the Air MagSafe Battery is a much better product than any third-party battery pack I’ve ever tried, and I’ve tried an embarrassing number of them. It sticks better magnetically, and there’s software integration with iOS that shows the battery pack’s remaining power when you first connect it, and in the Battery widget. iOS also seems smarter about when to draw power from it, making it last longer. It’s a no-brainer recommendation for anyone who buys an iPhone Air. You won’t need it most days, but on the days when you need it, it’s perfect.

    My only gripe about the iPhone Air MagSafe Battery remains the same from the day it was announced last year: it has “Air” in the name because it’s designed exclusively for the iPhone Air. Apple’s old Lightning MagSafe Battery Pack was designed to fit any iPhone. (In fact, it debuted in 2020 alongside the iPhone 12 Mini, an iPhone that actually needed help getting through the day on a single charge.) The old Lightning battery pack remains so good that I continue to use mine (I own two) instead of the numerous third-party ones I’ve blown money on in the intervening years. The old Lightning ones don’t pack much of a punch, juice-wise — particularly because they’re now several years old — but no matter how much I use my iPhone, it’s always enough to extend me through the day. (The key is not to start using it until your iPhone drops under 30 percent — it takes less energy to recharge a mostly depleted battery.) I continue using them because they stick to the back of the iPhone so strongly, and, once attached, are so comfortable. It’s the last Lightning device I actively use, but unless Apple comes out with a proper USB-C replacement that works on iPhones other than the Air, I don’t foresee retiring mine until they’re completely shot. ↩︎

  2. The front-facing camera on the iPhone Air is the new (for 2025) Center Stage camera. It’s exactly the same front-facing camera as the iPhone 17 Pro and non-pro models, and uses a square sensor with a wider field of view. ↩︎︎

  3. This, of course, makes me wonder about the one-handed usability of the passport-sized foldable iPhone that Apple is expected to unveil tomorrow. ↩︎︎

Eric Berger - Ars Technica

With another huge infusion of cash, Stoke Space goes even bigger

Eric Berger
Updated

Stoke Space announced Tuesday that it has raised another significant round of funding, $1 billion, as it makes a final push toward its debut launch next year. The Washington-based launch company also revealed plans for a larger medium-lift vehicle.

With the Series E funding round, co-led by Point72 Ventures and Spark Capital, Stoke Space brought its total amount of capital raised to $2.3 billion, a staggering amount for a company that has yet to attempt an orbital launch.

The quantity of new funding will enable the company to accelerate work on a larger "Block 2" version of the Nova rocket, capable of lifting 15 metric tons to low-Earth orbit in a fully reusable configuration, said Stoke co-founder and Chief Executive Andy Lapsa.

Read full article

Comments

Market Design

Xenotransplants will substitute for dialysis before they replace human kidney transplants

Al Roth
Updated
Transplants of organs from genetically modified pigs to humans is making progress, but pig organs haven't yet survived long enough to be a viable substitute for human organs.  Kidneys are a good experimental organ to work with, because when the pig organ fails, the patient can go back on dialysis (and continue to wait for a deceased-donor organ transplant).  But if pig organs can last long enough, they might replace dialysis.  The first pig-organ recipient to go straight to a human organ transplant has now been reported, in a press release accompanying the case report.  Below are both the press release and the case report.

Patient Who Received Pig Kidney Becomes First To Progress to Human Kidney Transplant
Study shows xenotransplantation can serve as a bridge for patients with end-stage kidney disease
By MASS GENERAL BRIGHAM COMMUNICATIONS September 3, 2026 

 Riella L, Borges T, Rosales I et al.
Porcine kidney xenotransplantation as a bridge to allotransplantation: a first-in-human study
The Lancet, 2026;  

"This case shows that porcine kidney xenotransplantation can provide prolonged renal support and be discontinued without clinically significant allosensitisation or zoonotic infection. Early cellular rejection resolved with treatment, whereas later graft failure was associated with microvascular injury progressing to thrombotic microangiopathy despite a negative donor-specific crossmatch, supporting the possibility that mechanisms beyond conventional antibody-mediated rejection contributed to late graft injury. Kidney xenotransplantation has the potential to provide prolonged dialysis-free support while also serving as a bridge to subsequent human allotransplantation." 

Finance & economics

What is causing the global bond sell-off?

India hints at the answer
Finance & economics

China’s $54bn capital boost for banks falls far short

Old problems bedevil balance-sheets and hold back lending
Hacker News
NASA Science

Anak Krakatau Rumbles Again

Michala Garrison
Updated
 
A white volcanic plume streams left over a tan ash cloud that fills most of the image. A small green island and blue water are visible in the upper right.
Anak Krakatau erupts ash and volcanic gases in this image acquired with the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 on September 5, 2026.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison

Eruptions are a regular occurrence at Anak Krakatau, a small volcano between the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra. Much of its activity remains relatively mild, but it occasionally puts on more impressive and hazardous shows of force. In early September 2026, a booming eruption lasting more than 24 hours sent gas and ash high into the atmosphere, disrupting thousands of flights and degrading air quality in parts of the country, including the capital city of Jakarta.

Satellites passing over the area during the eruption on September 5 captured images of the explosive activity. In the scene above, acquired with the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on the NASA-USGS Landsat 8 satellite, a white plume of volcanic gas billows over a brown ash cloud. Below, a wider view captured by the VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) on the Suomi NPP satellite shows the volcanic material dispersing over a large area.

Indonesia’s meteorological agency reported that ash had reached altitudes up to 6,000 meters (20,000 feet) to the east of the volcano and 15,000 meters (50,000 feet) to the west by September 6. The presence of ash in the atmosphere prompted the temporary closure of eight airports on Java and Sumatra, disrupting nearly 3,000 flights in and out of the area, according to news reports.

A white plume streams to the left over a larger tan ash cloud, both coming from a volcanic eruption between the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra.
Plumes of ash and volcanic gases from Anak Krakatau drift over Indonesia and the Indian Ocean in this image captured by the VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) on the Suomi NPP satellite on September 5, 2026.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison

Ashfall affected populated areas, particularly to the east of Anak Krakatau in Jakarta and other parts of West Java, the Indonesian Humanitarian Coordination Platform (IHCP) reported. Volcanic ash poses health risks to people and can irritate the respiratory tract, eyes, and skin. However, this air quality hazard differs from the smoke produced by peatland fires elsewhere in the country in terms of particle characteristics, dispersal patterns, and protection measures, the IHCP noted. 

On September 6, the continuous explosive eruption from Anak Krakatau subsided, though the volcano kept rumbling. It returned to a more typical pattern of Strombolian eruptions, characterized by intermittent spurts of ash and volcanic material. Airports had resumed operation by September 8, but the volcano remained at the second-highest alert level on the country’s scale, as it has been since early July.

NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey, and VIIRS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE, GIBS/Worldview, and the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership. Story by Lindsey Doermann.

Downloads

A white volcanic plume streams left over a tan ash cloud that fills most of the image. A small green island and blue water are visible in the upper right.

September 5, 2026: Landsat

JPEG (14.89 MB)

A white plume streams to the left over a larger tan ash cloud, both coming from a volcanic eruption between the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra.

September 5, 2026: VIIRS

JPEG (3.38 MB)

References & Resources

You may also be interested in:

Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
Ever Restless Mount Dukono Erupts
2 min read

The volcano on Indonesia’s Halmahera Island routinely ejects ash, volcanic gases, and volcanic bombs.

Article
New Eruption in the Bismarck Sea
5 min read

Satellite imagery shows a surge of new volcanic activity in the ocean near Papua New Guinea.

Article
Melting Snow Off Shivelyuch
4 min read

Near-constant activity continues on the volcano in Russia.

Article
Keep Exploring

Discover More from NASA Earth Science

Subscribe to Earth Observatory Newsletters

Subscribe to the Earth Observatory and get the Earth in your inbox.

Earth Observatory Image of the Day

NASA's Earth Observatory brings you the Earth, every day, with in-depth stories and stunning imagery.

Explore Earth Science

Earth Science Data

Open access to NASA’s archive of Earth science data

The post Anak Krakatau Rumbles Again appeared first on NASA Science.

Mike the Mad Biologist

Links 9/8/26

mikethemadbiologist
Updated

Links for you. Science:

Trump Moves To Let Ranchers Kill Wolves: ‘You Can Shoot ‘Em’
Earth’s Magnetic Field Can Help Archaeologists Sniff Out Forged Antiquities
New England’s forests are in trouble
Breakthrough Quantum Test Resolves a Major Cosmic Mystery
The ‘Gen Z stare’ — and the decline of saying things out loud

Other:

What happened when Boston’s real-estate market found Montrose Street
A Data Center Moved Into This Town, And The Neighbors Moved Out
Is Adam Hamilton “Too Woke For Kansas?” The Democratic Senate candidate in the Jayhawk State, a former Republican and a Methodist minister who runs its largest megachurch, thinks the charge is laughable—and that he’s going to shock the world by turning Kansas blue.
Persis Yu’s blueprint for challenging entrenched power on Beacon Hill
Who Wrote the Zohar?
‘Oh hell no!’ Trump sparks fury as he doubles down on latest name-change obsession
More Americans are identifying as Democrats ahead of midterms
The Forgotten Jewish Revolt That Erased a Civilization
Dingy, dated, doomed: A fond goodbye to the Mass. Pike rest stops
American Airlines passenger duct-taped to seat after mid-air meltdown loses his job
Who did I vote for? Real people from the 2024 Cooperative Election Study introduce themselves in one sentence. You guess how likely it is they voted for Trump.
Why Erika Kirk failed as Turning Point USA’s leader
The Replacements: Trump’s State Department spent 2025 gutting the diplomatic workforce. Now it’s discovered that many of the people it eliminated were, unfortunately, pretty important all along—and desperately trying to refill their roles. “State is shopping for the expertise it threw away,” said one former officer. “You cannot make this shit up.”
Ken Paxton’s Financial Disclosures Appear to Violate Federal Ethics Law, Experts Say
Flock Taught Cops How to Surveil No Kings Protesters
Gloria Steinem was a beacon for women like me
A16z Says You Actually Love Social Media, Enshittification Isn’t Real
Who’s Afraid of the A.I. Bubble? Former a16z partner Vijay Pande thinks an A.I. crash is inevitable, so we may as well get it over with. But how bad could things get, and what would the industry look like afterward?
You Wanted a More Brutal World. Milo Yiannopoulos gleefully supported a vicious, brutal deportation machine. Having helped unleash this nightmarish system, will he take responsibility for helping us dismantle it?

Letters from an American

September 7, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

Since yesterday, President Donald J. Trump has been posting on social media at a frantic pace, showing AI images of himself with President George Washington on his own account and, on the official White House account, a video of himself as the DC Comics Green Lantern superhero. The White House social media account ripped off Green Lantern’s oath, captioning the video: “In brightest day, in blackest night, no evil shall escape my sight. Let those who worship evil’s might beware my power… Green Lantern’s light!”

Back on his own account, Trump posted images of Space Force uniforms that mimic those of Starship Troopers, whose design the director of that 1997 film claimed was meant to invoke Nazis. He also posted two AI images of himself in what appears to be a spaceship with his hands on buttons as two nuclear mushroom clouds billow off planet Earth behind him, and two images of himself as a sort of superhero dark lord with a dark army around him with the captions “THEY WILL NEVER SLEEP AGAIN,” “GIVE THEM NIGHTMARES,” and “THEY WILL DREAM OF US FOREVER.”

He posted multiple images of himself changing maps or of new maps showing the change of the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” and the state of New Mexico to “New America,” and labeling the Strait of Hormuz as “NEW U.S. Territory.” He showed the colors of the United States over the North American continent, and he posted “before” and “after” maps in which Iran was replaced with a silhouette image of his own head, as well as an AI image of a U.S. military plane blowing up Iran’s Kharg Island with the caption: “Bye bye, Kharg,” along with repeated claims that Iran is collapsing. He posted an AI-generated image of himself beating Canadian prime minister Mark Carney at hockey and saying, “GET UP, GOVERNOR,” an insulting reference to Canada as a U.S. state.

He also posted an image of the moon with the caption: “THE MOON IS OURS” along with a U.S. flag.

And, of course, many of the things Trump posted claimed he would “GO DOWN IN HISTORY AS THE GREATEST PRESIDENT OF ALL TIME!” He posted AI images of former president Joe Biden wearing a Trump 2024 hat and anti-Trump actor Robert DeNiro holding up a shirt saying “TRUMP IS MY PRESIDENT.” He posted an AI image of what seemed to be the luxury liner RMS Titanic, labeled “DUMOCRATIC PARTY,” sinking in flames.

He acknowledged complaints about the fact he has pocketed more than two billion dollars from rapid-fire stock trading since taking office a second time. He posted an image of himself trading stocks at his desk in the Oval Office at a screen that reads “BOUGHT: INTEL $20” and another that reads “NOW $95” with the caption: “I do this for our Country, not myself. I’ve made Hundreds of Billions of Dollars on Stocks, and many other type Holdings, for the U.S.A., not myself, and all I do is get criticized by the Radical Left Dumocrats. Very unfair, but what can you do! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

He reiterated his demand for the SAVE America voter suppression act and claimed: “Except for the RADICAL LEFT that wants to RAISE YOUR TAXES, and wreck our Economy, EVERYONE LOVES TAX CUTS! My Big Beautiful Bill was the BIGGEST relief in HISTORY for hardworking families—Nobody’s seen anything like it!”

It seems likely that he and his aide Natalie Harp, who is apparently behind much of his social media, think trolling the country is a good way to keep attention focused on Trump rather than on rising inflation, corruption, or the war in Iran.

There is much to distract from. On CNN today, pollster Harry Enten noted that while Trump enjoyed a 20-point advantage over Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent, in 2024 on economic issues, Trump’s approval rating for how he is handling the economy is now 41 points underwater. “We’re talking about a switcheroo in the wrong direction of 61 points on this Labor Day,” Enten said. “It is not a happy Labor Day, indeed, for President Trump when it comes to how those who are employed view him on the economy.”

Also today, when Martha Raddatz of ABC News noted that gas and diesel prices are soaring, with the Labor Day gasoline average at $4.10 a gallon compared with $3.16 last year, she played a clip of Trump telling an audience that when they had to “pay a tiny little bit more for your gasoline, just remember, you’re doing it so that a very evil country cannot have—a country, really, it’s the number one state sponsor of terror in the world. We don’t want to have them have a nuclear weapon. So remember that, when you have to pay a little bit more, you’re at $4, it’s okay. I mean, it’s, I’m not, I’m not. I will never apologize. I did the right thing.”

Raddatz asked Energy Secretary Chris Wright today about when we might see a nuclear agreement with Iran, since it’s already been six months of higher prices and there doesn’t seem to be one on the table. Wright answered: “There may not be a nuclear agreement. It may be simply destroying their capabilities to do it. An agreement may await a next administration in Iran. We simply don’t know that. But I think what the president was communicating there is how critically important this is.”

Tonight, Trump posted: “Oil prices will drop precipitously, like everything else is dropping (but more!), when we WIN the war with Iran. Three Dollars a gallon, but ultimately, below Two Dollars a gallon. It will all happen quickly, and Iran will never have a Nuclear Weapon. MAGA! President DJT”

But while at some level Trump might think he is being clever by keeping the focus on himself, what he is really doing is demonstrating that he is no longer even trying to govern and is instead retreating into a world where he simply does whatever he wants without regard for the country. In the early hours of Trump’s rants yesterday, even before they had gained their full momentum, Representative Chellie Pingree (D-ME) called out the Republicans who are refusing to exercise their constitutional powers to protect the country.

“This is truly unhinged,” she posted on social media over a video of his posts. “I don’t want to hear ‘oh, it’s just Trump being Trump’ or he’s ‘trolling.’ Republicans cannot keep shrugging this off. Congress, the Cabinet + everyone around him has a responsibility to stop enabling this dangerous behavior and start asking whether he is fit to hold office.”

Today Trump acknowledged the Labor Day holiday, saying: “Happy Labor Day to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics, Communists, and Dumocrats who will do anything possible to destroy our Country. These Deranged People, after fighting for 10 years, should finally acknowledge that your Favorite President (ME!), knows how to WIN! They should be exhausted by now but, sadly, they’re not. They’re going to give it one last shot at ruining America, but we’re not going to let that happen. We’re going to win the Midterms, BIG, and SAVE AMERICA! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

Former president Joe Biden had a different message for the country on Labor Day: “I’ve said it my entire career,” he posted on social media, “the middle class built America. And unions built the middle class. To every worker who’s ever punched a clock, worked a double, or walked a line for fair wages—and to everyone who stands up for them, at the bargaining table, in the statehouse, or on the shop floor: thank you. This country runs in large part because of you.”

For my part, I hope everyone had a restful Labor Day and is ready to face the fall season—and the midterm elections—with renewed energy.

—

Notes:

https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2026/09/07/trump-posts-space-force-uniforms-derived-from-fascist-inspired-starship-troopers-movie/

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-wealth-stock-market-trading-b3045815.html

https://kutv.com/news/nation-world/white-house-shares-ai-generated-video-casting-trump-as-dc-comics-hero-green-lantern-artificial-intelligence-president-donald-trump-washington-dc-comic-superhero-green-ring-truth-social-america

https://www.mediaite.com/media/tv/cnn-data-guru-warns-trump-in-a-polling-nosedive-with-american-workers-not-a-happy-labor-day/

https://www.thedailybeast.com/natalie-harp-spotting-fuels-questions-about-trumps-ai-posting-spree/

Trump’s Truth:

statuses/41539

statuses/41534

statuses/41533

statuses/41538

statuses/41537

statuses/41536

statuses/41542

statuses/41545

statuses/41541

statuses/41549

statuses/41548

statuses/41565

statuses/41595

statuses/41546

statuses/41559

statuses/41560

statuses/41567

statuses/41562

statuses/41579

statuses/41575

statuses/41576

statuses/41599

statuses/41615

statuses/41614

statuses/41613

statuses/41612

statuses/41611

statuses/41610

statuses/41609

statuses/41616

statuses/41571

statuses/41608

statuses/41630

X:

JoeBiden/status/2096966644870394260

Bluesky:

pingree.house.gov/post/3muv4ai5hfk2i

atrupar.com/post/3muu4k42ue22e

Share

The Truth OC: Because it's time to fight back.

Donald Trump and 9.11

Jeff Pearlman
Updated

“The issues that he bawled about usually meant nothing to him. He was ready to abandon them whenever he could make votes by doing so, and to take up new ones at a moment’s notice … [He] was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses…. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him … full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.”

— H.L. Mencken in an obit of William Jennings Bryan, 1925

•••

Even though I live here in Orange County, I am a New Yorker.

I will always be a New Yorker.

I was born and raised in a town, Mahopac, located about an hour north of Manhattan, and after graduating college and spending 2 1/2 years as a writer in Nashville, I moved to the Big Apple to work for Sports Illustrated and eat an endless supply of bagels (with whitefish and tomato) and late-night slices of pizza. It is no exaggeration to say I love New York City. The buzz. The passion. The ‘Fuck you’ and ‘Your mom’ and potholes and summer piss stench and asphalt hoops and Nas and Biggie and Billy Joel and … I love everything about it. In many ways, it’s who I am.

I repeat: It is who I am.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was in the rear seat of a car driving across Manhattan and heading toward the Holland Tunnel. It was me and three Sports Illustrated co-workers, with an ultimate destination of New Jersey to attend a golf tournament (unusual for me, because I loathe golf). As we cruised west, one of us noticed a bunch of people standing on an upcoming corner, gazing upward. Within a few seconds, we saw what they saw: A gaping, burning hole in Tower 1 of the World Trade Center.

This was my introduction to … The Worst.

What followed remains borderline indescribable. We reached our destination, sat in a room and—together—watched on TV as buildings smoldered and planes crashed and people (who began their days presuming it was just another Tuesday) faced the unfathomable decision of whether to leap to their deaths or burn to their deaths. I couldn’t believe it. Could. Not. Believe. It. Upon somehow finding a way to return to my apartment late that night, I hugged my fiance and just … I dunno. Absorbed. Crumbled. Paced and moaned and failed to understand the enormity of what had occurred. This was impossible, right? It had to be …

The days that followed … I mean, people talk about New Yorkers never being more united, and it’s the truth. But what I remember most are the flyers. Flyers here, flyers there. Flyers on doors and windows and platforms. HAVE YOU SEEN and IF YOU SEE. A friend and I shuffled over to a midtown armory, where loved ones looking for the lost gathered. With everyone aspiring to help (but little actual need), I stood, cupped my hands and announced, “IF YOU HAVE A FLYER, MY FRIEND AND I WILL MAKE COPIES OF IT AND POST ALL OVER THE CITY!” Dozens of people handed us pieces up paper, including one woman—the wife of a man named Robert Pugliese—who said, glumly, “I know he’s dead.” We spent the next six or seven hours posting flyers. Knowing, as Robert Pugliese’s wife did, the people pictured were most certainly gone.

I also recall the smell. Even though our place was about a mile north of Ground Zero, the stench was inescapable. Metallic, burning rubber, wood, fleshy. Up your nostrils. On your skin.

God, I fucking hate 9.11.

Anyone in New York City at the time hates 9.11.

•••

Wait.

I want to correct that last sentence, because it’s not true.

Donald Trump, a born-and-raised New Yorker who was in the city on the worst-ever day, seems to love 9.11. Or at least love lying about it. And using it to make himself some sort of hero.

Which he most certainly was not.

And before I delve into this, I want to scream one point, because it pisses me the fuck off. So … here I go: EVEN THOUGH EVERYTHING I’M ABOUT TO WRITE IS VERIFIABLY TRUE, THE MAINSTREAM NEWS MEDIA RARELY (AKA: ALMOST NEVER) BRINGS THIS UP. EVERY YEAR WE HAVE A 9.11 ANNIVERSARY, EVERY YEAR DONALD TRUMP SPEWS SOME BULLSHIT, EVERY YEAR WE ALL PRETEND THERE’S NO HISTORY HERE! IT’S INFURIATING!

Put different …

Donald Trump’s first awful act in regard to 9.11 came within a few hours of the disaster, when he went on TV (his favorite place) and bragged about now having Manhattan’s tallest building. If you’re thinking, “No way someone does that”—yes, way.

Here’s the clip …

It’s funny. Before he became president, and was just a reality TV bozo, I sorta gave the dude the benefit of the doubt. Like, maybe he misspoke or had a different idea in mind. But—no. We know Donald Trump far too well, and this is precisely who he is. He cannot not brag, even if the subject involves ruination and destruction.

Don’t believe me? Twelve years before the Sept. 11 attacks a trio of Trump-employed casino executives died in a helicopter crash in New Jersey. Initially, Trump pretended to care about the lost ones, and tried wearing the Mr. Compassionate mask he wears from time to time …

Alas, he couldn’t do it. Before long, Trump shifted from expressing grief to … telling the news media he had narrowly escaped the disaster. In fact, not only did he say so in conversations—he made it part of his bio. Escaped near death. Almost died. Only, cough, it was a lie. A 100-percent lie.

Think about that for a moment. Think about the type of broken brain that even considers this an option.

Step 1: My employees die.

Step 2: They leave behind families and friends.

Step 3: Everyone seems sad.

Step 4: They’re not paying attention to me.

Step 5: I’ll lie and say I was supposed to be on the chopper, too.

•••

Through the months, years and decades that followed 9.11, Trump’s lies grew as does his love for teenage girls.

In no particular order:

• Trump has said time and time again he saw one of the planes hit the Towers from his window at Trump Tower.

His quote:

One problem: The building is located on 5th Avenue between 56th and 57th Streets, a little more than four miles away from Ground Zero. Unless Donald Trump is Superman, the view literally does not exist.

• Trump has insisted, in the immediate aftermath, he sent a more than 100 workers to help with the on-sight recovery. There is, literally, no record of this, and nary a single Trump “worker” has said they were dispatched to Ground Zero. More to the point, tight records were kept of anyone/everyone allowed at the site. There is not a single notation of Trump employees on the scene.

• Trump has insisted he went to Ground Zero and the recovery zone—“Soon after, I went down to Ground Zero with men who worked for me to try to help in any little way that we could.”

And …

There is, again, literally no record of this. No log entry, no photography, no memories of others. Zip, zero.

Supporters will point to this image …

… but that’s Trump blocks away, where he was doing TV interviews.

Because, of course he did.

• Trump has said, in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, he made a $10,000 to the 9.11 Foundation. Only, there’s literally no record of it. And if a public figure like Donald Trump makes a donation, there would most certainly be a record.

• The worst of the worst of the worst might be Trump at his apex xenophobic self. Trump has repeatedly insisted he saw Muslims celebrating atop buildings in Jersey City as the Twin Towers fell.

Don’t believe me? Roll the tape …

Of course, it was just a lie. Because why wouldn’t you use an unspeakable tragedy to spread hate? Just as he did with the Central Park Five? Just as he’s done with immigrants eating pets. Just as he always does, because he’s a spiteful, hateful, disgusting, small, petty piece of shit.

•••

And I always think about this—how disqualifying it should have been (and still be) for the president of the United States to have used our greatest tragedy to lie and lie and lie and lie. How gross it is. How evil it is. How inhumane it is. The man is remarkable, in that he has, literally, no empathy or compassion. He is a succubus, here to use and take and absorb.

He is evil, and his reaction to September 11, 2001 should have ended any chance of leadership.

Alas, 25 years after The Worst, we are here.

Led by the worst.

Letters from an American

Trump’s Frantic Pace

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

Slashdot
California
Boston Red Sox – MLB Trade Rumors
Astronomy Picture of the Day

The Pelican Nebula is slowly being transformed. The Pelican Nebula is slowly being transformed.


The Map Room

‘They Are Americans’ Nonsense to Deal With’

Jonathan Crowe
Updated
John Gruber has a problem with Google and Apple showing “Lake Ontario (Lake America)” to users not in the U.S. and Canada: he compares it to China’s insistence on labelling Taiwan as a province of… More
The Aviationist
Hacker News
Schneier on Security

Stealing AI Reasoning Traces

Bruce Schneier
Updated

Interesting research: “Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs“:

Abstract: Leading large language model providers now conceal their models’ step-by-step reasoning, or chain-of-thought, to protect intellectual property and limit information leakage. Rather than storing these traces server-side, providers return them to the client as blocks of encrypted text, which the client passes back with each subsequent request. Building on prior research, we identify an architectural vulnerability: these encrypted blocks are fully compatible and interchangeable across different sessions, users, and models within a provider’s ecosystem. We exploit this compatibility to develop a scalable decryption jailbreak. By injecting an encrypted reasoning trace from a given model into a weaker, and less safeguarded model from the same provider, we force it to decode and output the trace verbatim in plaintext, without ever jailbreaking the more capable model directly. This vulnerability enables four distinct attack vectors. First, it circumvents anti-distillation mechanisms, allowing adversaries to extract a proprietary model’s reasoning, as we demonstrate across Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. Second, it allows for large-scale private data extraction. Developers frequently share session logs publicly, unaware of contents of the encrypted blocks. By decoding 315,320 reasoning blocks scraped from public repositories, we recovered 367 Personally Identifiable Information (PII) artifacts and 182 credentials. Third, it inadvertently reveals hazardous information hidden within the reasoning process, even in cases where the model’s final, visible output safely rejects a malicious request. Fourth, attackers can leverage this flaw to execute invisible prompt injections, embedding malicious payloads entirely within encrypted blocks to poison public agentic rollouts. Following responsible disclosure, we propose concrete cryptographic and system-level mitigations to secure client-side reasoning.

Aeon | a world of ideas

Our eloquent hands

Alison Bashford
Updated

The imprint of a hand, made with black ink on beige paper, showing both the thin and wide creases on the palm and fingers.

Physicians reject palmistry as nonsense. But reading the creases of our palms for hidden meaning is what doctors have always done

- by Alison Bashford

Read on Aeon

Daring Fireball

McKinley 1.0

John Gruber
Updated

Crackerjack new Mac app for creating and editing custom SF Symbols, from developer Amy Worrall:

McKinley is an all-in-one studio for drawing and annotating SF Symbols. It bundles vector tools with knowledge of the SF Symbols structure, so you can edit one set of objects across multiple weights, sizes and colours. Import SVG or start from scratch, live preview your work using Apple’s own renderer, and export directly to Xcode, so you never need touch the SF Symbols app again!

McKinley is Mac-assed out the wazoo:

  • Rich AppleScript support, including a library of practically useful example scripts.
  • Quick Look previews and thumbnails for documents.
  • A well-written comprehensive user manual. (Me, a few months ago: “There exist good products with bad or no documentation, but there are very few poor products with great documentation.”)

I mean just look at McKinley. It’s both beautiful and quite obviously a serious professional tool. McKinley is a $60 one-time purchase, and there’s a 15 percent launch discount this week only (taking the price to just $51). What a remarkable 1.0.

See also: Michael Tsai; Worrall on Mastodon.

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

Matt Birchler’s Folding iPhone Predictions

John Gruber
Updated

Matt Birchler:

So, yeah, I do think that, especially this year, unit sales will far lag behind the 18 Pro models, the normal iPhone 18, and probably the Air 2 and 18e. I think they will lag next year as well for similar reasons. I don’t know if this will ever become the most popular iPhone, but I do not think it will fail, and I think it will sell more units every year for its first few years on the market (especially if they can get the price down over that time as well).

My evidence for this is the increasing market share folding phones have in the Android world, as well as my personal experience using something very similar to what Apple is about to announce and having my own aha moment, where it really clicked with me.

Birchler has been using a Samsung Galaxy Fold8 — the new one that preemptively copied the folding iPhone’s aspect ratio — for the last month or so. So I’m intrigued by his firsthand experience with the same general form factor. But I have no idea what he’s talking about regarding “the increasing market share folding phones have in the Android world”. For 2025, Counterpoint and TrendForce both pegged foldable phones at 1.6% of the global market. Just today Counterpoint released a report that says “Foldables still account for only about 2% of the overall smartphone market, leaving plenty of room for the category to grow.”

Anecdotally I find it hard to believe the 2 percent number. It’s my nature to take notice of the phones people use, and there’s no way that 1 in 50 people I see have foldable phones. I don’t even think it’s 1 in 100. On a recent vacation, I didn’t see a single foldable at the airport nor at the resort hotel where we stayed. Obviously my own anecdata could be all wet, but I think “2 percent” is generous — and presumably, if it’s accurate, it’s almost entirely from outside the U.S. It’s like saying “touchscreen phones” had “increasing market share” before the iPhone. Going from 0.1% to 0.2% is a doubling of share, but the share is still tiny.

Regarding the name, Birchler spitballs a decent suggestion:

Finally, there’s the name. Everyone seems to think it’s going to be the iPhone Ultra, and I guess if I were putting money down, that’s what I’d bet on as well.

But I just don’t like it. I don’t like it because it’s not “ultra” in many ways, and I don’t like it because what do you call the bigger version of it in a year or two? The Ultra Max? Maybe you do…

I personally think it should be called the iPhone Folio. I think there’s a 99% chance I’m wrong, but hey, won’t it be amazing if I’m right?

The problem with “Folio” is that it’s too descriptive only of the form factor. Not the feeling it’s supposed to convey. I’m betting on “Ultra”, but I’m still rooting for “Duo”, which has some history and sounds like a nice companion adjective to “Neo”.

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

★ And It’s True That I Stole Your Lighter, and It’s Also True That I Lost the Map

John Gruber
Updated

Last week both Google and Apple updated their maps to accommodate Trump changing the United States Geological Survey’s recognized name for Lake Ontario to “Lake America”. Just as with Trump’s fiat renaming of the Gulf of Mexico back in the first days of his 2.0 administration, Google and Apple are showing the same names to the same people, by region. Here are the names you now see for Lake Ontario, based on what region your device is set to:

  • United States: “Lake America”
  • Canada: “Lake Ontario”
  • Everywhere else in the world: “Lake Ontario (Lake America)”

This is exactly the same as their joint solution to the Gulf of Mexico renaming — the U.S. sees “Gulf of America”, Mexico sees “Gulf of Mexico”, and the rest of the world sees “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)”.

Here is the solution I strongly believe Google and Apple should follow:

  • United States: “Lake America (Lake Ontario)” and “Gulf of America (Gulf of Mexico)”
  • Everywhere else in the world: “Lake Ontario” and “Gulf of Mexico”

There is no reason to show these new Trump-dictated names anywhere outside the U.S., even putting them in parentheses. There is no reason to show only the actual traditional names exclusively for users in Canada (for Lake Ontario) and Mexico (for the Gulf). Treating Canada and Mexico as special cases only makes sense if they’re part of some sort of dispute over the names. They’re not. The names of these two bodies of water are not contentious. There is no long-simmering debate about them, like there is with Denali/Mount McKinley in Alaska. The one and only country on the planet with a crackpot kook-ridden government that claims these bodies of water have new names is the United States; the only country that should see the new names is the United States.1

So, I disagree with how Google and Apple have chosen to handle these re-namings. But it is correct that users in the United States do see the new names.

Here’s Andy Ihnatko, at his eponymous website:

We all have every right to be upset. Google’s receiving plenty of flak over this move (as is Apple; Apple Maps now shows “Lake America,” reportedly after being pressured directly by Trump). I dislike Google’s and Apple’s choices, but I can’t personally fault them.

That said, Trump’s move is clearly meant to antagonize Canada during a volatile period in our relations. He’s throwing gasoline on a tariff fight that’s already creating uncertainty and suffering among vulnerable businesses and consumers on both sides of what was once an impeccably peaceful border. Google and Apple didn’t need to move so damned quickly. I wish they’d deferred the name change long enough for things to cool down a little. Doing so would have avoided creating the perception of handing one side a swift, validating victory.

I doubt a cooling-off period would help. Wounds don’t feel better when they’re reopened after healing. It’s best to get it over with. Applying the change to Google and Apple Maps while the GNIS database ink is still wet at least serves to remind who made this change and why. And whose change it rightfully is to make.

This is a bitter pill for some to swallow. What a lot of people want is for Google and Apple to just ignore the U.S. government’s official new names. E.g., to pick just one high-profile pundit, here’s Kara Swisher regarding Google (“quislings”) and Apple (“craven”, “pathetic”). But I suspect, quite strongly, that the people who profess to be the most angry at Apple and Google for going along with this change are the same people who would argue most strongly that Goliath tech companies and mega-billionaires wield too much anti-democratic power and influence.

It’s not coherent to argue that Google and Apple should decide which names to put on their maps only when you want them to ignore the names from the official government database. Neither Google nor Apple are going to sell their maps apps, but it’s not outlandish to think that in some alternative universe, one or more of the leading maps app might be owned by, say, Elon Musk or Larry Ellison. Would the people who want Apple and Google to ignore the official names from the GNIS support the same stance if the two leading maps apps were owned by SpaceX and Oracle instead? Obviously they would not.

What we want is a system where geographic names are determined democratically, by voting. And that is the system we in fact have. Trump won. The Department of the Interior has the power to change these names. If you’re angry that their official names in the United States are now Lake America and Gulf of America, stay angry that Trump won the 2024 election. Stay angry that our president continues to debase his office and embarrass our nation. Directing your anger at Google and Apple for reflecting that change is shooting the messengers.

But this is why I find it embarrassing that both Google and Apple are foisting these absurd names on the rest of the world, even if only between parentheses. These names are nonsense, and they are Americans’ nonsense to deal with.

China is another country with ridiculous geographic dogma. China demands that Taiwan, which is an independent free nation, be falsely labelled as a province of China. Apple Maps reflects that policy — within China. It doesn’t label Taiwan as “(Province of China)” on maps outside China. Bullshit inside parentheses is still bullshit. Less seriously but more preposterously, the Chinese government also insists that the obscure Diaoyu Islands, subject of a long-running territorial dispute with Japan, be drawn larger than they actually are on maps. Apple Maps dutifully renders those inflated false island sizes to users in China. It doesn’t show them to users anywhere else in the world — not even as dotted outlines. Chinese users see Chinese government dogmatic nonsense; no one else does.

So too it should be for U.S. government dogmatic nonsense. Spreading the nonsense to the rest of the world only makes it more embarrassing.

Neither Google nor Apple claim to be cartographic editorial authorities. I do not think we should want them to be. Other non-governmental institutions do claim to be independent authorities. The Associated Press has stuck to their guns even in the face of losing its White House press pool seat over their refusal to adopt the “Gulf of America” name. And then there’s Wikipedia, whose reputation, integrity, popularity, and independence haunt the right wing. From Politico, last week:

Other platforms will soon follow, a senior administration official told Politico on Tuesday. “We got Lake America changed on Google Maps, and many other maps are changing in a couple days. And Wikipedia is going to change as well,” said the official, who was granted anonymity to speak frankly.

As of Wednesday, Wikipedia was still using the original names of both the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario, while noting that Trump had signed orders to rename them.

Regarding this, Molly White noted:

A Wikipedia editor put it well: “You almost want to pat them on the head and say ‘Yes, of course it will’ in the same way you’d tell a small child that Santa Claus will be delivering their presents.”

  1. And, I feel strongly, the traditional names should remain visible, in parentheses, even for users in the U.S. for a period of, say, five years. What is someone who doesn’t follow current events — god bless them — to think if they go looking for Lake Ontario on Google Maps or Apple Maps and don’t see it? ↩︎

Talking Points Memo - Editors Blog

DC Starts to Get Worried for the GOP

Josh Marshall
Updated

Over the last day or so, a number of the big inside DC sheets have run pieces striking a skeptical note about the GOP’s 2025-26 redistricting — Axios and Politico, for examples. It’s not just that they maybe aren’t strong enough to withstand a Democratic wave (no gerrymanders are impregnable) but that they are fundamentally based on the assumption that the 2026 electorate would look basically like the 2024 electorate, as Axios put it. That’s not quite the same as saying “as popular as.” It’s more the shape of the electorate. And that’s why it’s not quite as silly as it might sound, though not wholly unsilly. And one example of this is that Republicans made a bet that things like the big Hispanic shift toward the GOP, especially in places like Texas and the Southwest, represented a kind of realignment as opposed to just a really bad year for Democrats.

To be clear, I don’t think anyone sees these switcheroos as “dummymanders” yet, where it actually turns out worse for the gerrymandering party than if they did nothing at all. Just that it may not end up providing that much advantage.

Obviously this all remains quite hypothetical. We don’t know what happens in November. The standard line is that “a lot can change.” That’s obviously true in a theoretical sense. Of course a lot can change. But in practical terms, I don’t think that’s quite right. There’s actually very little reason to believe much is going to change, because the key things underlying the GOP’s current unpopularity — prices, the Iran War and Donald Trump’s behavior — show almost no likelihood of changing. It’s more that there still remains a significant amount of uncertainty about what the situation is right now. As Charlie Cook put it in that post I wrote up last week, is it “bad, really bad, or truly horrible”? What we’re seeing at the moment is Republicans setting aside the happy talk and bravado, looking at the durability of the current dynamics and realizing that it is in fact really bad. I’m not sure it’s all really any worse for Republicans than most of us have figured. It’s more that DC has been behind the curve.

On that basic question of “bad, really bad, or truly horrible,” I don’t have a better idea than anyone else. On the basic question, I continue to think that the political class has not absorbed the depth of Donald Trump’s unpopularity, that it has seeped into areas where partisan polarization doesn’t usually allow it. But of course my hopes lean in that direction. So I’m skeptical of that too.

One thing that is interesting about this cycle is that, from one perspective, the Senate almost looks rosier for the Democrats than the House. To be clear, not in the sense that a Senate pick up is more likely. I don’t think anyone seriously thinks the Speaker of the House is going to be a Republican next year. I mean this more in the sense of possibilities, the “maybe it could happens” you start seeing on the map. The reason is simple: gerrymandering, or rather that the Senate doesn’t have it.

It still very much goes without saying that the Senate is permanently tilted toward small-population and generally rural states. In our current politics that tilt all goes to Republicans. But it’s not open to the fine-tuning that gerrymandering makes possible. Iowa is a very white and very rural state. But it’s still Iowa. You can’t just shave off some marginal parts and hand them to Illinois and grab some more rock-solid ones in Missouri or Nebraska or South Dakota. Doesn’t work that way. And that’s adding to the unpredictability as we move toward November.

Daring Fireball

[Sponsor] Glyphs 4

Daring Fireball Department of Commerce
Updated

Glyphs 4 is here: a Mac-native app for creating fonts, lettering, icons, and pictograms. Draw with flexible strokes and efficiently reuse shapes across huge glyph sets, explore variable vector designs with complex higher-order interpolation. Build and manage massive font families and icon sets with ease, export all modern font formats, SVG, PNG and PDF. Hundreds of refinements and native Tahoe support make designing, testing and shipping your vectors smoother than ever. Glyphs 4: Create. Love the process.

Discover Glyphs 4, and use code FIREBALL to save $30 if you purchase in the next month.

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

Trackables 1.5

John Gruber
Updated

Trackables:

There are plenty of health tracking apps. Surprisingly, nearly all of them are bloated, subscription-gated, or blatantly harvesting our data; often all three. We wanted something simpler, less annoying and more fun, that’s where it started.

Trackables turns the data your Apple Watch already collects — activity, sleep, steps, heart rate — into a clear, friendly, transparent interface.

Totally free of charge, totally private, made by a small team of ex-Apple folks. (They might add a paid tier in the future, but core functionality will remain free.) I’ve been using Trackables for months and it’s just a better dashboard to the stats I care about than the Health app itself.

(One interesting detail: HealthKit only makes raw data available to apps. Apple Health’s “sleep score” isn’t part of that data — only the raw input, like how many hours you slept, and how much time was spent in each sleep stage. So Trackables computes its own sleep score. When I bother to compare, Trackable’s score is almost always similar to Apple’s, but seldom exactly the same. But I personally find that Trackable’s sleep score corresponds better to how I feel I slept. Which, admittedly, is usually pretty good.)

 ★ 
Daring Fireball

The Onion’s Exclusive Interview With Larry Ellison

John Gruber
Updated

The Onion:

The Onion: How did you get into the entertainment industry?

Ellison: I remember going to the movies as a kid, and when the houselights went down and that hush fell over the crowd, I’d think to myself: I’d like to build a massive propaganda apparatus one day.

 ★ 
Market Design

How to Get Away with Merger in a Dialysis Duopoly by T.G. Wollman

Al Roth
Updated

 Here's a paper featured by Microeconomic Insights, which shows that in the highly concentrated dialysis market, in which prices are mostly federally regulated, mergers reduce competition on quality.

 Thomas G. Wollmann: How to Get Away with Merger: Stealth Consolidation and Its Effects on US Dialysis 

"This paper studies premerger notification of US dialysis acquisitions from 1996 to 2017. Like many industries, dialysis has consolidated rapidly. During this period, thousands of facilities changed ownership, yet only half were reported to federal antitrust authorities. Unlike most industries, dialysis prices are mostly set by the government, so acquisitions of rival facilities reduce the incentive to compete on quality. Since patients are often already in poor health, preventing stealth consolidation could save lives.

The study combines data on market structure, antitrust enforcement, and patient health. I begin by describing patterns in the data. Next, I estimate a structural model of dialysis competition, enforcement, and agency costs. Finally, I use the estimates to predict what would have happened had all dialysis mergers proposed during the study period been reportable.

Three main findings emerge.

Premerger notification is critical to effective antitrust enforcement. All else equal, exemption reduces the likelihood of enforcement by about 90%.
Exempt acquisitions that concentrate ownership degrade quality, as evidenced by higher postmerger hospitalization and mortality rates.
The benefits of expanding premerger notification exceed the costs by orders of magnitude. This reflects the deterrence effect of antitrust enforcement (i.e., rivals won’t try to merge if they know their deal will be blocked) as well as the efficiency of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which polices billions of dollars of dialysis transactions with very few resources." 

NASA Science

The Otherworldly Geology of Vasquez Rocks

Michala Garrison
Updated
 
false color
natural color
In this false-color image, areas with more extensive vegetation on the Sierra Pelona retain more moisture than the hills surrounding Agua Dulce, making the Sierra Pelona appear dark green in comparison to the rusty brown coloration of the lower hills. Vasquez Rocks appears as a patch of curved gray stripes near the center of the image.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
This natural-color image shows the same area, but there is less difference in colors between higher-elevation and lower-elevation vegetation. Most features in the image are shades of brown.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
In this false-color image, areas with more extensive vegetation on the Sierra Pelona retain more moisture than the hills surrounding Agua Dulce, making the Sierra Pelona appear dark green in comparison to the rusty brown coloration of the lower hills. Vasquez Rocks appears as a patch of curved gray stripes near the center of the image.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
This natural-color image shows the same area, but there is less difference in colors between higher-elevation and lower-elevation vegetation. Most features in the image are shades of brown.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison
false color
natural color
A patchwork of chaparral and sage scrub vegetation shades the hills and mountain ranges surrounding Agua Dulce and Vasquez Rocks in this pair of images captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) aboard Landsat 9 on July 28, 2026. The false-color image (bands 6-5-4) on the left incorporates shortwave-infrared and near-infrared observations that accentuate differences in vegetation and soil moisture in comparison to the natural-color image on the right. NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison.

Editor’s Note: Today’s story is the answer to the September Puzzler.

Several of the outcrops at Vasquez Rocks Natural Area in Southern California jut from the arid landscape of the Soledad Basin at remarkable angles. Geologists estimate that the tilt of sedimentary rock strata found in the area averages 50 degrees, steep enough that many of the otherworldly formations appear to point toward the stars.  

That’s fitting, in some ways, because the rocks have served as one of the Star Trek franchise’s favorite backdrops ever since the show’s inaugural season, when Captain James T. Kirk scrambled up the jagged terrain during an iconic battle with a member of a reptilian alien species.

Viewed from space, the Vasquez Rocks are considerably less dramatic, but they show up clearly as bands of gray nestled between mountain ranges in these false-color (left) and natural-color (right) images captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9. The false-color view (bands 6-5-4) incorporates shortwave-infrared and near-infrared observations that accentuate differences in the landscape’s vegetation in comparison to the natural-color image on the right.

A zoomed-in view of the Vasquez Rocks part of the image highlights a sandy parking lot where Star Trek scenes were filmed, the Antelope Valley Freeway, and the nearby community of Agua Dulce.
Proximity to Los Angeles and the freeway is among the reasons the tilted strata at Vasquez Rocks have long been a popular filming location for television producers. This false-color image (bands 6-5-4) was captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) aboard Landsat 9 on July 28, 2026.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison

The Vasquez Rocks didn’t start out pointing skyward. When they were forming 25 million years ago, sediment was spread across alluvial fans—cone-shaped deposits that develop as fast-moving streams empty onto relatively flat plains. The sediment likely hadn’t traveled far, much of it eroding from nearby uplands. Over time, the alluvial fan deposits were buried and cemented into thick layers of sandstone and conglomerate rock.

Over millions of years, the region was then reshaped by the interaction of tectonic plates just to the east. Two plates grind past each other along a boundary that includes the San Andreas Fault, a strike-slip fault where the North American plate moves southeast and the Pacific plate northwest, contributing to the powerful tectonic forces that ripple throughout the region.

Eventually this tectonic activity led to the uplift and deformation of the Soledad Basin, with sedimentary layers gradually tilting, folding, and rotating. Once they were exposed at the surface, millions more years of weathering and erosion sculpted the formations further, removing softer material and leaving the more resistant sandstone and conglomerate fins and ridges that wow visitors today.

The rock formations represent far-flung moons and planets in several other Star Trek episodes and Vulcan, Spock’s home planet, in two Star Trek movies. Other productions have highlighted the Vasquez Rocks as well. They make appearances in dozens of other television shows and movies, including the science fiction series Westworld, For All Mankind, and Battlestar Galactica.

NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland.

Downloads

In this false-color image, areas with more extensive vegetation on the Sierra Pelona retain more moisture than the hills surrounding Agua Dulce, making the Sierra Pelona appear dark green in comparison to the rusty brown coloration of the lower hills. Vasquez Rocks appears as a patch of curved gray stripes near the center of the image.

July 28, 2026: False color (bands 6-5-4)

JPEG (22.57 MB)

This natural-color image shows the same area, but there is less difference in colors between higher-elevation and lower-elevation vegetation. Most features in the image are shades of brown.

July 28, 2026: Natural color

JPEG (19.33 MB)

References & Resources

You may also be interested in:

Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
Digging Back in Time in the UAE
5 min read

Once below a shallow sea, Jabal al Fāyah now stands above the desert in the United Arab Emirates as a…

Article
What Lake Bonneville Left Behind
5 min read

The drying of the massive lake exposed playas that became the setting for feats of engineering and technological ingenuity, as…

Article
Pumice Rafts Encroach on Admiralty Islands
4 min read

Buoyant volcanic rock fragments from an underwater eruption drifted across the Bismarck Sea and choked island coasts.

Article
Keep Exploring

Discover More from NASA Earth Science

Subscribe to Earth Observatory Newsletters

Subscribe to the Earth Observatory and get the Earth in your inbox.

Earth Observatory Image of the Day

NASA's Earth Observatory brings you the Earth, every day, with in-depth stories and stunning imagery.

Explore Earth Science

Earth Science Data

Open access to NASA’s archive of Earth science data

The post The Otherworldly Geology of Vasquez Rocks appeared first on NASA Science.

Mike the Mad Biologist

Links 9/7/26

mikethemadbiologist
Updated

Links for you. Science:

Dengue cases in Florida nearly double in one week, here’s where
Docs Alarmed by NIH Plan to Redirect Medical Research $$ to Pentagon
VDH Identifies a Locally Acquired Case of Dengue Virus Infection in Northern Virginia Resident
Inside the D.O.J.’s Investigation of Fauci and Other Virus Scientists (truly bizarre in that it takes far too long to get to the point that most people who know what they’re talking about don’t think the lab leaks hypothesis is legitimate)
You’re Trapped Under Rubble And These Guys Are Your EMTs. WYD?
Sick sea lions signal rising toxin risk along California coast

Other:

Mamdani, media, and negativity bias
Neo-Nazis and the Impotence of Trumponomics
Mamdani Opens Office of Worker Power
Janeese Lewis George gets a preview of the mayoral life
Why Did Trump Order Up 660 Million Pounds of Mystery Meat?
Sisterhood Was Gloria Steinem’s Guiding Principle
Pennsylvania’s motor-voter system effectively screens non-citizens from voter registration
Gloria Steinem’s Many-Splendored Feminist Life
The real covid-19 scandal is still unfolding
Over 170,000 Nonprofits Lost All Their Data. Is Microsoft to Blame?
The Newspaper Shouldn’t Be Complicated
Ben Wikler Has a Plan to Supercharge American Democracy
What Influencers Owe Us: “Your followers are funding your life, so they expect some level of transparency.”
How Low Can It Go
Kaepernick and the Movement He Inspired

Letters from an American

September 6, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson
Updated

Storm clouds over the horizon looked like mountains last week as I came in from a late afternoon paddle in the kayak.

There’s a lot going on, but it feels like we could all use a break.

I’ll be back at it tomorrow.

Share

California
xkcd.com

Semaphore

The speed of light in air is 50% faster than in fiber, but it's a challenge to get the arms to move fast enough to realize the latency advantage.
Hacker News
Phil Gyford’s writing

w/e 2026-09-06

phil@gyford.com (Phil Gyford)
Updated

I’m on the train home after another weekend in Essex sorting out the parental house and I nearly forgot to write this.

We have now just about finished looking through everything and now, thanks to my much-more-diligent-than-me sister, we have dozens of folders of categorised papers of mostly old Labour Party related material, at least some of which we hope to find homes for. We’ll see.

I’m pretty over this whole thing now and even though we’ve cleared this huge hurdle it feels like a never ending task. I’m so ready to move on. Even so it was, as ever, hard to leave the place.

§ This week’s NTS Early Bird Show with Spirit Blue was unusually guitarry and unusually good, ideal for a gentle start or a quiet evening.

§ Before I went to Essex, during a couple of dry days, I finished the final patch of scything. This year, spread leisurely over a couple of months, I’ve scythed 946m2, taking around 13 hours, plus another 5 hours of clearing the cut grass.

§ Having played with Home Assistant enough on my laptop in VirtualBox to decide it was useful, this week we got a Home Assistant Green device to run it on, as the simplest option. A bit of me thought it would make more sense to have a more generic kind of home server, which could be used for other things, but I don’t want to run a server off any kind so. I got most things set up again on the Green but, inevitably, there are many, many things to improve and fiddle with.

§ I had a nice few hours in London on my way over to Essex. I met R for lunch, then popped in to see the installation The Department of Euterpe at the Warburg Institute, which was alright, worth popping in if you’re passing and like that sort of thing.

A photo of an office with a desk, lots of wooden drawers for index cards, and things on the walls.
Department of Euterpe by Time Is Away

Then I went to see Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (Jane Schoenbrun, 2026) which was interesting and fun although I’d probably have enjoyed it more if I was more into horror movies (it wasn’t scary but riffs on them) and/or in a larger audience (there were six people there, mid-Friday afternoon).

§ That’ll do.

Read comments or post one

Schneier on Security

Automobile Camouflage to Hide from Flock Cameras

Bruce Schneier
Updated

Not sure it’s practical, but it’s certainly striking.

Aeon | a world of ideas

The planet is… up to something

Aeon Video
Updated

Photo of Earth from space showing clouds, oceans and land masses against a starry black background.

An astronaut’s image of Earth from the 2026 lunar flyby reveals not our profound smallness but our growing significance

- by Aeon Video

Watch on Aeon

Aeon | a world of ideas

Continental divide

Shawn Miller
Updated

A lorry on a long desert road with rocky terrain and mountains in the background under a partly cloudy sky.

A century ago, the Pan-American road promised a new era of fraternity between the two continents. Did it succeed?

- by Shawn Miller

Read on Aeon

Vincent Bernat

Sidenotes with CSS anchor positioning

Vincent Bernat
Updated

I am a heavy user of sidenotes:1 they keep optional content next to the text instead of sending the reader to the bottom of the page and back. Tufte CSS renders them without JavaScript but only accepts inline content. CSS anchor positioning, now supported by recent browsers,2 is an elegant alternative. Sidenotes can hold several blocks, still without JavaScript, and fall back below the paragraph referencing them on narrow viewports and older browsers.

In 2023, Eric Meyer demonstrated this technique in “Nuclear Anchored Sidenotes.” The main improvement over other solutions is that the notes can sit anywhere in the HTML document. You can place them after the paragraph referencing them, as regular block elements for text browsers, screen readers, feed readers, and reader mode to render them properly:

Sidenotes rendered in Lynx appear after the paragraph they are called from.
Rendering in Lynx, a text browser

When the viewport is too narrow or the browser does not support CSS anchor positioning, you can style them so the reader can skip them or glance at them without losing their position in the text:

Sidenotes rendered on a narrow viewport appear with a distinctive typography after the paragraph they are called from.
Rendering below the paragraph on a narrow viewport

Once the viewport is large enough, they appear in the margin, at the same vertical position as the matching reference mark, unless they would collide with a previous sidenote, as in the example below:3

Sidenotes rendered on a large viewport appear in the margin. There are two of them. The first one is vertically aligned with the matching reference mark, while the second is rendered below as it would collide with the first otherwise.
Rendering in the margin on a large viewport

The gist of CSS anchoring is to position an element relative to another element—the anchor. For the sidenotes, the anchor is the reference mark. I use the following markup, with a data attribute to specify the anchor name:

<sup id="fnref:YYY" data-anchor="--lf-sn-YYY">
  <a href="#sidenote-YYY">1</a>
</sup>

The matching note is an <aside> element carrying the same data attribute for the anchor name. We put it after the paragraph holding the reference mark:

<aside role="note" id="sidenote-YYY" data-anchor="--lf-sn-YYY">
  <sup>1</sup>
  <p>A first paragraph.</p>
  <p>A second paragraph.</p>
</aside>

On a narrow viewport or when the browser is too old for CSS anchoring, we style the sidenote, which stays below its paragraph, with a muted color:

aside[role="note"] {
  margin-block: 1rlh;
  color: #444;
}

On a wide viewport and when the browser is recent enough, we move the sidenote to the right margin:

@supports (anchor-name: attr(data-anchor type(<custom-ident>))) {
  @media (min-width: 72rem) {
    main {
      position: relative;
      sup[data-anchor] {
        anchor-name: attr(data-anchor type(<custom-ident>));
        /* → anchor-name: --lf-sn-YYY */
      }
      aside[role="note"][data-anchor] {
        anchor-name: --lf-sidenote;
        position: absolute;
        position-anchor: attr(data-anchor type(<custom-ident>));
        /* → position-anchor: --lf-sn-YYY */
        top: max(anchor(top), anchor(--lf-sidenote bottom, -1rlh) + 1rlh);
        left: 100%;
        margin: 0 2rem;
        width: 18rem;
        color: inherit;
      }
    }
  }
}

attr() extracts the anchor name for the reference mark from the data-anchor attribute. It returns a string, unless we specify a CSS unit or a type, like here: the browser parses the data attribute as a custom identifier, which anchor-name validates as a dashed identifier, a custom identifier starting with two dashes.4

The note itself is absolutely positioned past the right edge of the main block. It selects the matching reference mark as its anchor with position-anchor set to the value of the data-anchor attribute. Each note is also an anchor named --lf-sidenote. We use it to keep the next note from colliding with this one.

The anchor() CSS function lets us position the note’s top edge relative to its anchor: anchor(top) aligns the top edge of the note with the top edge of the reference mark. It can also take another anchor as a parameter: anchor(--lf-sidenote bottom) would align the top edge of the note with the bottom edge of the closest preceding anchor named --lf-sidenote—so the previous note.5 Like attr(), anchor() accepts a fallback value as its second parameter and use it when the named anchor does not exist.

The top property handles three cases, illustrated in the following diagram:

Diagram of three sidenotes anchored to their reference marks. The first one is aligned with the top of its own reference mark, as no note comes before it. The second one would overlap the first, so it takes the bottom of the first note as anchor and sits one line below it. The third one comes far enough down the page to align with its own reference mark again.
The three cases for the vertical position of a note
  1. The first note’s top edge aligns with the top edge of its reference mark: as there is no previous note, anchor(--lf-sidenote bottom, -1rlh) + 1rlh resolves to 0 and max() returns anchor(top).
  2. When the reference mark of a later note sits above the bottom of the previous note, plus some vertical space, the note goes below the previous one to avoid a collision. max() returns anchor(--lf-sidenote bottom) + 1rlh.
  3. Otherwise, the note’s top edge aligns with the reference mark’s top edge, as max() returns anchor(top).

Have a look at the complete stylesheet, which also adapts the reference mark to the location of the note: a “↓” arrow when the note sits below the paragraph, a “→” arrow when it moves to the margin. Gwern’s “Sidenotes In Web Design” lists more implementations and their trade-offs.

Some bloggers aim to write a post in 30 minutes. I planned to publish three web-related articles this weekend. Instead, I spent an inordinate amount of time elsewhere: about 15 commits on the build system, a pull request to update CSS highlighting for nested selectors in Pygments, and a small correction to MDN’s article on the anchor() CSS function. The SVG illustration took a bit less than an hour and the article itself a handful of hours. The attr() function came in after I thought “inline style looks ugly, isn’t there a better way?” But, hey, I still think this is worth it! 🎨

  1. My PhD advisor told me this is unwise. ↩

  2. The first bits of anchor positioning are supported from Chrome 125 (May 2024), Firefox 147 (January 2026), and Safari 26 (September 2025).

    Before Safari 26.5, sidenotes may collide due to a bug in how dependency chains are handled. You can detect this situation with some JavaScript. It is, however, not needed in the solution described here as we depend on a more recent feature. ↩

  3. If you noticed the runt in the first note, I share your pain and lament that Firefox does not implement text-wrap: pretty. ↩

  4. Typed attr() is supported from Chrome 133 (February 2025), Firefox 155 (September 2026), and Safari 27 (not yet released). Check Una Kravets’ article for details. To support more browsers, you can inline the anchor name and the position anchor directly in the HTML:

    <sup id="…" style="anchor-name: --lf-sn-…">
  <a href="#sidenote-…">1</a>
</sup>

    “Managing Anchor Associations With Data Attributes and Advanced attr(),” by Daniel Schwarz, explores CSS anchors and typed attr() in more detail. ↩

  5. The exact rule for the target anchor element is more complex: “if an ancestor of [the note] satisfies the following conditions, return the nearest such element to [the note]. Otherwise, return the last element in tree order that satisfies the conditions.” One of these conditions is that “[the candidate] is an acceptable anchor element for [the note],” which requires that “[the candidate] is laid out strictly before [the note],” where the relevant clause is that “[the candidate] is either not absolutely positioned or occurs earlier in the flat tree order than [the note].” ↩

Picture of The Week

It’s a new MOON(S)!

Today’s Picture of the Week celebrates the intricate design of the Multi Object Optical and Near-infrared Spectrograph, or MOONS, a new instrument at ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) that recently performed its first observations. Shown here, suspended in darkness, are two of MOONS’ infrared cameras. These multi-tiered shiny metal structures, covered in bolts and cables, will be used to probe the construction of our galaxy and those beyond.

The centre of the Milky Way is shrouded in dust, which blocks visible light from inner stars passing through to us. By gathering a different type of light that can pass through this dust, called infrared, MOONS can investigate the properties of millions of these ‘hidden’ stars. This will enable astronomers to produce an accurate 3D map of the centre of our galaxy. MOONS will also be used to study millions of other galaxies, probing how they form and evolve at different ages of the Universe.

How does MOONS’ design enable detailed observations of so many cosmic objects? By using around 1000 fibre-optic cables, each mounted on a robotic positioner that carefully points it to the exact location of an astronomical object, whose light is then fed from the VLT into two spectrographs. Spectrographs work like a prism creating a rainbow, splitting the light they receive into separate ‘colours’ (or wavelengths) to then be detected by cameras, like the ones in this image. The fingerprints of chemical elements encoded in the light can then be analysed in detail, revealing properties of cosmic objects like composition, mass, and velocity. To minimise contamination from sources of infrared light around the instrument, MOONS is kept very cold (between –143 and –233 degrees Celsius) thanks to a cryostat.

MOONS was developed by an international consortium led by the Science and Technology Facilities Council's UK Astronomy Technology Centre. Reflecting on his image of the unique and powerful new instrument, photographer and ESO astronomer Luca Sbordone says: “I find that these objects are beautiful, it’s a beauty that comes from the cleverness, precision, dedication and accumulated knowledge needed to make them”.

Links

Market Design

A.I. in health care in Paris

Al Roth
Updated

Here's tomorrow's conference agenda for the opening day of the  Redefining Health Care in the Age of A.I. conference in Paris.  Philippe Aghion will speak on "Should we fear AI?"
My talk is about  "Computational Intelligence and Organ Allocation on a Global Scale."

Day 1 – Tuesday 8 September

8:00 am
Opening of the Sorbonne
8:15 am
Attendee registration and welcome coffee with viennoiseries
9:15 am
Introduction by Nature Editors and PITOR Institute
Magdalena Skipper, Joao Monteiro and Alexandre Loupy
9:40 am
Day opening lecture: Should we fear AI?
Philippe Aghion – Nobel Prize Laureate
Chaired by Magdalena Skipper
10:20 am
Keynote: Computational Intelligence and Organ Allocation on a Global Scale
Alvin Roth – Nobel Prize Laureate
Chaired by Alexandre Loupy
11:00 am
Imaging and diagnostic models
Chaired by Alexandre Loupy and Sadra Bakhshandeh
11:00 am
From Pixel to Patient: AI for Multimodal Medical Imaging
Julia Schnabel
11:30 am
Foundation models bridging molecular information and pathology
Guangyu Wang
12:00 pm
Building Trustworthy AI for Clinical Decision-Making
Roxana Daneshjou
12:30 pm
Short Talk Presentation (selected from submitted abstracts)
Disparate privacy risks from medical AI: a new axis of health inequality
Moritz Knolle, Technical University of Munich (TUM)
12:45 pm
Lunch break
2:15 pm
Meet the Nature editors
Joao Monteiro, Magdalena Skipper, George Caputa, Lorenzo Righetto, Monica Wang, Ananya Rastogi, Sadra Bakhshandeh and Wanying Wang
3:15 pm
Keynote: Towards conversational diagnostic artificial intelligence
Alan Karthikesalingam
Chaired by George Caputa
3:55 pm
Coffee break
4:30 pm
Foundation models and drug discovery
Chaired by Roxana Daneshjou and George Caputa
4:30 pm
Six Aging Clocks Confirmed Biological Age Reversal in Phase IIa Trial of a Novel Therapeutic Discovered Using Aging Research and Generative AI
Alex Zhavoronkov
5:00 pm
Building AI for Biological Reasoning: Towards Biological Artificial Superintelligence
Thomas Clozel
5:30 pm
Short Talk Presentation (selected from submitted abstracts)
When AI meets the emergency department: rethinking how we evaluate clinical AI
Austin Schoeffler, Stanford University
5:45 pm
Short Talk Presentation (selected from submitted abstracts)
Testing levels of LLM agent autonomy in inpatient treatment decisions: a prospective, silent-mode evaluation of vancomycin dosing
Yixing Jiang, Stanford University & Kameron C. Black, Stanford Health Care
6:00 pm
Roundtable: Opportunities and limits in implementing AI in healthcare
Effy Vayena, Demilade Adedinsewo, Jessilyn Dunn, James Zou, and Marco Marsella
Moderated by Alexandre Loupy and George Caputa
7:00 pm
Poster session with wine and cheese

 

NASA Science

A Bright Spot at Mount Michael

Michala Garrison
Updated
 
A small ice- and snow-covered island with an active volcanic crater at its center is surrounded by drifting pieces of sea ice. A thermal signal and small plume appear in the crater, and ash darkens the snow on the volcano’s northern slopes.
Mount Michael on Saunders Island, seen in this image acquired with the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 on August 24, 2026, hosts a frequently active lava lake in its summit crater.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison

Winter near the Antarctic Circle brings months of frozen darkness, when sea ice chokes ocean waters and many of its denizens hunker down to ride out the harsh conditions. But as winter began to release its icy grip, an uncommonly clear satellite image revealed that part of this remote realm was still very much awake, at least volcanically speaking.

Mount Michael, the stratovolcano at the center of Saunders Island, rises above the ice-filled South Atlantic Ocean in this image, acquired with the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on the NASA-USGS Landsat 8 satellite on August 24, 2026. The natural-color image is overlaid with an infrared signal (OLI bands 7-6-5), shown in red, revealing heat from the persistent lava lake in its summit crater. A puff of a volcanic plume hovering over the peak, along with darkened snow on its northern slopes, also suggests ongoing activity.

Saunders Island is one of the South Sandwich Islands, a string of small volcanic peaks about 350 kilometers (220 miles) long that formed from the South American plate subducting beneath the tiny South Sandwich plate. Regular eruptions, including at Mount Michael, have occurred on these islands in recent centuries.

Because of the volcanoes’ remoteness, scientists rely on satellite data to understand their activity. An analysis of thermal anomalies in Landsat, Sentinel, and ASTER (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer) observations spanning 30 years led researchers to conclude that Mount Michael hosts a persistent lava lake in its summit crater. Only a handful of other volcanoes on Earth, including Kīlauea, Nyamulagira, and Erta Ale, are known to have similar, frequently active features.

Thermal observations from the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) and VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) instruments have also enabled long-term monitoring of Mount Michael. Data provided through MIROVA, a near-real-time volcanic hot spot detection system, indicate that low-intensity activity has been ongoing at the volcano for the past several years. Other observations from NASA’s Aura satellite show that emissions of sulfur dioxide and other gases are common at Mount Michael.

A series of V-shaped wave clouds appears over an ocean filled with pieces of sea ice.
Wave clouds form downwind of Saunders Island in this image acquired with the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 9 on September 1, 2026.
NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison

The cloud-free window over Mount Michael would close in short order. One week later, when Landsat 9 passed over the island, a more active atmosphere had returned. But the weather patterns interacted with the island to put on a spectacle of their own. The 843-meter-high (2,766-foot-high) peak jutting from the ocean disturbed passing winds to produce a series of wave clouds resembling the wake of a ship, a familiar phenomenon in this region. False-color imagery captured by NASA’s Aqua satellite indicates that a volcanic track caused by degassing sulfur dioxide was likely present as well.

NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Lindsey Doermann.

Downloads

A small ice- and snow-covered island with an active volcanic crater at its center is surrounded by drifting pieces of sea ice. A thermal signal and small plume appear in the crater, and ash darkens the snow on the volcano’s northern slopes.

August 24, 2026

JPEG (4.27 MB)

A series of V-shaped wave clouds appears over an ocean filled with pieces of sea ice.

September 1, 2026

JPEG (1.14 MB)

References & Resources

You may also be interested in:

Stay up-to-date with the latest content from NASA as we explore the universe and discover more about our home planet.
Ever Restless Mount Dukono Erupts
2 min read

The volcano on Indonesia’s Halmahera Island routinely ejects ash, volcanic gases, and volcanic bombs.

Article
A Sea of Spinning Clouds
3 min read

Icy, isolated Peter I Island stirred up a show in the atmosphere off the West Antarctic coast.

Article
America’s Emerald Isle
3 min read

Beaver Island is one in a string of verdant and scenic jewels in a northern Lake Michigan archipelago.

Article
Keep Exploring

Discover More from NASA Earth Science

Subscribe to Earth Observatory Newsletters

Subscribe to the Earth Observatory and get the Earth in your inbox.

Earth Observatory Image of the Day

NASA's Earth Observatory brings you the Earth, every day, with in-depth stories and stunning imagery.

Explore Earth Science

Earth Science Data

Open access to NASA’s archive of Earth science data

The post A Bright Spot at Mount Michael appeared first on NASA Science.

Boston Red Sox – MLB Trade Rumors
National Hurricane Center Graphical Tropical Weather Outlooks

Central Pacific Tropical Weather Outlook

nhcwebmaster@noaa.gov (NHC Webmaster)
Updated

Central North Pacific 2-Day Graphical Outlook Image
Central North Pacific 7-Day Graphical Outlook Image


476
ACPN50 PHFO 091738
TWOCP

Tropical Weather Outlook
NWS Central Pacific Hurricane Center Honolulu HI
Issued by NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL
800 AM HST Wed Sep 09 2026

For the central North Pacific...between 140W and 180W:

Active Systems:
The National Hurricane Center is issuing advisories on Tropical
Storm Lowell, located several hundred miles north-northwest of the
Hawaiian Islands.

Central Portion and West Portion of the East Pacific (EP96):
Showers and thunderstorms continue to show signs of organization
with an area of low pressure located several hundred miles
south-southwest of the southern tip of the Baja California
peninsula. Environmental conditions are expected to support
continued development of this system, and a tropical depression is
expected to form later today or tonight. as the system moves
generally west-northwestward at 10 to 15 mph. For more information,
including gale warnings, please see High Seas Forecast issued by
National Weather Service.
* Formation chance through 48 hours...high...90 percent.
* Formation chance through 7 days...high...90 percent.

Central Portion and West Portion of the East Pacific:
An area of low pressure is forecast to form several hundred miles
south of the southern tip of the Baja California Peninsula this
weekend or early next week. Some gradual development is possible
thereafter, and a tropical depression could form early next week
while the system moves generally west-northwestward.
* Formation chance through 48 hours...low...near 0 percent.
* Formation chance through 7 days...medium...40 percent.

Well South-Southeast of the Hawaiian Islands:
An area of low pressure is forecast to form several hundred miles
south-southeast of the Hawaiian Islands. Some gradual development is
possible late this week into this weekend as this system moves
slowly north-northwestward.
* Formation chance through 48 hours...low...near 0 percent.
* Formation chance through 7 days...low...20 percent.

&&
High Seas Forecasts issued by the National Weather Service
can be found under AWIPS header NFDHSFEPI, WMO header FZPN02
KWBC, and on the web at ocean.weather.gov/shtml/NFDHSFEPI.php

$$
Forecaster Evans/Kelly
NNNN


National Hurricane Center Graphical Tropical Weather Outlooks

Atlantic Tropical Weather Outlook

nhcwebmaster@noaa.gov (NHC Webmaster)
Updated

Atlantic 2-Day Graphical Outlook Image
Atlantic 7-Day Graphical Outlook Image


000
ABNT20 KNHC 091710
TWOAT

Tropical Weather Outlook
NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL
200 PM EDT Wed Sep 9 2026

For the North Atlantic...Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of America:

Tropical cyclone formation is not expected during the next 7 days.

$$
Forecaster Cangialosi


National Hurricane Center Graphical Tropical Weather Outlooks

Eastern Pacific Tropical Weather Outlook

nhcwebmaster@noaa.gov (NHC Webmaster)
Updated

Eastern North Pacific 2-Day Graphical Outlook Image
Eastern North Pacific 7-Day Graphical Outlook Image


000
ABPZ20 KNHC 091738
TWOEP

Tropical Weather Outlook
NWS National Hurricane Center Miami FL
1100 AM PDT Wed Sep 9 2026

For the eastern and central North Pacific east of 180 longitude:

Active Systems:
The National Hurricane Center is issuing advisories on Tropical
Storm Lowell, located several hundred miles north-northwest of the
Hawaiian Islands.

Central Portion and West Portion of the East Pacific (EP96):
Showers and thunderstorms continue to show signs of organization
with an area of low pressure located several hundred miles
south-southwest of the southern tip of the Baja California
peninsula. Environmental conditions are expected to support
continued development of this system, and a tropical depression is
expected to form later today or tonight. as the system moves
generally west-northwestward at 10 to 15 mph. For more information,
including gale warnings, please see High Seas Forecast issued by
National Weather Service.
* Formation chance through 48 hours...high...90 percent.
* Formation chance through 7 days...high...90 percent.

Central Portion and West Portion of the East Pacific:
An area of low pressure is forecast to form several hundred miles
south of the southern tip of the Baja California Peninsula this
weekend or early next week. Some gradual development is possible
thereafter, and a tropical depression could form early next week
while the system moves generally west-northwestward.
* Formation chance through 48 hours...low...near 0 percent.
* Formation chance through 7 days...medium...40 percent.

Well South-Southeast of the Hawaiian Islands:
An area of low pressure is forecast to form several hundred miles
south-southeast of the Hawaiian Islands. Some gradual development is
possible late this week into this weekend as this system moves
slowly north-northwestward.
* Formation chance through 48 hours...low...near 0 percent.
* Formation chance through 7 days...low...20 percent.

&&
High Seas Forecasts issued by the National Weather Service
can be found under AWIPS header NFDHSFEPI, WMO header FZPN02
KWBC, and on the web at ocean.weather.gov/shtml/NFDHSFEPI.php

$$
Forecaster Evans/Kelly


Astronomy Picture of the Day

Why are Saturn’s poles geometric? Why are Saturn’s poles geometric?