Piplup is getting another Community Day event for 2026. Here's all the perks, including how to find a shiny Piplup.

Natasha Singer / New York Times:
Fueled partly by US tech companies, governments worldwide are racing to deploy GenAI in schools and universities, even as agencies such as UNICEF urge caution  —  In early November, Microsoft said it would supply artificial intelligence tools and training to more than 200,000 students and educators in the United Arab Emirates.

My thanks to Listen Later for sponsoring this week at DF. Listen Later is a super simple, super useful service that turns articles into podcast episodes. When you sign up, you get a custom email address to send articles to; every article you forward to your Listen Later address is transformed into very human-like narration, and gets delivered to your private podcast feed. You can subscribe to your private Listen Later podcast feed in any podcast app.

In addition to the email gateway, there’s a Shortcut for sending articles from Safari (on Mac or iOS), a web extension for Chrome, and a simple web interface for submitting new articles. It’s very simple and the narrated versions sound great.

Sign up for free and start listening today. New users get $2 in credits to try it out — no commitment. And if you like it, you simply prepay for credits as you go. There’s no subscription — you simply pay for what you use. I wish more services had a pay-as-you-go model like Listen Later’s.

Valve has announced the winners of the 2025 Steam Awards and, unsurprisingly, Hollow Knight: Silksong, took home the Game of the Year honors. It was also given the "Best Game You Suck At" award, which, I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not. Given the relentless fawning over Silksong since its release in […]

Matthew Dowd, in a long, devastatingly careful post on Twitter/X:

If they’re suggesting their waveguide displays are bright enough and vibrant enough to see clearly in direct sunlight, that would be yet another innovation they’ve discovered that every other player in the market (including the Chinese manufacturers where the waveguide displays come from) has missed.

Meta has access to every display manufacturer and their Display Glasses’ peak brightness is ~5,000 nits, itself very power heavy. These glasses came out just last fall and there is no sign of significantly brighter waveguides shipping for commercial products since then. It’s also worth noting that Meta Display Glasses users have noted poor readability in direct sunlight, suggesting a greater leap would be necessary to meet Pickle’s claims.

Put simply, Pickle having much brighter waveguides that also have a 30-degree FOV is extremely unlikely. It would mean that some waveguide manufacturer out there (there aren’t many) recently achieved a breakthrough and has chosen Pickle to be the first device it’s found in. Oh, and it’s going to ship next quarter.

I don’t know what these scammers at Pickle think is going to happen, but they sure as shit aren’t going to ship a product that does anything vaguely close to what they claim they’re on the cusp of shipping. I doubt they’re going to ship anything at all, ever. The whole thing is like the Big Lie, but for technology not politics.

One of two scenarios is true:

1. Pickle, a 15-person startup founded in 2024 that has raised less than $10 million, is the most advanced personal computer hardware company in the world, on the cusp of launching multiple hardware and software technologies that put the company 5-10 years ahead of established rivals like Apple, Meta, Samsung, Google, Sony, and Zeiss. The Pickle 1 glasses are the most amazing consumer electronics device since the original iPhone. CEO Daniel Park will go down in history as one of the most innovative leaders and inventors in the history of the world. Or:

2. Pickle is a complete and utter sham that is accepting $200 pre-orders for a product that exists only as a fabricated fake in its launch video. CEO Daniel Park is a liar and fraud, and, depending upon what they do with the pre-order payments they are now collecting, perhaps a thief.

Either (a) is mostly true or (b) is mostly true. Given that there exists not one single independent person other than Park himself who vouches that the Pickle 1 actually exists and functions in prototype form, I think it’s pretty obvious which scenario is the case. Which makes me wonder what the hell is going on at Y Combinator these days.