A Cloud Strife Commander deck gets a surprising boost from Magic’s TMNT and Lorwyn Eclipsed cards, creating a chaotic five-color warrior strategy.

Simon Willison:

There are a lot of open questions about this, both ethically and legally. These appear to be coming to a head in the venerable chardet Python library. chardet was created by Mark Pilgrim back in 2006 and released under the LGPL. Mark retired from public internet life in 2011 and chardet’s maintenance was taken over by others, most notably Dan Blanchard who has been responsible for every release since 1.1 in July 2012.

Two days ago Dan released chardet 7.0.0 with the following note in the release notes:

Ground-up, MIT-licensed rewrite of chardet. Same package name, same public API — drop-in replacement for chardet 5.x/6.x. Just way faster and more accurate!

Yesterday Mark Pilgrim opened #327: No right to relicense this project.

A fascinating dispute, and the first public post from Pilgrim that I’ve seen in quite a while.

Fresh off launching the low-cost MacBook Neo, Apple is reportedly preparing at least three new products that will fit into its highest-end "ultra" lineup. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, the next batch of releases may not bear the "ultra" name, like its Watch, but will all command price premiums over their mainline counterparts. There's the […]

Wall Street Journal:
The US and Israel are using AI to wage war on Iran with unprecedented speed and precision in attacks, even as the cost of ill-informed decisions remains high  —  Intelligence, targeting and damage assessments are accelerating thanks to military versions of software now remaking business and daily life

Donald Knuth, who, adorably, effectively blogs by posting TeX-typeset PDFs:

Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I’d been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6 — Anthropic’s hybrid reasoning model that had been released three weeks earlier! It seems that I’ll have to revise my opinions about “generative AI” one of these days. What a joy it is to learn not only that my conjecture has a nice solution but also to celebrate this dramatic advance in automatic deduction and creative problem solving. I’ll try to tell the story briefly in this note.

(Via Simon Willison.)