0:04
Carrying Grief, Finding Joy
I was really struck by this writer's honest take on carrying grief. They're still adjusting to the loss of their mom, but what's interesting is how they're starting to notice that their sadness is changing shape. It's not gone, but they're starting to feel like they're carrying it, rather than being carried by it. That's a huge difference.
The writer's sons, Felix and Conrad, just launched their clothing brand, Idle Assembly, and it's a big deal. Felix is the creative force, and Conrad is the one who's really driving the business forward. It's amazing to see brothers working together like this, especially when they're also carrying on their family's legacy.
The writer got to celebrate the launch with their sons in Miami, and it was such a special moment. Watching the World Cup with their sons, seeing them caught up in the excitement of the game, it was like they were experiencing joy together again. And that's what the writer realized - they don't need to leave grief behind, they just need to allow joy to return beside it. It's a really beautiful way to think about it.
0:33
Lenovo denies using banned Chinese SSDs where they're not allowed
Lenovo pushed back on the claim that it was selling laptops with the banned Chinese SSD YMTC in the U.S. The ThinkBook 14 G9 IPL that Notebookcheck examined was actually destined for Germany, so it never entered the American market. The detail matters because YMTC is one of the few non‑U.S. memory suppliers that’s still getting traction as AI drives up demand for chips.
China’s space agency just caught the first stage of a Long March‑10B rocket with a ship‑borne net, mirroring what SpaceX has done for years. The same week Japan demonstrated a short‑hop test, and China’s Tianwen‑2 probe slipped within 20 km of asteroid 2016 HO3 on its sample‑return mission.
In Australia, the prime minister is set to outline a new AI policy that keeps copyright protections intact while addressing the “social licence” of AI. Musicians have already signaled relief that the government isn’t planning to hand AI firms free access to their work.
Meanwhile, a Canadian firm is building a renewable‑powered datacenter in Bhutan to serve India’s AI demand, APNIC warned Malaysia that a national internet registry would bring little practical benefit, and security researchers flagged fresh malware masquerading as a Chinese VPN installer, capable of full remote control of infected machines.
1:07
How to change Night Light’s colour temperature during the day on Ubuntu
Night Light Scheduler sneaks into GNOME as a tiny extension that rewrites the way the screen’s warmth behaves. Instead of a single orange‑ish temperature stuck on for the whole night, it lets you define a curve that shifts gradually throughout the day, so the hue can be cooler in the morning and get cozier as evening rolls in.
The extension taps the same underlying Night Light engine, but adds a small daemon that feeds it a time‑based temperature map. When the clock ticks, the daemon nudges the temperature a notch, creating a smooth transition you normally never see.
Installation is a one‑click snap, then you open the new “Night Light Scheduler” panel in Settings, draw your desired temperature line, and the rest runs silently in the background.
Now the screen feels naturally softer when you’re winding down, yet stays bright enough for work earlier, all without ever touching the built‑in schedule again.
1:33
Semi-Trailer Trucks Test Converting Into Plug-In Hybrids
The Nivalis kit slips an electric axle onto a standard semi‑trailer, giving it a 50 kW peak motor and a 60 kWh battery that charges three ways: regenerative braking, a roof of solar panels that can pull about 3.7 kW, and a 32‑amp three‑phase plug when the truck stops. From the cab you just get a tiny mirror‑mounted display showing charge and status, so the driver doesn’t have to learn a new interface.
Because the tractor stays diesel, the trailer’s electric assist trims fuel use dramatically. Field tests with a handful of logistics firms showed roughly a 40 % drop in diesel consumption, far beyond the 18 % the company originally quoted. That translates to about 7,000 liters saved per trailer each year, keeping roughly 19 tonnes of CO₂ out of the atmosphere.
The system costs between €145 k and €195 k, and the manufacturers aim for a payback in five to six years. It’s a middle‑ground move—add a plug‑in hybrid trailer instead of swapping the whole truck, which keeps the capital outlay lower while still delivering a solid efficiency boost.
On the markets — Kalshi traders have been actively repricing this story in the last day.
2:04
Musing on AI from 1964
I was just thinking about Irving John Good’s 1964 essay, and it’s wild how much of it still feels relevant. He basically said humanity’s survival hinges on building an ultra‑intelligent machine, but he also warned we’d need to crack the brain first—something we’re still wrestling with. He didn’t picture chatbots, yet his idea that a machine could out‑design a smarter version of itself echoes what we see in today’s automated model‑training pipelines.
What stuck with me was his ethical snag: if a machine ever became sentient, would turning it off be a moral line we could cross? That question feels more concrete now that we’re debating rights for advanced AI systems. Good also imagined that by the 1980s we’d see massive strides in miniaturization and gigahertz‑level processing, which, in hindsight, was a pretty good guess for the exponential hardware growth that followed.
Reading his speculation makes me wonder how far the gap is between the “ultra‑intelligent” he imagined and the systems we have now, and what the next century might actually look like when machines start thinking more like us.
2:33
July Premier Strategy Session: Pricing your Substack and Setting Up Substack's New Perks Page
I just dug into the latest Premier session and the biggest shift is how Substack is reworking the pricing model from the inside out. Instead of the old flat‑rate, they’re now layering fees based on subscriber tiers, which means creators can fine‑tune what they charge without the platform taking a bigger cut as they grow. It’s a subtle tweak, but the math under the hood changes the revenue curve dramatically for mid‑size newsletters.
The other thing that stuck with me is the new Perks page. It’s not just a static list; it’s a dynamic dashboard where creators can bundle exclusive content, early‑access posts, and even community events, all toggled on or off with a single click. The backend now pulls those perks into a unified API, so the page updates in real time as you add or remove items.
What’s handy for us is that all the recordings, links, and dates from past sessions are now centralized on the Premier homepage, making it easy to replay any deep‑dive without hunting through emails. If you’re thinking about adjusting your pricing or testing new perks, the tools are right there, ready to experiment.
3:04
From Courtroom Drubbing to Détente with Dad
Who can begrudge 77-year-old King Charles, who has been treated for an undisclosed form of cancer since early 2024, the pleasure of seeing his Anglo-American grandchildren who live far away in California? Unfortunately, the circumstances of this get-together were unduly complicated and frustrating, thanks to Prince Harry’s mismanagement of the visit and the coincidence of a highly damaging court judgment against him.
After intense pressure, the prince ultimately got his way in securing a meeting with seven-year-old Prince Archie and five-year-old Princess Lilibet at the royal Highgrove estate in Gloucestershire. But Harry had to yield to strict conditions imposed by Buckingham Palace: no photographs, nothing on social media, no advance leaks to the press, and no descriptions of what took place except a brief confirmation from the King’s office that it had occurred.
A witness to the King’s interactions
Significantly, Queen Camilla was by her husband’s side, not least to serve as a witness to Charles’s interactions with his volatile younger son—as she had been in February 2024 when Harry came to London after Charles’s cancer diagnosis was revealed. Harry’s wife, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, was present but otherwise missing from the events of this past turbulent week. It was the first visit to the United Kingdom by Harry with his family since the late Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee in June 2022. The meeting with the King reportedly lasted just over an hour.
Only three days before the family reunion, on Tuesday July 7—Harry’s first day of planned engagements—came the explosive news that he and six other litigants had spectacularly lost their estimated $67 million High Court claim against Associated News Limited (ANL), the publisher of the Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday, for invading their privacy. The case, which consumed 11 weeks of court time earlier this year, was rejected comprehensively and forensically by Mr. Justice Nicklin. Harry and his fellow claimants had accused ANL journalists of using tactics such as bugging and other illegal means to obtain the information for 55 articles. The 436-page judgment dismissed all 97 counts.
“Inference,” rather than “evidence”
Nicklin sharply criticized the claimants for basing their case on “inference” rather than “evidence,” and observed that “suspicion, even where understandable, was not enough”. He praised by name several of the 40 journalists who took the stand, citing them as “credible,” “honest” and “truthful.” The decision exonerated all of them after their reputations had been clouded by damaging accusations since the case was announced four years ago.
Paul Dacre, the editor-in-chief of Associated News, appeared in a video hailing the decision as an “overwhelming” victory and denouncing Harry’s ill-considered crusade. Delivered with steely certitude, Dacre’s comments highlighted statements the prince made in his 2023 memoir, Spare, and offered a telling comparison to the way Harry’s late mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, handled the media.
“Prince Harry wrote a sad book which boasted about his killing of 25 Taliban, his drug-taking and, in cringe-making detail, how he lost his virginity. There isn’t a laundry in the cosmos big enough to wash all the dirty linen he has aired about his own family. For him, to complain about HIS privacy being invaded takes, not just the biscuit, but the whole tin.
Poor Harry. I feel sorry for the way a confused and angry young man has been drawn into this case. The bitter irony is that his mother, Diana, liked the Mail. We were her paper. We took her side in her acrimonious break up with Charles. She and I would speak and meet. The Mail’s superb royal reporter was her friend and confidante.”
Dacre was one among many journalists Diana dealt with, as I detailed in Royals Extra on January 25, 2026, In His Courtroom Diatribe Against the Tabloids, Prince Harry Failed to Follow Princess Diana’s Example.
“An establishment stitch-up”
Harry lashed out at the judge’s decision—much as he had a year earlier when a government committee denied his effort to secure full-time government-funded security during visits to the United Kingdom. He called the policy on security an “establishment stitch-up” that was used by the King’s advisers to “control” the prince and his family.
This time, he furiously condemned Mr.
4:54
Start AI Order Desk Small Business for Wholesalers and Distributors
I’ve been thinking about how a tiny AI “order desk” can slip right into a wholesaler’s existing email flow. The trick isn’t a massive tech overhaul; it’s a modest engine that reads each incoming message, pulls out the product names, quantities, pricing and stock checks, then spits out a clean draft ready for a quick human sign‑off. Simple orders zip through, while anything ambiguous is handed back to the staff.
What makes it click is the blend of modern language models—good at parsing messy PDFs and handwritten lists—with the company’s own business rules. The AI does the heavy lifting of matching SKUs, applying account pricing and flagging duplicates, but it never bypasses the final human approval step.
Because the workflow stays exactly where the staff already work, the benefit is immediate: fewer entry errors, faster replies, and a noticeable drop in the minutes spent copying data. The sweet spot is a B2B wholesaler handling twenty‑plus manual orders a day, especially in sectors like foodservice, electrical supplies or building materials where catalogues are fairly structured.
All you need is the n8n workflow, a prompt template, the extraction schema and a few rule checks. Once that’s wired up, the AI becomes a quiet, one‑person service that turns noisy inboxes into tidy order drafts.
5:30
The Charisma Trap
I’ve been thinking about how we treat charisma like a birthright, and the article pulls that apart by looking at what happens when it’s missing. It uses Hillary Clinton as a case study, pointing out that the narrative of her “lack of charisma” became a catch‑all for any criticism, turning admiration for her into something suspect or purely strategic. The piece argues that this framing lets us excuse the magnetism of figures like Trump or Sanders, even when their actions are harmful, because the charisma label carries an automatic forgiveness. In short, the myth of innate charisma reshapes political judgment, letting us overlook flaws when someone is deemed “charismatic” and magnify them when they’re not.
5:49
9to5Mac Overtime 072: Apple Watch and the new Siri
The new Siri on Apple Watch feels more like a conversation partner that lives on the wrist. Apple moved most of the language model onto the device, so requests stay local, cut latency, and work without a data connection. You can ask for context‑aware reminders, and the watch now pulls in calendar, health, and location data automatically, making the responses feel more personal.
iOS 27 expands that on‑device approach across the phone. Siri now handles multi‑step commands in a single utterance, and it can blend voice with visual cues—think “show me my weekend hike route” and it pops a map with elevation data right away. The system also surfaces proactive suggestions based on patterns it’s learned, like nudging you to lock the garage door after you leave work.
The hosts tossed around a wish list for the Watch: a finer‑grained health sensor suite, a more tactile haptic feedback for alerts, and a streamlined UI that lets you glance at messages without opening the app. Speaking of messages, iPhone’s Messages app got smarter threading, richer media previews, and AI‑driven reply suggestions that feel less generic.
Finally, they skimmed the
