đ The CitroĂ«n 2CV 2028 Concept Car is Adorable
Look how cute this thing is:
Jameson Dow at Electrek:
CitroĂ«n has unveiled a concept electric version of its classic 2CV, aiming to bring the vehicle to market in 2028 for just âŹ15,000.
For the entire second half of the 20th century, the CitroĂ«n 2CV (âDeux Chevaux,â French for âtwo horsesâ) held a special place in Europeâs automotive landscape.
The affordable, comfortable, yet underpowered vehicle had enormous popularity, selling millions of units over its production run.
Its cute, quirky look was unique and eye-catching, with its tall, rounded, cartoon-like passenger cabin, jaunty circular headlights, and pop-up windows.
And that interior!
There are more photos in Electrek's article.
This will probably never see the light of day in the US, but I'd love to see more whimsical, fun, playful, and small cars like this over here.
đŠ« Beavers Destroy Sign Warning About Beavers
Daniel Tilles at Notes From Poland:
A sign installed to warn the public about damage caused by beavers has been destroyed by the beavers themselves, according to the Polish foresters who erected it.
The incident was reported in a post on social media by the forestry district of Lubliniec in southern Poland, which shared photos of the sign, which read âWarning! Damage caused by beaversâ. The wooden post it was displayed on had been destroyed in an apparent beaver attack.
The hubris of the sign was its undoing.
đ The People Holding Up the Internet
Sheets.works:
People post this comic whenever something breaks. The tower is labelled "all modern digital infrastructure" and it stands on one small block, "a project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003".
We wanted to know how close to true it is. We downloaded the full history of 23 pieces of software that phones, browsers and servers depend on, and counted everyone who made ten or more changes to each one between October 2025 and October 2026. Then we listed what is actually installed on an Android phone, an iPhone and a Windows PC.
It's great to see the people doing this work called out in this piece. It's less great to see how little they're appreciated or compensated for it.
Knowing how much of the digital world is held together by people who do many years of hard work for little to no rewardâbeyond the satisfaction of doing the work itself, of courseâmakes me hopeful that the moneyless future utopia depicted in Star Trek is, in fact, possible.
đȘŠ The Job Trail
Bryan Mamaril built an Oregon Trail style web game called The Job Trail:
It is 2026. You have been laid off. Somewhere there is a job.
I made it 12 weeks in before I ran out of money. Maybe a little too on the nose, a little too real.
đș Dark Matter: Love and Be Loved
As a fan of science fiction, I've been watching Dark Matter since it premiered. It's a good show with solid execution, but nothing exceptional.
Until now.
I just watched the latest episode, Love and Be Loved (season two, episode eight), and I'm here to tell you that episode is a masterpiece. I haven't seen anything on television that good in years. The writing, acting, cinematography, tone, pacing... everything was exquisite.
Even if you're lukewarm on every prior episode, it's still worth it to watch the entire show to get the backstory, nuance, and framing that leads up to this single episode.
Highly recommended.
đ Dropout
I want to blog more about the good stuff, so let's talk about the streaming service Dropout. (This isn't a sponsored post or anything, I'm just a big fan.)
Dropout is fairly unique in both the type of content they produce and in how the business itself is run. They treat everyone they work with quite well (they pay residuals to writers, actors, and crew members, do profit sharing, pay people to audition, and more). The positive energy this brings aboutâboth in front of and behind the cameraâis palpable and tangibly elevates the content in ways that can't be faked. If want to learn more about this side of things, check out the Dropout Wikipedia page.
Some of my favorite Dropout shows are Game Changer, Make Some Noise, and Crowd Control. More than once I've had to pause an episode because I was laughing too hard and needed to recover before continuing. Game Changer, in particular, has a special place in my heart due to the unique brand of effervescent chaos it employs.
There's also a lot of top-notch fan-made content, like DeepBlueInk's animations that use the audio from Game Changer and Make Some Noise. Two of the best ones: A Knight's Concerning Oath and Kermit the Frog Represents Himself on a Murder Charge (if you visit only two links in this entire post, please make it these two).
If you're curious about Dropout but don't want to jump straight into a subscription, check out the Dropout YouTube channel for a lot of clips and other tidbits.
đ Attention is All You Have
Alice Girard Guittard:
Before recommendation algorithms were a thing, you had to decide what you would be doing on the computer.
You didnât really have one big app that you could open and order it to entertain you. Instead, you had a few dozen of bookmarks to websites, each with a specific idea in mind. A site for video game news, that one website with lots of tutorials, a blog about anime that didnât update often enough, a wiki about a TV show from the 90sâŠ
Of course awful things existed on the web. We had Encyclopedia Dramatica and Rotten.com, but you actually had to put the effort to go there if you wanted. Nobody was going to put pictures of dead kids and far-right propaganda as a suggestion after a pancake recipe or a cat video.
The good thing is that this intentional internet is still around. It has just been a bit buried below the corporate web, but itâs not very hard to find. After all youâre on this blog, so you probably already have a good idea about it.
I was lucky enough to grow up alongside the Internet. RFC 791âthe one that defines IPv4âwas published the same month I was born. When I was growing up, the only option was to be intentional when using the computer, so that's what I learned to do. I loved it.
By the time big and popular social media came around it was so different from my tried-and-true approach that it never really stuck. Sure, I've dabbled with social media over the years, but my use and engagement have always been low.
I prefer things like RSS feeds, newsletters, and Tumblr (which is, I guess, technically social media in its own unique way) over anything with an algorithmic feed. To put it another way, I prefer to select who has access to my time and attention instead of letting an algorithmic feed wash over me.
To be clear, I don't think algorithmic feeds are all bad. They can be quite useful for discovering new and interesting things, but you have to be careful about the algorithms you trust (which are few and far between these days) and use them in moderation. Given when and how I grew upâspending a lot of time on the computerâthat's easy for me, but it's not easy for a lot of people with different experience, like a lot of people younger than me. I mean, hell, a lot of those folks probably don't even realize there are other options.
That's a shame. A lot of people would benefit from being more intentional when using their computers, phones, and the Internet, but it's hard to demonstrate the benefits when the algorithms are so compelling. Sometimes you get lucky and the algorithm surfaces some great stuff, but those algorithms have their own agendas, and those agendas do not have your best interests at heart.
Being a passenger can be fun, but there's a lot of amazing stuff out there you'll never find if you don't spend some time in the driver's seat.
âąïž US Military Had Close Call After Using AI for False Intelligence Report, Sources Say
Katie Bo Lillis and Zachary Cohen at CNN:
The intelligence report, circulated across the US military this spring in the midst of the war with Iran, immediately set off alarm bells: A Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program.
The US military swung into action with plans to intercept the vessel, according to four sources familiar with the episode. According to two of the sources, armed members of the US military were preparing to board the ship. Military planes were in the air, one of those sources and another source familiar with the incident said.
It was only just before the planned operation that officials dug deeper into the report put together by a special operations command analyst and found it had been generated with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) â and that a chatbot the analyst had used inaccurately identified the material the ship was carrying. CNN was not able to learn what the misidentified cargo was.
The report, according to one of the sources, was âentirely false.â But it also âalmost started a war,â the source said. Any US operation against a Chinese vessel could have risked spiraling into an armed conflict between the two nations.
This is fine.
đ§ Human Brain is Two Separate Organs
Krista Conger at Stanford Medicine:
The new research finding shows that the human brain consists of two ancient nervous systems cleverly packaged together â a more primitive part that regulates our heartsâ beating, our breathing and other functions, and another that makes us distinctly human, capable of poetry, mathematics and wondering about our own origins.
The discovery could help explain why scientists have struggled for decades to grow certain types of brain cells in the laboratory â and it opens new avenues for studying devastating diseases that affect the brain stem, such as spinal muscular atrophy (also known as SMA) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also known as ALS or Lou Gehrigâs disease).
Fascinating.
This kind of discovery always serves to remind me about how much we don't know, and how much is still left to discover about the universe and ourselves.
âïž More on the iPhone Duo Pencil
In my previous post about the iPhone Duo I speculated that there was more to the Apple Pencil support story:
Regarding Apple Pencil support, I feel like we don't have the full story yet. Currently, Apple says iPhone Duo is compatible with only the USB-C Apple Pencil which has very few features compared to the Apple Pencil Pro. That's out of necessity; without the magnetic connection hardware, there's no way for the Apple Pencil Pro to pair or charge with iPhone Duo.
But why is Apple Pencil support for iPhone Duo coming later this year? And why weren't there any Apple Pencils at the hands-on event? Even if the feature is coming later this year, why not let at least some of the press use an early beta version?
Here's my wild theory: there's a new Apple Pencil coming in October alongside the rumored OLED iPad mini, and that new Apple Pencil will not just work with the iPhone Duo, but will clearly be the one best suited for it. What I'm hoping for is a slightly smaller (shorter, more pocketable) Apple Pencil with pressure sensitivity that works with some kind of inkwell-like USB-C charging/pairing base.
Wishful thinking? Maybe, but the iPhone Duo Apple Pencil vibes are off. This device would be a killer sketchbook with apps like Linea Sketch and Procreate, or even just Apple's Notes app, but it can only really excel with additional Pencil hardware features like pressure sensitivity. The USB-C Apple Pencil only supports tilt, and while that's better than nothing, but my gut tells me there's another shoe that hasn't dropped yet.
This morning Michael Burkhardt wrote this over at 9to5Mac:
[Apple] initially planned to build a new Apple Pencil for the Duo. It wouldâve been smaller and attached to the hinge side of the iPhone Duo.
According to Bloomberg, that pencil ran into âtechnical problemsâ prior to mass production, so the company scrapped it and went with the traditional USB-C Apple Pencil.
After the keynote, you mightâve noticed on Appleâs website that Apple Pencil support wonât be available on iPhone Duo at launch. That delay is a result of the fact that the product wasnât initially designed with the USB-C Apple Pencil in mind, and Apple still needs to test it thoroughly
If true, it sounds like my hopes and dreams of a new iPhone Duo-compatible Pencil dropping soon (alongside a new iPad mini) were, indeed, too optimistic.
It will be really interesting to see the iPhone Duo teardown and find out if there's any Pencil-related magnetic hardware inside.