ChemistryCarl

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying 24 Starlink satellites lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Sunday, June 28, 2026. Source: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/spacex-starlink-17-40-b1088-vsfb-ocisly

That is an objectively dope couch. | Image: Kai Wright Kai Wright is the co-host of Stateside with Kai and Carter over at the Guardian. But Wright has been bringing his unique insights to listeners for years. He's also hosted Notes From America, The United States of Anxiety, and Indivisible. He's a Peabody Award-winning journalist who has profiled powerful men, explored what it means to be American, and chronicled the AIDS epidemic. When he's not diving deep on sex, race, and politics, he's gardening, listening to John Coltrane, and steadfastly refusing to buy a new phone. Wright was kind enough to give us a glimpse into his daily routine, how he unwinds, and offer some simple but powerful advi … Read the full story at The Verge. Source: https://www.theverge.com/report/958695/kai-wright-npr-guardian-interview-questionnaire

A GTAO sequel is almost certainly coming, but the singleplayer campaign should be the priority. Source: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/grand-theft-auto/we-should-all-be-happy-that-gta-6-isnt-launching-with-multiplayer/

Apple is hiking prices in response to the ongoing memory shortage. On Thursday, the company adjusted the price of its new MacBook Neo, which will now start at $699 instead of $599, while the base MacBook Air will jump to $1,299 from $1,099, as reported earlier by Bloomberg. The 14-inch MacBook Pro is getting an increase as well, going from $1,699 to $1,999. Meanwhile, the iPad Air will now start at $749 instead of $599, while the iPad Pro is increasing to $1,199 from $999. As spotted by Bloomberg, Apple is even raising the prices of its HomePod, which now costs $349 instead of $299, as well as raising the price of the HomePod mini to $129 … Read the full story at The Verge. Source: https://www.theverge.com/tech/952162/apple-price-increase-ram-shortage

"Our findings suggest that experience effects can turn short-run declines in labor demand into long-run declines in labor supply." Source: https://fortune.com/2026/06/21/male-labor-force-participation-rate-decline-childhood-experience-wages-unemployment/

There are plenty of useful things a metric can reveal. There are even more it can obscure or corrupt. It took me well over a decade of tracking my own life in ever greater detail to fully appreciate this duality, which probably reveals something about both me and the nature of measurement. Like a lot… Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/06/19/1138778/inevitable-weakness-metrics-quantified-life-book-review/

Nobel Peace Prize winner PM Abiy Ahmed will stay in power, as analysts warn of renewed conflicts in Ethiopia. Source: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/6/21/ethiopian-prime-ministers-party-easily-wins-parliamentary-election?traffic_source=rss

Hyperventilating experts were wrong about the Iran war. The end of the conflict is a massive buy signal for stocks. Source: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trumps-iran-agreement-changes-the-game-for-investors-these-are-the-two-sectors-to-buy-right-now-0705bc62?mod=mw_rss_topstories

Check out this video from gameranx: "TWO Games about Repairing Retro Electronics You Can Play RIGHT NOW" Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/DRIV9L_AcuQ

Tokyo-based AI startup Sakana AI has officially launched its first commercial product, Sakana Marlin. Billed as a "Virtual CSO" (Chief Strategy Officer), Marlin is an autonomous, B2B research agent that deliberately abandons the instantaneous text generation of modern chatbots in favor of deep, long-horizon reasoning. What sets Marlin apart from the current ecosystem of AI tools is its temporal scale: instead of returning an answer in seconds, it runs continuous, self-governing reasoning loops for up to eight hours at a time to deliver deeply researched, well cited, 100-page strategy reports and executive slides. The company posted sample reports generated by Marlin on its product website here. Available immediately via the company’s website with pricing starting at a pay-as-you-go tier, the platform is designed strictly for enterprise use—specifically targeting corporations, financial institutions, and think tanks. The generative AI hype cycle has largely been defined by speed. For the past two years, the industry standard has been the ability to generate a poem, a line of code, or a surface-level summary in mere milliseconds. But the enterprise frontier is rapidly shifting from shallow, rapid generation to deep, methodical reasoning. With Marlin, major businesses are no longer asking how fast an AI can answer, but how deeply it can think. The Product: A Virtual CSO What exactly is a business getting when they deploy Sakana Marlin? The workflow is fundamentally different from typical large language model (LLM) interactions. Rather than engaging in a tedious back-and-forth prompt engineering session, the user simply provides a core research topic. Following a brief initial exchange to sharpen the scope and direction of the investigation, the human steps away entirely. For the next several hours, Marlin operates as a self-contained digital strategy team. It formulates ... Source: https://venturebeat.com/technology/when-deep-research-isnt-enough-for-your-business-sakana-ai-launches-ultra-deep-research-agent-for-100-page-reports-in-8-hours