So in Florence, there's this really cool opportunity to experience the city in a unique way. You can stay for three nights and get private access to some amazing places, like artisans' workshops and private palaces. You'll also get to visit the Ferragamo Archives, which is pretty special. And since it's just after the grape harvest, you'll get to see the Chianti countryside in all its beauty.
The food is also a big part of this experience, with meals in some really grand and intimate settings. You'll get to try some classic Florentine dishes like ribollita and bistecca alla fiorentina. It's a great way to learn about the city's culinary heritage.
There's also a guide put together by David Prior that recommends some of the best hotels, restaurants, and shops in Florence. It's a great resource if you're planning a trip there. Overall, it seems like a really special way to experience Florence, with a lot of unique and exclusive experiences.
So I was looking at this collection of vintage rugs that can be shipped from various cities. What caught my attention was the variety of locations, with New York and Portland being mentioned specifically. It seems like the idea is to feature items from different cities each week, with readers encouraged to suggest their own city for the next roundup. The focus this time is on some really unique vintage rugs found on Etsy, which have been curated and linked for easy browsing.
Every premiere has a dress rehearsal. The actors run the full script in a smaller room, before a friendlier crowd, so that the timing is right when the curtain goes up for real. On June 13, in Grand Ballroom B at the Republican Party of Texas convention, I watched a dress rehearsal. The premiere is scheduled for July 18, when the same network stages a ‘conservative grassroots’ “Nationwide Day of Protest” against AI data centers in at least 13 locations. The panel and the protest are sold to conservatives as two independent expressions of a genuine conservative grassroots awakening. They are nothing of the kind. They are one production, with one script, one director, and one source of money, and the convention was the dress rehearsal you were allowed to watch. Start with the question that should stop any thinking conservative cold. Why would money tied to the AI industry, and to the tech fortunes built beside it, pay to organize opposition to AI infrastructure? The premise seems self-refuting. People do not fund their own enemies. The puzzle dissolves the instant you grasp what the fight is actually about. It is not a fight over whether AI gets built. It is a fight over who is allowed to build it, and over who writes the rules that decide. The economist Gabriel Kolko explained this pattern a half century ago. The great incumbents of the railroad and meatpacking eras did not fear regulation. They wrote it, because rules drafted to their specifications crushed the smaller rivals who could not absorb the cost of compliance. Safety becomes the moat. The incumbent does not drain the swamp around his castle, he deepens it, and he names the project public protection. Read with that lens, the funding trail stops being mysterious and becomes legible. The group behind the July 18 protest is called Humans First. The Washington Post reported that Humans First was incubated by the Center for AI Safety, which supplied seed money as a loan and whose co-founder appears on the California incorporation papers as the new group’s chief executive. The Center for AI Safety is not a conservative institution, and its money is not conservative money. A detailed public accounting puts its funding near $23.3 million, of which more than $21 million came from a small circle of effective-altruism donors. Open Philanthropy, financed by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, supplied roughly $12.49 million. Jaan Tallinn, an early Skype engineer who also sits on the Center’s board, routed about $7.5 million through his Survival and Flourishing Fund. Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX Future Fund put in $6.5 million before the fraud collapsed, after which the bankruptcy estate clawed back some $5.2 million of it. Even OpenAI is in the documents, with a $333,333 grant on its 2023 tax filing, and its chief executive among the signatories of the Center’s headline extinction statement. The staffing confirms what the money implies. The movement strategist for Humans First, Jeremy Ornstein, helped build the Sunrise Movement, and in 2018 he was among the activists who occupied Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office alongside a newly elected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. His coalition counterpart, Alexander McCoy, is a self-described member of the Democratic Socialists of America who co-founded a veterans group built to impeach President Trump and who, as the Washington Post separately confirmed, campaigned for Vice President Harris in 2024. These are not incidental hires. They are the people who write the script that conservatives are then recruited to perform. Now watch the same company take the convention stage. The host was the Alliance for Secure AI, run by Brendan Steinhauser, whose conservative resume is authentic and whose usefulness depends on exactly that. The tell sits in one line of his own biography, where he serves on the board of the AI Policy Institute, one of the policy shops the trade press places squarely inside the effective-altruism orbit. The panel’s moderator, Robert Arnakis, is the Alliance’s own Director of External Affairs, which means the supposedly neutral host and the supposedly neutral moderator are a single organization. Dr. Vael Gates, introduced from the stage as arriving from Berkeley, is no Texas grassroots activist at all. She is a career effective-altruism AI-safety researcher whose own talk materials list Open Philanthropy among her funders, and she delivered the verbatim catechism of that movement, warning that frontier labs are building a “second intelligent species” that humanity may not survive. The faith segment came from a Future of Life Institute speaker, an organization founded by Max Tegmark and the same Jaan Tallinn whose money already sits in the Center’s ledgers.
On the markets — Kalshi traders have been actively repricing this story in the last day.
China In Arms BOOKSTORE and GIFT SHOP! Twitter and YouTube Page and LinkedIn Subscribe: $5 Monthly; Cancel Anytime Subscribe now 23 June 2026 (Tuesday) A Most Wanted Man Le Carré’s Cold War Classic in Post-9/11 Clothing By Wendell Minnick (Whiskey Mike) 顏文德 TAIPEI - A Most Wanted Man (2014) delivers a gripping slow-burn spy thriller that ranks among the strongest adaptations of John le Carré’s work. Director Anton Corbijn brings the story to life with atmospheric precision, starring the late Philip Seymour Hoffman in one of his final lead roles as the weary German intelligence operative Günther Bachmann. The plot centers on a Chechen refugee who arrives in post-9/11 Hamburg and ignites a delicate intelligence operation. Bankers, lawyers, and rival agencies clash as they navigate moral gray zones, betrayal, and the tension between patient tradecraft and blunt political pressure. Though set in the War on Terror era, the film unfolds as a classic Cold War study. It captures le Carré’s signature moral ambiguity, bureaucratic cynicism, and quiet human drama, transposed into the modern surveillance state. Based on le Carré’s 2008 novel A Most Wanted Man, the movie elevates its deliberate pacing through nuanced performances by Hoffman, Rachel McAdams, Willem Dafoe, and Robin Wright. Wright, in particular, nails the role of a ruthless Washington operator. Le Carré fans still await a big-screen version of The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), his novel set in Hong Kong during the final days of the Vietnam War. This reviewer missed A Most Wanted Man during its theatrical run in Taipei. In an era when many spy films rely on clichés - archetypal femme fatales, cartoonish Middle Eastern villains with bombs, and gimmicky gadgets - the genre often triggers my “popcorn rule”: if the story fails to engage by the time the box empties, it’s time to leave the theater. Corbijn’s film breaks that rule. It rewards patience with emotionally devastating payoff and stands as smart, subtle espionage at its best. Leave a comment Subscribe now Give a gift subscription Get 20% off a group subscription
Last week, AMD was found to have stripped memory encryption from its consumer CPUs without any warning or notice. Now, following a wave of backlash on social media, the chipmaker has now reinstated the protection, though it still hasn't explained why the safeguard was disabled in the first place. Ars Technica reports: Following the revelation, social media was deluged by comments from AMD consumers decrying the move. They noted that AMD's quiet removal of TSME after supporting it for so long seemed underhanded. The move came solely as a result of firmware changes made in a recent update. With no physical changes required to silicon, continued support was largely, if not purely, a matter of will rather than a necessity required by changes to hardware. The critics called on AMD to reverse the move. Over the weekend, AMD said it planned to do just that in a firmware update scheduled for release next month. More often than not, the chipmaker refers to TSME as Memory Guard. "Regarding certain non-PRO Ryzen 9000-series desktop processors, a BIOS option to enable Memory Guard was previously available but was removed in a recent update," AMD said in an email. "Based on valuable community feedback, we will reinstate this option in an upcoming BIOS release in July." The company has yet to explain why it removed the protection. Critics speculate that AMD dropped it in an attempt to steer customers toward more costly CPUs. It's possible, though, that there were less nefarious reasons, such as the difficulty of continued support as chip designs changed. Another possibility is that AMD made the move for performance reasons. Encrypting and decrypting data in memory creates latency. Slowdowns are the enemy of gamers, one of the more popular customer segments using the 9000-line of Ryzen processors. Since many gamers already voluntarily disabled TSME and had little need for it in the first place, AMD may not have considered the change of much consequence.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Microsoft has accidentally introduced a bug in Outlook for Mac that omits the original message from email replies, making it difficult for recipients to follow conversation history. Until Microsoft releases a fix, its suggested workaround is to roll back from version 16.110 and disable automatic updates, which is "great for users in full control of their devices -- not so good for anyone with a managed device," notes The Register. "Administrators with fleets of Macs running Outlook should brace for helpdesk tickets." From the report: In some instances, having a user copy and paste the salient bits of the email they are responding to might not be such a bad thing. We've all had emails that required epic amounts of scrolling to find what started the conversation, so forcing users to think about what they actually need to include is no bad thing. However, disrupting user workflows without warning -- well, that is undoubtedly a bad thing. This is, after all, one of the most basic things an email client needs to do, so shipping a product with a bug that breaks this functionality says more about Microsoft's approach to quality than anything else.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
GM slipped about fifty new FANUC robot arms onto the line at its Detroit “Factory Zero” plant, the same spot where they’ve been idling roughly 1,300 workers since a temporary layoff in March. The robots are set up to tack on components during assembly, a move that trims a few manual steps but also signals a shift in how the plant is staffed.
What’s striking is the timing: the automation rollout began while the union‑backed layoffs are still hanging in the balance. The United Auto Workers’ local leadership has been vocal, arguing that the company could have recalled some of those workers instead of filling the gaps with machines.
Other automakers are already on a similar path—Stellantis and Ford have been adding FANUC arms, and Hyundai is eyeing Boston Dynamics’ Atlas humanoids for a Georgia EV plant by 2028. Those moves are feeding a broader debate about whether automation is a safety net or a profit lever.
For the workers on the line, the new arms feel like a reminder that the promise of a shorter week or safer jobs can get lost when the bottom line takes precedence. The tension at Factory Zero now sits between the whir of fresh robotics and the empty stations left by the laid‑off crew.
When you approach the world of Linux, you have a ton of distros at your disposal; however, you'll only see a handful get recommended. For newcomers, people point toward Linux Mint. From there, people may direct others to Fedora, Ubuntu, or even an Arch-based system. But one distro I rarely see pop up in discussions surrounding distros is openSUSE's offerings, which is really saddening, given how I adore its rolling release distro, Tumbleweed.
VS Code has been my comfort zone for years. It is fast, flexible, familiar, and has an extension for almost everything . But after spending some time with Google Antigravity 2.0, I finally understand what a next-generation IDE is supposed to feel like.
Amid the growing memory crisis, AMD seems to have found a rather unconventional plan to reduce reliance on DRAM. On June 15, the company acquired MEXT, a California-based startup behind the development of an AI-driven memory tiering system capable of making NAND flash storage behave like DRAM.
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