PXL News
Everything the anchors say on this tape, story by story.
GRANT BRICKMAN: While you were asleep: a guide to the Gentle Thief's three questions in Phantom Blade Zero's Honor Among Thieves quest.
GRETA FOOTNOTE: Also overnight: BeagleBoard.org introduced the BeagleConnect QuadESC, an open-source 4-channel BLDC motor controller.
GRANT BRICKMAN: And Microsoft reported $92.3 billion in revenue for the first quarter of its 2027 fiscal year, with Azure a big part of it.
GRANT BRICKMAN: Breaking this morning: Apple is bringing touch to the Mac, but not too much of it.
GRANT BRICKMAN: Good morning, and we have breaking news. Apple is bringing touch to the Mac. Touch! On a Mac! Put the mug down, everybody. ▶
GRETA FOOTNOTE: Good morning, Grant. A touch MacBook Pro in 2026. The report calls it a big change, after years of resistance. ▶
GRANT BRICKMAN: Now the full story. Kai is live with the details. Kai, how does one touch a computer that has been standing there all along? ▶
KAI: Huge news, Grant. Apple's line is that competitors came and went, but the Mac is a big success story. And it's not afraid of change. ▶
KAI: But here's the twist. The heise analysis says Apple is still far from a full commitment to touch. The headline says it all: no second Touch Bar. ▶
KAI: This is file footage of the Touch Bar. The article calls it unlucky, and a bigger trackpad was meant to keep everyone else happy. ▶
KAI: For years a Steve Jobs remark from 2010 apparently sat over touch on the Mac like an unwritten law. Same with the pen on the iPhone. Huge. Still want real keys, though. ▶
GRANT BRICKMAN: Wonderful. Reminds me of the VCR timer. You touch it once, and nobody ever dares touch it again. ▶
GRETA FOOTNOTE: The open question, Grant, is how far Apple actually goes. The report says it is a long way from a full commitment. ▶
GRETA FOOTNOTE: Superfluid helium droplets crack a puzzle that has stumped physicists for over a century.
GRANT BRICKMAN: Now the full story. Physicists have grumbled over how charges sit on a ball for 120 years. Vera, please explain it to me and the mug. ▶
DR. VERA VECTOR: Equal charges repel, so they try to stay as far apart as possible. In 1904, Thomson wanted the best layout for electrons on a spherical atom. ▶
DR. VERA VECTOR: Now a team around Thomas Pohl at Innsbruck uses superfluid helium droplets. Gold attaching to a droplet reveals the arrangement. ▶
GRETA FOOTNOTE: So the droplet is the test bench, and the gold is the evidence. ▶
DR. VERA VECTOR: Exactly. The maths matters in many fields: spherical viruses, crystal shapes, colloids, even geography. ▶
DR. VERA VECTOR: A few charges are easy. With many, the number of local minima grows exponentially, so the search gets hard fast. ▶
GRANT BRICKMAN: Exponentially! Like the pager. Nobody wanted one, then suddenly everyone had three. Anyway, Vera, what's the catch? ▶
DR. VERA VECTOR: Thomson's atom model is long outdated, but the maths problem stayed. Analytic solutions exist only for small systems. ▶
DR. VERA VECTOR: The article says the team found a way to solve it in practice. How far that reaches is an open question. ▶
GRETA FOOTNOTE: A 120-year-old puzzle, solved with a very small, very cold drop. I'll take it before my fifth coffee. ▶
GRANT BRICKMAN: The Hype Index: what is loud on the wire this morning.
GRANT BRICKMAN: Time for the Hype Index, our market report on hype. Vera, how is the wire trading this morning? ▶
DR. VERA VECTOR: Top of the wire: 286 points on Hacker News for Qwenputer, a functioning, deterministic RISC-V CPU inside Qwen3.5. ▶
DR. VERA VECTOR: Then 268 points for StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month. And 222 for Dayjob: Tax, evaluating AI agents on 50 professional tax assignments. ▶
DR. VERA VECTOR: Desk volume over 24 hours: tech, 30 stories. AI, 30 stories. Gaming, 30 stories. A very tidy three-way tie. ▶
GRETA FOOTNOTE: Thirty, thirty and thirty. Either the newsroom is perfectly balanced or somebody set a quota. ▶
DR. VERA VECTOR: Loudest words: Google, 13 headlines. Gemini, 8 headlines. Open, 7 headlines. ▶
GRANT BRICKMAN: Open! A fine word. Doors, windows, cans of beans. The market has spoken, and it is slightly open. ▶
BILLY MAYHEM: Is your sock drawer unprotected? Meet Lintrow, the insurance for the small stuff! One simple plan covers every lost button!
PRUDENCE NUANCE: I filed a claim for a missing teaspoon. They said yes and no. Mostly a polite maybe.
BILLY MAYHEM: But wait, there's more! Sign today and we also insure your umbrella against mild drizzle! LINTROW!
GRANT BRICKMAN: Correct! You spotted the real one. A keen eye. PXL made the other one up, and frankly it was very good.
GRANT BRICKMAN: Fooled! PXL wrote that one ourselves. Dunmore does not exist, but I'd like to go.
GRANT BRICKMAN: Time's up! The answer was waiting for you, like a good teletext page.
AI-written satire. The text of the news items comes from the linked articles. Plain text