TRANSCRIPT

## Headlines
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.

## Apples Touch-Kehrtwende: Bloß keine zweite Touch Bar (heise online)
https://www.heise.de/meinung/Apples-Touch-Kehrtwende-Bloss-keine-zweite-Touch-Bar-11503889.html?wt_mc=rss.red.ho.ho.atom.beitrag.beitrag
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.

## Heliumtropfen machen 120 Jahre altes Verteilungsrätsel sichtbar (wissenschaft.de)
https://wissenschaft.de/artikel/heliumtropfen-machen-120-jahre-altes-verteilungsraetsel-sichtbar
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.

## The Hype Index (PXL)
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.

## [AD · fictional product] Lintrow
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!

## Real or PXL?
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.