I doubt this will take off like, say, GlassDoor, but if it catches on, could be an interesting resource to make oneself feel better. Orders of magnitude more data are needed for this to be useful.

The answer is "yes." The methods are ...

For cheesemongers in the United States, these should be creamy times.

“The Big Cheese,” a documentary about mongering, opens at the IFC Center in Manhattan next month, bringing the arts of slicing, wrapping and spieling great cheese to the big screen. Last year, the gold medal at the Mondial du Fromage, a biennial cheesemongering competition in Tours, France, was won by an American for the first time, the culmination of the home team’s decade-long quest to gain the respect enjoyed by European mongers.

There are reasons to celebrate on the public-health front, too. A wedge of cheese reigns in glory near the top of the newly inverted food pyramid the federal government put out in 2025.

Few mongers are cheering, though. They are deeply anxious about the future of their profession.

A chaotic barrage of tariffs and a war in the Middle East have driven up the prices of many cheeses, both imported and domestic. Grocery chains increasingly stock grab-and-go hunks of cheese vacuum-sealed in plastic, slashing jobs for mongers and selling at prices that independent counters can’t match. Smaller stores have trouble finding bright, curd-curious young people who will take minimum-wage pay or just above it to work on their feet all day caring for dense wheels streaked with entrancingly pungent blue mold and luxurious triple-cream rounds that drip like honey.

Nintendo urged a court to dismiss a lawsuit demanding that it pass tariff refunds on to customers, saying that people who bought a Switch console or other products have no legal right to refunds that Nintendo is due to receive from the government.

Nintendo said in a motion to dismiss yesterday that plaintiffs are “ask[ing] this Court to invent a legal duty out of whole cloth to retroactively re-price completed sales simply because the legal landscape has changed.” Nintendo said the plaintiffs “have no legal entitlement to the tariff refunds Nintendo stands to receive.”

The lawsuit was filed in April by two customers who seek to represent a class of all US residents who bought Nintendo products from February 2025 to February 2026. California resident Gregory Hoffert and Washington resident Prashant Sharan filed the class action complaint in US District Court for the Western District of Washington, alleging unjust enrichment and a violation of the Washington Consumer Protection Act’s prohibition on unfair or deceptive acts.

“Nintendo engaged in unfair acts by: (i) raising prices due to tariffs; (ii) failing to disclose that it intended to seek tariff refunds; and (iii) retaining tariff refunds despite having passed the costs to its customers,” the lawsuit alleged. In their unjust-enrichment claim, plaintiffs said Nintendo profits were “unjustly obtained as a result of its price increases on goods subject to unlawful tariffs.” Nintendo raised prices for the original Switch console by $30 to $50 and added $5 to $10 to the prices of various Switch 2 accessories.

Nintendo told the court that “the doctrine of unjust enrichment does not apply when a party voluntarily pays a purchase price and receives a product in return.” Nintendo said plaintiffs “received exactly what they paid for: Nintendo products that Plaintiffs knowingly and voluntarily purchased at the advertised price. Nor is there anything ‘unjust’ about Nintendo retaining money that it may receive from the government as tariff refunds. The fact that Nintendo stands to receive tariff refunds does not give Plaintiffs any legal entitlement to those funds.”

People always suspected big tech was greedy, but not quite like this. Patrons of Amazon Web Services have been landed with panic-inducing monthly bills running as high as $1.5tn for subscriptions that usually cost less than the price of a cup of coffee.

From Bangalore to Bolsover, the bills have been causing alarm after a computer glitch resulted in the astronomical invoices being dispatched around the world by Jeff Bezos’s company, which provides data and cloud services to millions of customers, from students and small charities to big businesses.

“I almost had a heart attack when I received an email alert from Amazon Web Services with the billing for our charity’s school grounds audit app, which usually costs us less than a pound per month,” Dan Harvey, the head of marketing at the Hampshire-based Learning Through Landscapes told the Guardian. It was not even the end of the month and Harvey’s bill was standing at $7.8bn (£5.8bn), somewhat more than the previous month’s 43 cents.

In a dark way, this is the best possible kind of billing fuckup; unlike a 10x bump that would be noticed but not universally, this heads off into the land of the absurd.

I'm somewhat particular about what I grow for myself, but as this is more of a group activity, I'm curious what others have had success with.

I'm looking at seeds (and, holy fuck, have those gotten more expensive since I got starter domes [lost in the divorce and never to be used again] from Park Seed back in 2010), and outside of crucifers, I'm at a bit of a loss.

Web search used to be far more helpful, which we all know, but after this much time, getting back to where I was is an exercise in frustration. I've not yet checked out the county extension office (I assume we have these in Texas), but I generally found them to be more useful for things like soil amendments and timing than specific crops.

Have you had broccoli do particularly well in fall? If so, what strain?

From the who-could've-seen-this-coming dept:

Dozens of Meta employees have sued the social media company over claims that it used artificial intelligence tools to tag workers for mass layoffs. The workers allege that those AI tools targeted them after they asked for protected or maternity leave or disability accommodation.

The lawsuit, filed Monday in federal court in the northern district of California, points to Meta’s workforce reduction of about 8,000 employees earlier this year. Meta is the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The suit alleges that Meta used a “constellation of internal artificial intelligence systems”, including AI performance ratings and keystroke- and activity-monitoring data, to pinpoint who to lay off.

“Meta did not assemble the termination list through the considered judgment of managers who knew the work,” reads the 71-page complaint. Instead, the 26 workers listed in the lawsuit allege the company used AI systems “to score, rank and select employees for inclusion on the list”.

The plaintiffs are seeking a preliminary court ruling to stop Meta from finalizing the layoffs while they pursue their ​claims, along with relief that could include reinstatement, back pay, lost equity, benefits and other damages.

The industry as a whole still has some kinks to work out.

We’ve all heard the warning that “The internet is forever.” But in reality, huge swaths of the digital world are disappearing all the time: websites go dark, governments purge public records, social media posts vanish, and streaming platforms remove films and music, Without deliberate efforts to preserve this material, much of our recent history could simply cease to exist. The Internet Archive has spent decades fighting that disappearance, most nottably through its Wayback Machine, which preserves snapshots of a web that is otherwise constantly being rewritten. Current Affairs spoke with Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, and librarian Chris Freeland, co-editor of the Internet Archive’s new Vanishing Culture report, about why the internet is far more fragile than we think and what is lost when corporations and governments can make information disappear.

Nathan J. Robinson

Okay, listen, I want to start with a phrase—a phrase that will get under your skin, a phrase that I'm sure you've heard many times, and that we're going to correct here at the beginning. And the phrase is some variation on "the internet is forever," that is to say, when you put something online, it's never going to go away. I've heard that all of my life; I have lived through the birth of the internet, the entire history of the internet, and I've heard that all the time. So, tell us, is the internet in fact forever? And if not, in what ways is it not?

For the very first time, biologists packed nonliving components into a cell-like membrane, piece by piece, and witnessed the bag of molecules start to behave like life. The lab-made synthetic cell grew, replicated its DNA, and divided, demonstrating the basic functions of a cell cycle.

It’s “an impressive step,” said Jack Szostak, who studies the origins of life at the University of Chicago and was not involved in the research. “I don’t know of any other effort to put together an artificial cell from biological components that has progressed so far.”

The cell is not alive by any definition. It can’t survive without constant deliveries of food and ribosomes, the machinery needed to make proteins. It has no defenses or a good waste removal system. But it’s the strongest demonstration yet that it is possible to generate life from nonlife, a goal that synthetic biologists have been chasing for decades.

“It’s a big step forward to this holy grail of making a living thing out of dead components,” said Sijbren Otto, a systems chemist at the Stratingh Institute for Chemistry in the Netherlands who was not involved in the work. “It’s not completely there yet, but it’s definitely getting quite close.”

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s ruling coalition has unveiled a sweeping package of tax, labour and pension reforms aimed at reviving Europe’s largest economy and countering a surge by the far right.

The “Programme for Revival and Employment” announced on Thursday includes about 10 billion euros ($11.4bn) in annual income tax relief targeted at lower and middle-income earners, taking effect from January 1, 2027.

The 34 reform measures also include an overhaul of the creaking pension system, tougher rules for employees’ sick leave and a reduction of the country’s stifling bureaucracy.

The tax relief is to be financed primarily by restructuring the surcharge on top incomes.

“The highest earners in this country will therefore take on a larger share” of the tax burden, said Finance Minister and Vice Chancellor Lars Klingbeil of the centre-left SPD. “That is fair, so that our country can move forward.”

It's so weird to hear politicians make sense at the Cabinet level.

According to DuckDuckGo's AI search feature, US President Donald Trump passed away earlier this month from rabies.

The screenshot shows a search result from DuckDuckGo for the query "when did trump die of rabies." The top result claims that Donald Trump reportedly died of rabies on June 7, 2026, citing sources wkna49.com and abcnews.com. It includes a section titled "Date of Death" repeating the date and "Circumstances Surrounding His Death," mentioning a sequence of events involving Vice President JD Vance, unconventional treatments advised by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and confirmation that rabies was the cause of death. The page includes a small portrait image of Donald Trump.

As the AI feature explains, Trump was apparently predeceased by Vice President JD Vance, who also died from the incurable virus. In fact, if you click the article it cites as evidence — which looks like it was published by a local West Virginia broadcaster called WKNA News, but more on that in a moment — the piece asserts that Trump got bit by Vance on purpose, acting on the advice of Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F Kennedy Jr, who advised that the deadly infection could confer "superpowers."

Needless to say, not a word of this is true. Trump and Vance are alive, and though RFK Jr has made numerous dubious health claims during his tenure in the government, he has never espoused the health benefits of rabies infections. (DuckDuckGo's AI also inexplicably cites an ABC News story about an Ohio man who died from rabies that makes no mention of Trump.)

Enter r/poisonai, "the world's #1 source for Accurate, Verified and Trusted information!" according to its official description. The newly-formed subreddit is basically a big inside joke, and the butt of it is the AI industry.

Its roughly 45,000 members tirelessly post absurd misinformation on everything from the nuances of watering a brick to grow a house to the claim that blue whales are actually orange.

But the favorite fabrication the AI poisoners on Reddit have latched onto is that JD Vance has died of rabies. Many dozens of posts mourn Vance's supposed passing after succumbing to the disease, with someone even sharing a fake Trump Truth Social post eulogizing him.

To really sell it, everyone in the replies treats all of this as totally real. There are posts decrying how Vance's death from rabies has been "dismissed as a meme," while others admonish various AI models for asserting — incorrectly, they fume — that Vance is very much alive and that his rabies death is merely "satirical misinformation."

Much as it pains me to say it, I guess Reddit is still good for something.