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Bay Curious - Secrets of Golden Gate Park

San Francisco's Golden Gate Park is at the heart of city life. Created in 1870 when the land was mostly sand dunes, the park is now one of the crown jewels of the city by the bay and is a must-visit for anyone traveling here. World famous institutions like the Conservatory of Flowers, De Young Museum, California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco Botanical Gardens and Japanese Tea Gardens are located in the park, but there are just as many hidden trails, magical dells and places to get lost. We explore some of the hidden delights of Golden Gate Park that even devoted locals might not know about. And, we'll tell the epic story of how this park got built in the first place.


Additional Resources:


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Bay Curious is made by Katrina Schwartz, Christopher Beale and Olivia Allen-Price. Additional support from Jen Chien, Katie Sprenger, Maha Sanad, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everyone on Team KQED.

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The Daily - A War Within the War: Israel’s Bombardment of Lebanon

With the world’s attention on the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, a second front in the conflict has opened in Lebanon.

Israel has pummeled an area in the southern outskirts of Beirut where Hezbollah holds sway, as well as southern Lebanon, with airstrikes, displacing almost one million people. Israel has also expanded its assault into other parts of Beirut, the capital.

Christina Goldbaum, The New York Times’s bureau chief in Beirut, explains how the crisis in Lebanon connects to the broader war, what Israel hopes to achieve and what people in Lebanon fear might come next.

Guest: Christina Goldbaum, The New York Times’s bureau chief in Beirut.

Background reading: 

Photo: David Guttenfelder/The New York Times

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.


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Opening Arguments - Ballots Seized in Georgia? Voting Chaos in Dallas? Here’s What to Make Of It.Please use this Draft for 03/16 – Libsyn Ads Ops

OA1244 - More election news updates. What the heck happened in Dallas? How is hunting for fraud in Georgia still a thing? Why is the DOJ trying to get non-public voter data from the states? There’s smoke. There’s fire. But it might not be coming from the places everyone is looking. Jenessa helps us focus our concerns in the right direction, and maybe calms our nerves just a bit.

Check out the OA Linktree for all the places to go and things to do!

 

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What Next | Daily News and Analysis - Bombing Iran…for Jesus?

If no other explanations for the Iran War seem satisfying, have you considered that the point is to bring about the end of the world and the return of Jesus Christ? The people in power have. 


Guest:  Tim Dickinson, senior writer and editor at The Contrarian.


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Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, and Rob Gunther. 

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The Daily Detail - The Daily Detail for 3.16.26

Alabama

  • 3 of 6 crew members killed in air tanker crash were from Birmingham National Guard
  • Eagle Forum of AL sues Tuscaloosa library for denying them public access 
  • Morgan Murphy's attorney says Secretary of State not helping voters be fully informed for primary voting by not removing Murphy's name from ballot
  • Man now charged with murder of Choc family that went missing from Theodore home
  • 1819 News CEO Bryan Dawson completes a "Pic up the Mic" event at Montevallo University

National

  • President Trump gives update on war in Iran, the SAVE America Act and cartels running the country of Mexico
  • FCC Chairman calls out fake news and possibility of not renewing licenses for major media outlets
  • Attorney Alan Dershowitz says Jeffrey Epstein's death should be investigated further
  • Thomas Massie still likes President Trump despite his recent rally in KY  to derail Massies re-election bid
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Python Bytes - #473 A clean room rewrite?

Topics covered in this episode:
Watch on YouTube

About the show

Sponsored by us! Support our work through:

Connect with the hosts

Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Monday at 10am PT. Older video versions available there too.

Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to our friends of the show list, we'll never share it.

Michael #1: chardet ,AI, and licensing

  • Thanks Ian Lessing
  • Wow, where to start?
  • A bit of legal precedence research.
  • Chardet dispute shows how AI will kill software licensing, argues Bruce Perens on the Register
  • Also see this GitHub issue.
  • Dan Blanchard, maintainer of a Python character encoding detection library called chardet, released a new version of the library under a new software license. (LGPL → MIT)
  • Dan is allowed to make this change because v7 is a complete “clean room” rewrite using AI
  • BTW, v7 is WAY better:
    • The result is a 48x increase in detection speed for a project that lives in the hot loops of many projects. That will lead to noticeable performance increases for literally millions of users (the package gets ~130M downloads per month).
    • It paves a path towards inclusion in the standard library (assuming they don’t institute policies against using AI tools).
    • Thread-safe detect() and detect_all() with no measurable overhead; scales on free-threaded Python 3.13t+
  • An individual claiming to be Mark Pilgrim, the original creator of the library, opened an issue in the project's GitHub repo arguing that Blanchard had no right to change the software license, citing the LPGL requirement that the license remain unchanged.
  • A 'complete rewrite' is irrelevant, since they had ample exposure to the originally licensed code (i.e. this is not a 'clean room' implementation).
  • Blanchard disagreed, citing how version 7.0.0 and 6.0.0 compare when subjected to JPlag, a library for detecting plagiarism.
  • Blanchard told The Register he had wanted to get chardet added to the Python standard library for more than a decade since it’s a core dependency to most Python projects.

Brian #2: refined-github

  • Suggested by Matthias Schöttle
  • A browser plugin that improves the GitHub experience
  • A sampling
    • Adds a build/CI status icon next to the repo’s name.
    • Adds a link back to the PR that ran the workflow.
    • Enables tab and shift tab for indentation in comment fields.
    • Auto-resizes comment fields to fit their content and no longer show scroll bars.
    • Highlights the most useful comment in issues.
    • Changes the default sort order of issues/PRs to Recently updated.
  • But really, it’s a huge list of improvements

Michael #3: pgdog: PostgreSQL connection pooler, load balancer and database sharder

  • PgDog is a proxy for scaling PostgreSQL.
  • It supports connection pooling, load balancing queries and sharding entire databases.
  • Written in Rust, PgDog is fast, secure and can manage thousands of connections on commodity hardware.
  • Features
    • PgDog is an application layer load balancer for PostgreSQL
    • Health Checks: PgDog maintains a real-time list of healthy hosts. When a database fails a health check, it's removed from the active rotation and queries are re-routed to other replicas
    • Single Endpoint: PgDog can detect writes (e.g. INSERT, UPDATE, CREATE TABLE, etc.) and send them to the primary, leaving the replicas to serve reads
    • Failover: PgDog monitors Postgres replication state and can automatically redirect writes to a different database if a replica is promoted
    • Sharding: PgDog is able to manage databases with multiple shards

Brian #4: Agentic Engineering Patterns

Extras

Brian:

Michael:

Joke: Ergonomic keyboard

Also pretty good and related:

Links

Posted on

Python Bytes - #473 A clean room rewrite?

Topics covered in this episode:
Watch on YouTube

About the show

Sponsored by us! Support our work through:

Michael #1: chardet ,AI, and licensing

  • Thanks Ian Lessing
  • Wow, where to start?
  • A bit of legal precedence research.
  • Chardet dispute shows how AI will kill software licensing, argues Bruce Perens on the Register
  • Also see this GitHub issue.
  • Dan Blanchard, maintainer of a Python character encoding detection library called chardet, released a new version of the library under a new software license. (LGPL → MIT)
  • Dan is allowed to make this change because v7 is a complete “clean room” rewrite using AI
  • BTW, v7 is WAY better:
    • The result is a 48x increase in detection speed for a project that lives in the hot loops of many projects. That will lead to noticeable performance increases for literally millions of users (the package gets ~130M downloads per month).
    • It paves a path towards inclusion in the standard library (assuming they don’t institute policies against using AI tools).
    • Thread-safe detect() and detect_all() with no measurable overhead; scales on free-threaded Python 3.13t+
  • An individual claiming to be Mark Pilgrim, the original creator of the library, opened an issue in the project's GitHub repo arguing that Blanchard had no right to change the software license, citing the LPGL requirement that the license remain unchanged.
  • A 'complete rewrite' is irrelevant, since they had ample exposure to the originally licensed code (i.e. this is not a 'clean room' implementation).
  • Blanchard disagreed, citing how version 7.0.0 and 6.0.0 compare when subjected to JPlag, a library for detecting plagiarism.
  • Blanchard told The Register he had wanted to get chardet added to the Python standard library for more than a decade since it’s a core dependency to most Python projects.

Brian #2: refined-github

  • Suggested by Matthias Schöttle
  • A browser plugin that improves the GitHub experience
  • A sampling
    • Adds a build/CI status icon next to the repo’s name.
    • Adds a link back to the PR that ran the workflow.
    • Enables tab and shift tab for indentation in comment fields.
    • Auto-resizes comment fields to fit their content and no longer show scroll bars.
    • Highlights the most useful comment in issues.
    • Changes the default sort order of issues/PRs to Recently updated.
  • But really, it’s a huge list of improvements

Michael #3: pgdog: PostgreSQL connection pooler, load balancer and database sharder

  • PgDog is a proxy for scaling PostgreSQL.
  • It supports connection pooling, load balancing queries and sharding entire databases.
  • Written in Rust, PgDog is fast, secure and can manage thousands of connections on commodity hardware.
  • Features
    • PgDog is an application layer load balancer for PostgreSQL
    • Health Checks: PgDog maintains a real-time list of healthy hosts. When a database fails a health check, it's removed from the active rotation and queries are re-routed to other replicas
    • Single Endpoint: PgDog can detect writes (e.g. INSERT, UPDATE, CREATE TABLE, etc.) and send them to the primary, leaving the replicas to serve reads
    • Failover: PgDog monitors Postgres replication state and can automatically redirect writes to a different database if a replica is promoted
    • Sharding: PgDog is able to manage databases with multiple shards

Brian #4: Agentic Engineering Patterns

Extras

Brian:

Michael:

Joke: Ergonomic keyboard

Also pretty good and related:

Links

Posted on

What A Day - Can Big Oil Grease The Courts?

The war in Iran has essentially closed the Strait of Hormuz, the world's most important oil transfer point, sending oil prices over $100 a barrel with the potential to go even higher. And yet, the odds of the Trump administration suddenly pivoting to invest in renewable energy are pretty much zero. Last year, the Department of Justice submitted a brief urging the Supreme Court to take up a case that could limit cities' and states' ability to sue oil and gas companies for environmental damage — and the court has agreed to hear it. For more on what's at stake here, we spoke with Mike Meno. He's the communications director for the Center for Climate Integrity, an advocacy organization that works with communities to hold Big Oil accountable.

And in headlines, the head of the Federal Communications Commission makes another thinly veiled threat, the Kennedy Center Board is expected to vote on President Trump's grand renovation plans today, the department tasked with keeping Americans safe at home is still shut down.

Show Notes:

Posted on

Short Wave - This is your brain on pleasure (even the guilty kind)

It’s likely you have at least one “guilty pleasure.” Maybe it’s romance novels. Or reality TV… Playing video games… or getting swept into obscure corners of TikTok. Neuroscientists say the pleasure response helps us survive as a species. So why do we feel embarrassed by some of the things we love the most? Even if you don't have these negative emotions, experiencing – and studying – pleasure is not as straightforward as it might seem. For a long time, neuroscientists thought the concept of "pleasure" referred to a singular system in the brain. But as research into the subject grew, scientists realized that pleasure is really a cycle of "wanting" and "liking" – each with separate neural mechanisms. Today on the show, producer Rachel Carlson explores this cycle with researchers, who weigh in on the science of pleasure. Even the kind that makes us feel guilty. 

Read more of Rachel’s story on guilty pleasures. 

Interested in more brain science? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org.

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