Timekeepers meet next month to vote on retiring the leap second, pushed along by the awkward prospect of a negative one. The proposal defers the problem into the next millennium.
Editor's noteStandards bodies rarely make the news, and this is why they should. A great deal of software was written on the assumption that leap seconds would keep arriving, and the interesting question is not the vote itself but what quietly breaks in the decade after timekeepers stop inserting them.
TECHNOLOGY
Dev log 20: Deleting 180k lines and chasing socket leaks: A week in the OSS trenches
An engineer's public work log for the week: 180,000 lines cut from a personal vault, socket leaks traced inside libp2p, a contribution landed in the Rust compiler, 102 commits in total.
Agent Trust in 2 Weeks: Part 3, Traces are flowing. Now what?
Third instalment on putting an AI agent under observation. With traces arriving, the argument is that any single conversation can be opened, scored by an evaluation, and judged within seconds.
MARKETING & DESIGN
AI canvas, Synthetic self, The prompt is the product
A weekly roundup for designers, built around the shift from operating software step by step to describing an outcome and letting an agent choose the commands, files and tests.
Editor's noteThis piece groups three separate arguments under one banner: AI as a design surface, AI as a mirror that fabricates a public self, and AI as the interface itself. The unifying risk for design teams is that judgment about identity and trust now sits inside prompt engineering, not visual craft.
The lab, the factory and the dentist
Three ways to organise work: the lab, where nobody knows the answer and failure is the method; the factory, where the answer is known and productivity rules; and the dentist, somewhere in between.
A new house in Croatia is broken down into components to create a curious composition
A two-storey private house outside Zagreb, set back from the road in a planted landscape, broken into components by its Croatian architects so it reads as several small buildings.
ADVERTISING & PR
KFC Fans Trade Gold For Sauce in Pawnshop-Inspired Pop Up
A pawnshop-styled pop-up in New Zealand invited fans to trade gold for sauce, handled end to end by one agency across experiential, media relations, creative and content.
Editor's noteThe stunt cost little beyond staffing two days in Ponsonby, yet it borrows scarcity and novelty from Liquid Gold's earlier Australian frenzy to manufacture local buzz. The open question for the category: whether a pawnshop gimmick with no purchase requirement converts curiosity into repeat sauce sales once the store closes.
Mark Molloy Directs Yacht Heist in 3 Minute Blockbuster For MLC
An Emmy-nominated director has made a three-minute heist film for an Australian superannuation brand, the centrepiece of a campaign running one hundred and seventy-one assets over eighteen months.
Shift 20, Bus Stop Films Formalise Partnership with 'The Full Frame'
Two organisations have formalised a partnership giving Australian brands one route to hire deaf, disabled and neurodivergent cast and crew, rather than each advertiser working it out alone.
HUMAN RESOURCES
How To Design Better Branching Scenarios: Start With The Decision
Guidance on building branching scenarios that actually teach: start from a real decision, offer choices a learner might plausibly make, let consequences follow, and add no complexity the lesson does not need.
Editor's noteThe framework here shifts branching-scenario budgets away from narrative production toward locating genuine judgment calls first. For L&D teams burned by expensive multi-path builds that taught nothing new, the practical test becomes whether a decision point could genuinely divide competent staff, not whether it makes a better story.
GS Caltex’s Saehong Hur: Leading from the top; moving forward—together
An executive at a South Korean energy group makes the case for constant communication and a single joined-up mindset as the way to keep pace with shifting markets.
5 myths about being a genius
A neurologist argues that genius is trained rather than issued at birth, and picks apart five assumptions about talent that keep capable people from attempting difficult work.
PUBLIC POLICY
Can an All-Female Nude Spa Bar Transgender Clients With Male Genitalia? The Supreme Court May Decide.
A federal appeals court is weighing whether a women-only spa may refuse clients who are transgender, in a case whose opening judicial line has already drawn attention for its bluntness.
Editor's noteThe petition asks the Supreme Court to decide whether state anti-discrimination law can override a private business's sex-segregated, nudity-based access policy under expressive-association and religious-exercise claims. A grant would test how far Tandon-era religious-liberty precedent extends into commercial anti-discrimination enforcement, beyond the narrower church and worship contexts courts have addressed so far.
US troops can still be tracked by purchased location data, and Congress wants to know why
Two lawmakers have asked the Defense Department's watchdog to explain why measures meant to stop adversaries buying troops' location data from brokers are not working as promised.
Alienation of Affections as Complicity
Responding to commenters on a suit against a former senator, the writer rejects the claim that a spouse's lover owes nothing, while still favouring abolition of the tort on other grounds.
