Every licensed dog, month by month. After a long slide from 2017, the registry rebounded to a record 11,200 in 2025. Licenses still spike each spring, peaking in May 2025.

For almost 2,000 years, the carbonized library of Herculaneum has kept a cruel bargain: its scrolls survived the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, but only by becoming too fragile to open. To read one was to destroy it. Hundreds of rolls have therefore remained sealed, their contents preserved yet unreachable. Today that changes. We have completely virtually unwrapped and read PHerc. 1667 — the scroll the Vesuvius Challenge community knows as Scroll 4 — without ever touching its pages. It is the first Herculaneum papyrus to be digitally unrolled and read in full, end to end, and made available for sustained scholarly study. PHerc. 1667 began as a blackened, rolled mass of carbonized papyrus. To read it, we never unrolled it physically. Instead, we scanned it with high-resolution X-rays, reconstructed the wound sheet inside the volume, flattened it into a readable surface, and used machine learning to bring out the faint traces of ancient ink. …PHerc. 1667 is what survives of a larger roll: earlier attempts to open it by hand — in the 19th century, and again in 1969 and the 1980s — destroyed its outer layers and left only the compact inner core, about 8 cm of an original height of 19–24 cm. From that surviving portion we have now recovered and read the text in full — the lower parts of some 22 columns, transcribed and reviewed by papyrologists. It is the first time the preserved text of a rolled Herculaneum scroll has been read continuously, end to end, rather than in isolated words or patches. The recovered text is a philosophical treatise on ethics, and the evidence points to a Stoic work: it turns on human nature, impulse, and the moral progress of human beings, and its final preserved column names Aristocreon — nephew and disciple of the great Stoic Chrysippus — which, together with the language and themes of the text, places it in a Stoic context and dates it to the 2nd century BC. Because the papyrus is damaged, the readings are fragmentary, with gaps where the surface is lost. Even so, several passages can be read clearly for the first time in two thousand years. …The scans were acquired with high-resolution phase-contrast X-ray microtomography on the BM18 beamline at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble — an instrument able to resolve the wafer-thin, densely packed layers of a Herculaneum roll. The work was carried out in collaboration with the National Library of Naples “Vittorio Emanuele III”, which safeguards the Herculaneum papyri. From those volumes, the team reconstructed the scroll's geometry, traced and flattened its surface into a readable sheet, and trained machine-learning models to detect ink that is almost indistinguishable from the carbonized papyrus beneath it. Each reading was then examined and transcribed by papyrologists.

In 2022, I wrote about the damning fall of events tech company Pollen. The short of it:

Pollen seemed to have pulled off the improbable feat of building a business in the notoriously low margin industry of events, surviving Covid-19, and building a solid software engineering organization. In April this year, the company announced it had raised another $150M in fresh funding. But just three weeks later, Pollen laid off about 200 people, a third of staff. Leadership assured employees all was well. However, from that point on, things got worse. Leadership later pulled the plug on Slack, employees were not paid wages, pension contributions went missing, and vendors were not paid. Some vendors took matters into their own hands; on 9 August 2022, JIRA was suspended when Atlassian tired of the company’s failure to pay. On 10 August 2022, Pollen went bankrupt, collapsing into administration.

The news that Noam Shazeer is (once again) leaving Google seems like a big deal. The news that he's joining OpenAI, which turned the transformer paper he helped write into a product that he couldn't launch (in his first stint) at Google seems like an even bigger deal. Bigger still may be the fact that he had rejoined to help the Gemini product take on ChatGPT, which was seemingly working, at least to some degree. But actually, the biggest deal has to be the actual deal that brought him back to Google. Because it wasn't even two years ago when Google paid $2.7B to bring Shazeer back. And like that – poof – he's gone. To be fair, there were others on the Character.ai team that Google seemingly wanted too. The non-exclusive licensing rights for Character? Probably less so. If anything, that aspect of the deal has ranged from a headache to a nightmare.1 But clearly it was a deal structure in such a way to get Shazeer back with an offer he couldn't refuse. And he didn't. Until he did. Again. That deal structure, of course, was one of the early "hackquisitions" – a deal to bring on a company's key talent without acquiring the company itself. Because that clearly would have been messy from a regulatory perspective for any of Big Tech. If nothing else, such deals would be bogged down for months while they're scrutinized. A "hackquisition", by contrast, could be done almost instantly.