THE PELOTON

No Caravan, No Crowd: Stage 3 Races Through Fire Country to a Silent Les Angles

↩ Developing story — first reported Jul 03 · previously Jul 04, Jul 05

GRANOLLERS, Spain — Stage 3 rolled out of Granollers on Monday into a Tour that has already acquired the atmosphere of a race operating around rather than through normal conditions. As this paper reported Sunday, ASO chose to run the stage despite the wildfires burning in southern France — 10,000 people evacuated near the finish — but stripped the final 40 kilometres of both spectators and the publicity caravan. The peloton will finish Les Angles in something close to silence.

By mid-morning, the stage had found its shape. A 19-rider break was out front with roughly two minutes in hand after Visma's race radio confirmed no GC threats were in the move and the team stood down.¹ The break includes Cort (Uno-X), Oliveira and García Pierna (Movistar), Plapp and Schmid (Jayco AlUla), Storer (Tudor), Pedersen (Lidl-Trek), Vervaeke (Soudal-QuickStep), Bennett (NSN), and nine others from smaller outfits. The decisive terrain is still ahead: the category-1 Col de Toses at kilometre 128 — 9.3km at 6.5% — before the race crosses into France and climbs to the cat-3 finish at Les Angles.

The opening act produced casualties. A crash near the front of the peloton caught del Toro, Bruno Armirail (Visma), and several Netcompany-Ineos riders. Everyone came through, but Matthew Riccitello — a key domestique for Paul Seixas — was at the medical car.¹ Egan Bernal spent considerable energy trying to force his way into the break, then suffered a flat tyre just as the move consolidated and lost the battle. Cian Uijtdebroeks, Movistar's GC hope, was already struggling out the back before 40 kilometres were done. Arnaud De Lie, who has been ill since before the start, was also off the back early.

The heat was already established at sign-on. Granollers read 33°C at the flag.¹ Stage 4 is forecast at 40°C.

After Sunday's stage, Visma sports director Marc Reef gave IDL Pro Cycling the team's honest read of why Vingegaard let Pogačar and del Toro through on the final Montjuïc climb. "On the first climb of the day, it was already around 40 degrees," Reef said. "As soon as the pace picked up a bit, a lot of riders fell behind. By the time we started the fourth lap, I think three-quarters of the peloton had already been dropped." The riders who survived the selection essentially stayed together until the very end, when the pace finally lifted near the summit. Reef's framing: a stage that suited Vingegaard "a little less this time around," not evidence of a gap in form. "He's still showing that he belongs among the best."²

Visma are not treating the yellow jersey as an obligation. Reef said directly that keeping yellow "isn't the be-all and end-all."² Whether Vingegaard leaves Les Angles in the leaders' jersey this evening is, on their read, not the metric by which to judge the opening weekend.

One quieter dispute is playing out around Visma's kit. The team is racing in an all-black "architect" swap-out, chosen over a cream alternative by public vote before the Tour. Commentators had flagged it as a heat trap. Visma head of performance Mathieu Heijboer pushed back in a team note: fabric construction matters far more than colour for thermoregulation, he argued. UV-resistant, moisture-wicking fibres produce only "insignificant differences" in body temperature between colour options, backed by the team's own climate-chamber testing of Nimbl kit prototypes. "The choice of fabric plays a much greater role than the color," Heijboer said.³

The catch Heijboer did not address directly: the cream jersey they voted away is made from the same materials as the black one. Same fabric, lighter colour — it would have been cooler.³ The team has apparently calculated that aerodynamics, UV resistance, and fan goodwill cover the difference. Stage 4 at 40°C will serve as a live trial.

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THE LAB

.splat4d: Dynamic Gaussian Splat Sequences at 58× Compression, HTTP Range Native

A 427 MB raw sequence of Gaussian splat frames encodes to 7.4 MB — 58× — and streams over plain HTTP Range requests from any object store, no server logic required.¹ That's the headline figure for .splat4d, a new container format for streaming dynamic 3D Gaussian splat sequences documented by Adam Raudonis.

The compression stack layers several decisions. A static/dynamic split stores all background splats exactly once — the entire background of a 1.6 GB sequence costs a few megabytes. For dynamic splats, a deadband "hold" track emits a new value only when the true value would violate the stored bound, which zeroes most temporal deltas and eliminates quantization flicker by construction. Frames organize into H.265-style closed GOPs: keyframes of absolute quantized values, followed by P-frames of exact integer deltas. Each GOP chunk decodes independently, so a seek fetches roughly 10% of a chunk to show a keyframe — about 145 ms on a 50 Mbps connection. The entropy stack then runs Morton ordering of splats, zigzag-coded deltas, byte-plane shuffling (Blosc-style), and per-stream zstd, landing at near-order-0 entropy for those streams. Across eight sequences from three independent capture pipelines — CMU Panoptic dome juggling and ball sports, Neu3D cooking scenes, Technicolor birthday footage at 659k splats — the format runs 16–58× below raw and 14–20× below per-frame gzip at −9. For context, the best generic lossless baseline, zstd-19 --long applied across the whole series, reaches only 2.5×.¹

The error-bound guarantee is unusual: bounds are deterministic and pointwise, not statistical or averaged over PSNR. Position is bounded to ±2mm per axis (L∞ norm), color to ±4 out of 255 levels, rotation is exact.¹ The Rust and JavaScript decoders reconstruct bit-identical values — integer deltas cannot drift. The streaming design uses plain HTTP Range requests: a 256 KB fetch for the header and chunk index, one range for the static section to render the complete first view, then one range per GOP chunk during playback. On the server side, this means standard S3/GCS/R2 CORS configuration and no Content-Encoding (payloads are already compressed inside the container). A WebGPU renderer ships as primary with a pixel-verified WebGL2 fallback. The Python encoder is pip install splats4d; input is a directory of antimatter15 .splat frames.

Smaller-scale compression note from July 4: Iwo Kadziela, working with Codex, built a credible ASCII world map in 445 bytes using deflate. The JavaScript snippet Simon Willison highlighted uses fetch() with a base64-encoded data: URI piped through new DecompressionStream('deflate-raw') — a browser API combination Willison noted he hadn't seen used this way before.²

On July 2, the EU Council adopted a position to fast-track reactivation of Chat Control 1.0 — the 2021 temporary exemption from E-Privacy rules that allowed messaging providers to voluntarily scan private chats using AI and hash matching for known child sexual abuse material. That exemption expired April 3 with no replacement in place: the Council and Parliament failed to agree on an extension, and the broader Chat Control 2.0 proposal, which would make such scanning mandatory, remains stalled.³

The procedural maneuver works around a formal constraint. An expired regulation cannot be extended in legal terms, so the Council introduced what Heise describes as a new regulation that is "largely identical in content but different in form."³ The draft is being pushed onto Parliament's agenda under an urgent procedure, timed for the last plenary session before the summer recess. At second reading, the Council's position can only be blocked if an absolute majority of all MEPs — not just those present, but of the full chamber — votes against it. Heise notes that threshold is historically difficult to reach before summer break, when many members have already departed. Critics quoted in the article call the procedure an attempt to bypass democratic scrutiny; the Council frames the expired exemption as a legal loophole that leaves providers without cover for detection systems already running.

If it clears the vote, messaging services operating in the EU regain legal cover to run AI and hash-match scanning of private communications on a voluntary basis. The mandatory Chat Control 2.0 battle continues in the background.

Trending today: GitHub is dominated by Claude Code skills collections, AI agent wrappers, and leaked system-prompt repositories — no games, graphics, compiler, or GPU-architecture work cleared the bar.

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THE WORLD

Seattle Hosts USA-Belgium Round of 16 Tonight; Office Market Faces a Zombie Decade

• USA vs Belgium at Lumen Field tonight — Seattle hosts the World Cup Round of 16 at 5pm; a U.S. win would be their first quarterfinal since 2002. KIRO 7

Match-day logistics: Downtown will be gridlocked from roughly noon to 9pm — Alaskan Way closes as early as 1:30pm for the march to the stadium. Sound Transit runs the 1 and 2 Line every eight minutes with service extended to 1am; fares are $3. No public parking at Seattle Stadium; rideshare pickup zones are in Pioneer Square, CID, and SODO. Free secure bike valet is available south of Dearborn at Alaskan Way.¹

Downtown's zombie decade: Seattle's downtown office vacancy hit 37% — the highest of any major U.S. city, per Cushman & Wakefield — and the problem is structural, not cyclical. Since 2020, downtown office properties have shed $15 billion in value (down 46%) and now generate $128 million less per year in property taxes.² Even a full return to pre-pandemic demand would take eight more years to fill the current surplus. Strip out Amazon specifically and that number grows to 16 years. Experts estimate as much as a quarter of the supply is effectively permanent excess. The city currently has four conversion projects totaling 400 housing units in progress.

### ON THE TRAIL

WEEKEND PICKS — Sat Jul 11 – Sun Jul 12

Weekend weather across the Cascades is clean. I-90 East / Teanaway stands out (72°F Saturday, 77°F Sunday, precip ≤1% both days). Mountain Loop and North Cascades carry a slight Saturday chance (18–22%) but well clear of the disqualifying 50% threshold.

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1-night: Boulder River — Mountain Loop Highway, ≈90–120 min from Issaquah

A Jul 5 reporter's watch clocked 9.17 miles total, with the campsite at the halfway point: roughly 4.6 mi / ~800 ft gain to camp. Trail in good condition with a few easily skirted blowdowns; huckleberries beginning to ripen. No bugs, no snow, no ford mentioned; river access throughout for water. Crowd count: 5 cars at 9:30am on a holiday Sunday.

Weather (Mountain Loop): "Mostly sunny Saturday (66°F, 22% precip); mostly sunny Sunday (71°F, 6% precip)."

Jul 5 WTA report

No 2-night pick cleared criteria this week. Goat Rocks / North Fork Tieton to Old Snowy is spectacular and trail-crew cleared — but a rock-hop creek ford after the burn area and head-net-level mosquitoes at McCall Basin disqualify it. PCT White Pass section likewise has a calf-deep Bumping River ford and atrocious bugs at several lakes.

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REGIONAL SNAPSHOT

• I-90 East / Teanaway — Red Top Lookout: road recently regraded and in good shape, no bugs, no snow; loose rock on the final pitch, watch footing on descent. About 10–12 cars at 1:30pm on July 5. Longs Pass: trail cleared of recent blowdowns, lots of small creeks, dusty and sunny above treeline — go early.³ - Mountain Loop — Ashland Lakes: 2–3 cars on a Sunday afternoon, bugs "not too bad," mostly shaded trail, and a reporter who knows the area explicitly calls it a great easy 1-night backpack — DNR is actively building out campsites. Boulder River: see above. - North Cascades / Hwy 20 — Lookout Mountain: fully snow-free, upper meadows at peak bloom (paintbrush, lupine, Sitka valerian), "almost no bugs," only 6 parties spotted all day, black bear in the meadows on the way down. Sauk Mountain: snow-free, wildflowers at all elevations, dry trail; rough road for the last 0.2 mi — park in the gravel pullout to spare your car. - Snoqualmie / I-90 — Talapus & Olallie Lakes: busy parking lot at 9am but trail genuinely quiet; lake was cold but swimmable at just under 70°F. Ira Spring / Mason Lake: "absolutely perfect hiking and weather," spectacular mountain views, and the lake. Both areas had reports of few bugs. - Mt Rainier (NE / Sunrise) — Palisades Lakes: minimal bugs except right at lakeside; only 4 people spotted on the way to Upper Palisades on July 5; lots of bear and elk sign. Burroughs / Glacier Basin: two small snowfields on the Burroughs route with steps already kicked — no spikes needed — but bugs are annoying when you stop, so keep moving. - Goat Rocks / South Cascades — Old Snowy via North Fork Tieton is open and trail-crew maintained; no spikes needed on most of the route; disqualified as a pick this weekend due to the creek ford in the burn area and mosquitoes requiring DEET and head nets at McCall Basin. Worth bookmarking for later in the season.

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THE LONG READ

The Unlootable Archive: How Three People Are Making Palestinian Memory Impossible to Erase

About once a month, the Palestine Museum Digital Archive's website goes down. Someone attacks it — the team doesn't always know who — and the site disappears. Then the staff restore it from one of the distributed backups stored at sites around the world, and the archive comes back up. More than 500,000 records: photographs, identification papers, diaries, maps, films, letters. All of it returns.¹

"We can't protect it from being hacked," says Amer Shomali, general director of the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit, West Bank, "but we can protect it from disappearing."

That distinction — between a successful intrusion and a successful erasure — is the architectural principle at the center of one of the more quietly remarkable preservation projects running today. Shomali and his team began building the archive in 2018, starting with door-knocking: visiting families in the West Bank, asking permission to scan old photographs and documents. What they built has grown to half a million records, maintained by three full-time staff and a network of volunteers, funded by diaspora donations, the University of California, and the Gerda Henkel Foundation.

The scale of what they're working against is documented. UNESCO verified damage to 164 cultural sites in Gaza since October 7, 2023 — historical buildings, religious sites, museums, archaeological sites.¹ A 2025 report by the Applied Research Institute–Jerusalem found at least 2,400 archaeological sites in the West Bank had been taken over by Israel. In June, Reuters reported Israeli lawmakers are advancing legislation to place ancient sites in occupied territory under the Israeli Ministry of Heritage — a move that Palestinian and Israeli rights groups describe as functional annexation. Shomali says roughly 80 percent of the country's national collections have been looted, destroyed, or remain under Israeli control.

The engineering response is deliberately unglamorous. The platform is open-source. The backups are geographically distributed. The redundancy is designed not to prevent attack but to make destruction impossible regardless of attack success. "It's not something theoretical," Shomali told Wired's Tamara Davison, recalling a week in which Israeli forces bombed two art galleries, seven museums, two main archives in Gaza, and hundreds of archaeological sites.¹ The archive exists because physical institutions — even the Palestinian Museum itself, a striking building designed by Heneghan Peng architects among terraced gardens in Birzeit — can be seized, bombed, or made inaccessible by checkpoints. Bits distributed across multiple continents are harder to confiscate.

The team is also solving problems most archivists don't face. Some documents are in Ottoman Arabic, a script that requires specialized expertise to read; the museum is exploring an automated bot to help process historical records in that language. Among the items digitizer Mohammad Rabae has handled: a 19th-century Bible printed in Jerusalem, and a Palestinian newspaper from 1930 with pages so brittle they had to be unfolded by hand before scanning. "Digitization is not only about creating a digital image," he said. "It's also about preserving fragile historical material safely for future generations."

The archive's second purpose is access. The museum built what Shomali calls "an exhibition in a box, Ikea-style" — downloadable exhibition materials that anyone, anywhere, regardless of budget, can print and mount. The project has been exhibited more than 260 times, from Japan to San Francisco, translated into five languages.¹ In May 2026, artist Leyya Mona Tawil used the archive to build an exhibition at SoEx in San Francisco; she described accessing only "a fragment of what the museum holds." In Spain, curator Pablo Llorca spent two months working with the archive's imagery before debuting To Tell My Story in Madrid in October 2025 — it has since traveled to around 15 locations across the country and drawn interest from Spain's Ministry of Culture.

The distributed model gives Shomali something he describes as structural: "All of a sudden, you start to have this mesh, this web of information and data, and it allows you to rewrite the history — but interestingly, bottom-up, in the sense that it's not a state archive." The archive wasn't commissioned by a government and doesn't depend on one for survival. It survives because copies exist in enough places that no single actor can make them all go away.

He closes the piece with a line from the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish: "We who are able to remember are able to liberate ourselves."¹ It reads less like a slogan than like a design requirement.

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FROM THE ARCHIVE

The Boy Who Came Back: July 6, 1885

A gas-lit laboratory, Paris, 1885. A boy of nine sits upright in a wooden chair, shirt lifted, knuckles white on the armrests. A bearded physician in a dark frock coat leans over him, syringe in hand, the boy's side exposed. Behind, a second older man — heavy-set, watchful, his hands clasped behind his back — stands at a bench crowded with glass vials, rubber stoppers, and coiled tubing. A single window throws a shaft of afternoon light across the bench; the rest of the room recedes into deep cross-hatched shadow. The physician's face is intent, the boy's turned slightly away. No text. Black-and-white pen-and-ink with confident bold linework, controlled hatching on the coats and shadow, generous white space in the light-struck areas, newspaper op-ed style.

Sixty hours after a rabid dog bit Joseph Meister fourteen times — wounds deep enough that the nine-year-old could barely walk — Louis Pasteur made a fold in the skin of the boy's right upper abdomen and administered the first injection.¹

The date was July 6, 1885. Pasteur was not a doctor; his doctorate covered chemistry and physics, and he had no legal right to vaccinate a human being. He had tested his rabies preparations on dogs and rabbits. He had never given them to a person. At a weekly meeting of the French Academy of Sciences, he had laid the case before two physicians — Alfred Vulpian and Jacques Grancher — and together they looked at the Alsatian boy and concluded that his death, absent intervention, was essentially certain. Grancher would administer the doses to keep Pasteur inside the law. Pasteur would supply the material and the nerve. He later wrote that he resolved to try the method "though not without great anxiety."¹

The protocol ran three weeks: thirteen inoculations total, each drawn from progressively more virulent rabbit spinal cord preparations, each batch first injected into healthy rabbits to confirm it didn't cause disease outright before going into the boy.¹ At the end of the course, Meister received a dose from a rabid dog. Nothing happened. He was immune.

Pasteur eventually hired him as a concierge at the Institut Pasteur, the institute whose construction Grancher had overseen and which opened on November 14, 1888.² Meister worked there for decades, in the building that owed its existence to his survival.

He died on June 24, 1940, ten days after the German army entered Paris. He turned on a gas stove. For years the story circulated that he had killed himself rather than let the Nazis desecrate Pasteur's crypt — a heroic myth, and a false one. Researchers Héloïse Dufour and Sean Carroll, working from the diary of Eugène Wollman and interviews with Meister's granddaughter, determined that he was despondent over his wife and children, who had fled Paris to escape the bombing.¹ He had somehow convinced himself they were dead.

His wife and daughters returned to Paris later that same day.

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THE FUNNIES

Compression Ratios and Hot Takes

*After XKCD — on the .splat4d format's 58x compression claim, and what storing the background exactly once implies about the spatial variety of most people's apartments. After Garfield — on the Visma team's fan-voted all-black race kit, and what Stage 4's forecast 40 degrees thinks of the performance science marshaled in its defense.*

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ALSO NOTED

Also Noted

• Hegau Gravel: Vakoč and Laing take UCI Gravel World Series round in Singen — Petr Vakoč (Factor Racing) edged Simon Pellaud by two seconds in the elite men's race; Nele Laing (Canyon DTSwiss ATR) claimed her first-ever UCI Gravel World Series victory in the women's race — this German round is the only German qualifier for the World Championships in Nannup, Western Australia in October. cyclingnews.com Jul 5, 2026
• Why join a Tour breakaway with a 2% win rate? — BikeRadar explains Chapette's Law (the peloton gains a minute per 10km at full effort) and the real incentives that send riders up the road: media coverage, bonus sprints worth up to €1,500, and a career-altering stage win that pays €11,000 — reasons that hold even when the math doesn't. bikeradar.com Jul 6, 2026
• Cannondale Factory Racing MTB team to close after 2026 season — After more than 30 years and a roster that has included Anne-Caroline Chausson, Cedric Gracia, and current Olympic champion Jolanda Neff, Cannondale is ending its Factory Racing program and replacing it with a broader "Cannondale Rogues" ambassador format spanning MTB, gravel, and lifestyle disciplines. cyclingmagazine.ca Jun 24, 2026
• C2PA image authentication won't work until every camera signs every photo — Developer Sean Goedecke argues that C2PA Content Credentials — positioned as the EU AI Act's approach to tagging AI-generated images — is currently unusable because only Google's Pixel 10 signs photos by default, the iPhone doesn't, and most images lose their C2PA metadata after passing through any social media server. seangoedecke.com Jul 5, 2026
• ICE's internal watchdog opened 131 cases against online critics in 14 months — Wired reports that ICE's Office of Professional Responsibility — normally an internal misconduct body — sent agents to a New York polling site to confront a poll worker over an Instagram post crediting a newspaper's reporting, and court filings show it has issued administrative subpoenas to tech companies to unmask anonymous critics. wired.com Jul 6, 2026
• Nature study: galaxy filaments remain structured at scales where uniformity should prevail — A paper by researchers at Italy's Enrico Fermi Research Center, drawing on more than two decades of research, found coherent galaxy networks that persist at scales where the standard cosmological model predicts structure should fade into a featureless background, potentially wobbling a foundational assumption of modern cosmology. wired.com Jul 6, 2026
• sqlite-utils 4.0rc3: compound foreign keys land as a breaking change — Simon Willison's rc3 adds support for introspecting and creating compound foreign keys (a breaking change to `table.foreign_keys`) and aligns column name matching with SQLite's case-insensitive convention; stable 4.0 was expected this weekend but the expanding changelog delayed it. simonwillison.net Jul 6, 2026
• Elm 0.19.2 delivers sub-350ms incremental builds — A parser allocation fix reduces GC copying by 20%, peak memory by 10%, and overall compile time by 7%; the release also signals a path to 1.0 via a series of small non-breaking releases adding features like equatable and hashable types. elm-lang.org Jul 6, 2026
• Flipper Zero commits to maintained firmware, publishes integration test suite — After community backlash over what looked like firmware abandonment, Flipper Devices is allocating resources for ongoing maintenance, moving all feature requests to voted GitHub Discussions, and making its internal QA integration test cases public as a required gate for all firmware PRs. blog.flipper.net Jul 1, 2026

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THE QUESTION

When the Explanation Arrives After the Decision

When the EU's legal exemption for voluntary message scanning expired on April 3 and detection reports kept flowing anyway, the Council's fast-track move to restore "identical in content" authorization was not restoring a system — it was labeling one that never stopped.¹

As THE LAB reports today, the Council's procedural maneuver rests on a formal distinction: an expired regulation cannot legally be extended, so member states introduced what Heise describes as a regulation "largely identical in content but different in form."¹ The draft is timed for Parliament's final session before summer recess, when an absolute majority of all MEPs — not just those present — is required to block it. That threshold is historically unreachable once members have departed.¹ The Council's own framing names the stakes plainly: it is closing "a looming legal loophole" for detection systems already running. The systems were already running. The loophole was legal exposure, not a behavioral gap.

Today's paper raises the same structural question in a different register. THE PELOTON's coverage of Visma-Lease a Bike's all-black race kit includes head of performance Mathieu Heijboer's technical defense: fabric construction matters far more than color for thermoregulation; climate-chamber testing of the team's Nimbl kit prototypes showed jersey color produces only "insignificant differences" in body temperature.² That explanation is probably accurate. But the black kit was chosen over a cream alternative by fan vote before the testing was marshaled in its defense² — and Velo's own reporting notes the discarded cream jersey, made of identical materials, would still have been cooler.² The science describes the choice. It didn't make it.

The question worth carrying through Stage 4's forecast 40°C and through this week's EU parliamentary session: when formal justification arrives after the decision — legal authorization, climate-chamber data, expert review — what work does it actually do? In the jersey case, the cost of getting the sequence wrong is a few degrees of body heat. In the Chat Control case, it is the privacy architecture of messaging for hundreds of millions of people. The sequencing problem is the same. The stakes are not.

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