FeedCity

Hayden Field, reporting for The Verge:

In what’s potentially the first major payout to creatives whose work was used to train AI systems, Anthropic has reached an agreement to pay “at least” a staggering $1.5 billion, plus interest, to authors to settle its class-action lawsuit. The amount breaks down to smaller payouts expected to be approximately $3,000 per book or work. Lawyers for the plaintiffs said it’s “believed to be the largest publicly reported recovery in the history of US copyright litigation.”

Link: theverge.com/anthropic/773087/anthropic-to-pay-1-5-billion…

After struggling for years trying to figure out why people think [Cloudflare] Durable Objects are complicated, I'm increasingly convinced that it's just that they sound complicated.

Feels like we can solve 90% of it by renaming DurableObject to StatefulWorker?

It's just a worker that has state. And because it has state, it also has to have a name, so that you can route to the specific worker that has the state you care about. There may be a sqlite database attached, there may be a container attached. Those are just part of the state.

— Kenton Varda

Tags: kenton-varda, sqlite, cloudflare

In August we performed a live taping of the show from a theater perched on the edge of Manhattan, overlooking the Hudson River, overshadowed by the wide open night sky. Three stories about voids. One about a fish that screams into the night – and the mystery of its counterpa...

Florida Decided There Were Too Many Children. “Florida is the first state to take the courageous step toward decluttering itself of excess children, but under the inexpert guidance of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., other states may follow.”

Introducing EmbeddingGemma

Brand new open weights (under the slightly janky Gemma license) 308M parameter embedding model from Google:

Based on the Gemma 3 architecture, EmbeddingGemma is trained on 100+ languages and is small enough to run on less than 200MB of RAM with quantization.

It's available via sentence-transformers, llama.cpp, MLX, Ollama, LMStudio and more.

As usual for these smaller models there's a Transformers.js demo (via) that runs directly in the browser (in Chrome variants) - Semantic Galaxy loads a ~400MB model and then lets you run embeddings against hundreds of text sentences, map them in a 2D space and run similarity searches to zoom to points within that space.

Tags: google, ai, embeddings, transformers-js, gemma

Any time I share my collection of tools built using vibe coding and AI-assisted development (now at 124, here's the definitive list) someone will inevitably complain that they're mostly trivial. A lot of them are! Here's a list of some that I think are genuinely useful and w...

How Are You Supposed To Get The COVID Vaccine Now? An Explainer. “If you are not in one of the 16-ish states requiring a prescription for a COVID vaccine, you should be able to self-report a condition and receive your vaccine.”

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

David Pierce, writing for The Verge: Mike Cannon-Brookes, the CEO of enterprise software giant Atlassian, was one of the first users of the Arc browser. Over the last several years, he has been a prolific bug reporter and feature requester. Now he’ll own the thing: Atlas...

Dave Michaels and Katherine Blunt, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link): “There are strong reasons not to jolt the system and to allow market forces to do the work,” Mehta wrote. Wall Street analysts scored the ruling a huge win for Google and Apple since i...

Beyond Vibe Coding Back in May I wrote Two publishers and three authors fail to understand what “vibe coding” means where I called out the authors of two forthcoming books on "vibe coding" for abusing that term to refer to all forms of AI-assisted development, when Not all A...

In the aftermath of the 2016 election, British American artist Jo Hay began a series of engaging portraits called Persisters “that depict contemporary, trailblazing women in pursuit of civil rights and justice”. Pictured above are her paintings of Letitia James, Elizabeth Warren, Greta Thunberg, Christine Blasey Ford, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Marie Yovanovitch. The portraits are quite large, as you can see in this photo of AOC’s painting.

I also quite like Hay’s other portraits, including this poignant one of Anne Frank.

Tags: art · Jo Hay · politics

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Dave Hone is a paleontologist, expert on dinosaurs, co-host of the Terrible Lizards podcast, and author of numerous scientific papers and books on the behavior and ecology of dinosaurs. He lectures at Queen Mary University of London on topics of Ecology, Zoology, Biology, an...

David McCabe, reporting for The New York Times: Google must hand over its search results and some data to rival companies but does not need to break itself up by selling its Chrome web browser, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday. The decision, by Judge Amit P. Mehta of the...

There are finallys, and there are finallys. Apple shipped the original iPad in April 2010. Instagram shipped in October 2010 — and was iPhone-exclusive until 2012. That Instagram didn’t ship a native iPad version of its app until now is really one of the strangest things in tech. But here it is.

One significant difference from Instagram on phones is that on iPad, it defaults to the Reels view, and you have to tap below Reels in the sidebar to get to your following timeline. Adam Mosseri explains their thinking behind this in this Reel (natch).

Link: about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/instagram-for-ipad/

“I almost admire the confidence it must take to tell people what to do online. But I long for the days when the internet wasn’t just lists of bossy self-optimisation plans.”

Shane Schieffer is attempting to swim the entire 140-mile length of Lake Powell in 10 days, self-supported. Yeah, that means he’s dragging 215lbs of gear behind him on a paddle board while he swims. He’s documenting the whole thing on Instagram; here’s a video where he exp...

The Rise of the Traveling Third Space. “Traveling third spaces are not physically fixed; they move across cafes, malls, restaurants, and host various programming for a singular community in a particular city.”

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Lucasfilm recently released an official map of the galaxy that Star Wars takes place in. And it’s huge.

The map is slightly interactive; you can zoom and scroll it, but you can’t search or, say, click to highlight all the star systems featured in Andor. But you can do manual lookups using this massive 59-page PDF listing of Star Wars star systems.

Tags: maps · Star Wars

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Pre-Show: Trouble in Razer paradise 🗣️ It’s St. Jude time again! 🗣️ The Marco Offset Follow-up: Casey has thoughts about the compact iOS 26 controls in Safari Settings → Apps → Safari Apple device advice for those that are athletically engaged Place your phone...