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Random photos from summer. A Forkalyst gig. The big funfair. Irrland. And the start into our vacation. (38 photos)

The Merchant’s House Museum was NYC’s first landmarked building, but until this year, the function of a small hidden passageway in the house was unknown. When historians and preservationists examined it in detail, they found that it was built by the first owner of the hous...

AI Is Getting Scary Good at Making Predictions. “From this point on, for as long as we exist, we might be asking AIs what comes next. We won’t always understand how they arrived at their predictions.”

An AI-generated report, delivered directly to the email inboxes of journalists, was an essential tool in the Times’ coverage. It was also one of the first signals that conservative media was turning against the administration [...]

Built in-house and known internally as the “Manosphere Report,” the tool uses large language models (LLMs) to transcribe and summarize new episodes of dozens of podcasts.

“The Manosphere Report gave us a really fast and clear signal that this was not going over well with that segment of the President’s base,” said Seward. “There was a direct link between seeing that and then diving in to actually cover it.”

— Andrew Deck for Niemen Lab, How The New York Times uses a custom AI tool to track the “manosphere”

Tags: generative-ai, new-york-times, journalism, ai, data-journalism, llms

Andrew Cunningham, writing for Ars Technica at the end of January: Apple also outlines a number of usage restrictions for the generative AI features that rely on external services. Apple says that, “at a minimum,” users will be able to generate 50 images, 50 presentation...

Amid the ongoing climate crisis, how do artists express concerns about water and the environment?

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Along the Mississippi River, ‘Water | Craft’ Is a Confluence of Art, Culture, and Ecology appeared first on Colossal.

Sleeping cleans your brain. Research suggests that zoning out, daydreaming, and being bored can perform a similar function without the need for deep sleep. So put down that phone occasionally and let your brain chill for a bit.

Tags: neuroscience · science · sleep · video

In case you didn’t realize, ICE is still terrorizing communities, kidnapping people off the streets, and destroying property in Minnesota. “The target of the kidnapping was taken away by ambulance.”

Skills in OpenAI API OpenAI's adoption of Skills continues to gain ground. You can now use Skills directly in the OpenAI API with their shell tool. You can zip skills up and upload them first, but I think an even neater interface is the ability to send skills with the JSON r...

Fontemon is the world’s first video game in a font. “The entire game is enclosed in fontemon.otf, no javascript, no html, all font.”

GLM-5: From Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering

This is a huge new MIT-licensed model: 754B parameters and 1.51TB on Hugging Face twice the size of GLM-4.7 which was 368B and 717GB (4.5 and 4.6 were around that size too).

It's interesting to see Z.ai take a position on what we should call professional software engineers building with LLMs - I've seen "Agentic Engineering" show up in a few other places recently. most notable from Andrej Karpathy and Addy Osmani.

I ran my "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle" prompt through GLM-5 via OpenRouter and got back a very good pelican on a disappointing bicycle frame:

Via Hacker News

Tags: definitions, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, llm-release, vibe-coding, openrouter, ai-in-china, glm

Whether working in the studio or street, James Reka gravitates for vivid abstraction.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Minimal Shapes Layer into Dynamic, Abstracted Murals by James Reka appeared first on Colossal.

The GOP goal of destroying the post office is coming along: the USPS is now so unreliable that newspaper delivery is delayed across the country. (My mail delivery is currently one bundle every week or two.)

cysqlite - a new sqlite driver Charles Leifer has been maintaining pysqlite3 - a fork of the Python standard library's sqlite3 module that makes it much easier to run upgraded SQLite versions - since 2018. He's been working on a ground-up Cython rewrite called cysqlite for a...

Hey gang. I took a couple of days off at the beginning of the week to visit some colleges with my daughter. She found a potential contender, one that was just fine, and a school that isn’t going to work for her — we both independently zoned out listening to the presentation ...

"The head is more than the center of the brain and thought; it is the place where the soul lives and must be protected," the artist says.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Traditional African Baskets and Pottery Meet Pop Culture in Donté K. Hayes’ Sculptures appeared first on Colossal.

Everyone’s living a life you know nothing about. Be kind.

“We will not achieve any of our ultimate goals without exercising state power, and the most effective way to take state power is through nonviolent but confrontational resistance.”

A recommendation for a recent episode of the Heavyweight podcast on the Trump regime’s occupation of Minneapolis.

The Marías is a band from Los Angeles, made up of María Zardoya, Josh Conway, Jesse Perlman, and Edward James. They released their first EPs in 2017 and 2018, and their first album in 2021. But then, as you’ll hear, there was a period of a lot of uncertainty around the band’...