Ann Ballentine bought an old candy factory building in Brooklyn in 1979. She filled it with working artists and became something of a fairy godmother to them all.
It entails someone who’s not as money driven, because you’re not gouging people for huge rents, and it requires being determined to do that over a long stretch of time.
This is a lovely little short film.
Tags: Ann Ballentine · art · NYC · real estate · video
robservatory.com/block-the-upgrade-to-tahoe-alerts-and-system-settings-indicator/
Free Claude Max for (large project) open source maintainers
Anthropic are now offering their $200/month Claude Max 20x plan for free to open source maintainers... for six months... and you have to meet the following criteria:
- Maintainers: You're a primary maintainer or core team member of a public repo with 5,000+ GitHub stars or 1M+ monthly NPM downloads. You've made commits, releases, or PR reviews within the last 3 months.
- Don't quite fit the criteria If you maintain something the ecosystem quietly depends on, apply anyway and tell us about it.
Also in the small print: "Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis. We accept up to 10,000 contributors".
Via Hacker News
Tags: open-source, ai, generative-ai, llms, anthropic, claude
Do people still worship the ancient Greek gods? “Hellenism – also called Hellenic ethnic religion, or Dodekatheism – which is the practice of worshipping ancient gods, has been growing in popularity since the 1990s.”
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
Jimi Hendrix Was a Systems Engineer. “Hendrix’s mission was to reshape both the electric guitar’s envelope and its tone until it could feel like a human voice.”
Marks found on 40,000-year-old artifacts might be a proto-language. “They found that these sign sequences displayed an information density very similar to the earliest examples of the cuneiform forerunner called proto-cuneiform.”
MG Siegler, writing at Spyglass:
Of course, Netflix could have absorbed such a cost. It’s a $400B company (well, before this deal, anyway) — double Disney! Paramount Skydance? They’re worth $11B. Yes, they’re paying almost exactly $100B more than they’re worth for WBD. Yes, it’s looney. But really, it’s leverage.
To be clear, Netflix was going to pay for the deal with debt too, but they have a clear path to repay such debts. They have a great, growing business. They don’t require the backstop of one of the world’s richest men, who just so happens to be the father of the CEO. How on Earth is Paramount going to pay down this debt? I’m tempted to turn to another bit of Paramount IP for the answer:
- Step one
- Step two
- ????
- PROFIT!!!
The aluminum soda can is a humble testament to the power and scope of human ingenuity. If that sounds like hyperbole, you should watch this video, which features eleven solid minutes of engineering explanation and is not boring for even a second.
More science/engineering programming like this please…I feel like if this would have been on PBS or Discovery, it would have lasted twice as long and communicated half the information. For a chaser, you can watch a detailed making-of from an aluminum can manufacturing company:
[This is a vintage post originally from Apr 2015.]
Tags: Bill Hammack · design · timeless posts · video
cnbc.com/2026/02/26/block-laying-off-about-4000-employees-nearly-half-of-its-workforce.html
Pope Leo XIV to his priests: stop using AI to write sermons. “‘To give a homily is to share faith,’ he said, and AI ‘will never be able to share faith.’”
Radiolab
• WNYC Studios
Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees. “Composition II with Red, Blue, and Yellow is in the U.S. public domain. It has been since January 1, 2026. No amount of Spanish law or invented ‘dual copyright’ theories changes that.”
Features | The Verge
• Danny Fenster and Amy Kurzweil
This story is a comic by Danny Fenster and Amy Kurzweil and is not compatible with RSS readers. But you can (and should) read it at The Verge’s website.
sixcolors.com/post/2026/02/apple-announces-f1-details-and-a-surprising-netflix-partnership/
