Is the best literary film adaptation of the last 50 years: a) The Silence of the Lambs, b) The Princess Bride, c) The Return of the King (LoTR), d) Apocalypse Now, or e) Jurassic Park?
Longreads
• Cheri Lucas Rowlands
"It's a new era of D.I.Y. medicine. Now the health establishment needs to catch up."
A French corporation was recently found criminally liable for enabling terrorism. “The court in Paris has just ruled that cynicism and an exclusive focus on profits can constitute a crime.”
Colossal
• Grace Ebert
"Some people say, ‘Why do you weave?’ But they don’t understand this work."
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 How One Cooperative Champions the Quechua Weavers of Peru’s Sacred Valley appeared first on Colossal.
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
Everyone Is Blaming AI for the Water Crisis. We’re Looking at the Wrong Culprit. “One drive to the work I do on the Colorado River used more than 20 times the water of everything I did with AI in 11 weeks.”
The Accursèd Alphabetical Clock. “This clock displays the current time alphabetically.” Totally deranged…I love it.
Every Frame a Painting’s Taylor Ramos & Tony Zhou are back with a video essay about pushing the boundaries of genre in Tsui Hark’s 1995 film The Blade.
One reason filmmakers like to work in a genre is that it gives us a pre-made box: a set of expectations, tropes, and boundaries. On the one hand, we want to play within that box, and on the other, we want to push against its edges. Tsui Hark’s The Blade is an exploration and a deconstruction of the box that is wuxia.
If you’re not familiar with wuxia, the video explains the genre; it’s basically Chinese martial arts fantasy — think Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or Hero. (thx, neil)
Tags: film school · movies · Taylor Ramos · The Blade · Tony Zhou · video
Peak slab phone in 2026 looks a lot like a camera attached to a phone Auto Focus shot on Oppo Find X9 Ultra: https://youtu.be/9s69aThM7rA?si=x8qW7F4MorY2qgRp MKBHD Merch: http://shop.MKBHD.com Playlist of MKBHD Intro music: https://goo.gl/B3AWV5 Phone provided by Oppo for review. ~ http://twitter.com/MKBHD http://instagram.com/MKBHD http://facebook.com/MKBHD
AI agents are already too human. Not in the romantic sense, not because they love or fear or dream, but in the more banal and frustrating one. The current implementations keep showing their human origin again and again: lack of stringency, lack of patience, lack of focus. Faced with an awkward task, they drift towards the familiar. Faced with hard constraints, they start negotiating with reality.
— Andreas Påhlsson-Notini, Less human AI agents, please.
Tags: ai-agents, coding-agents, ai
scosman/pelicans_riding_bicycles
I firmly approve of Steve Cosman's efforts to pollute the training set of pelicans riding bicycles.
(To be fair, most of the examples I've published count as poisoning too.)
Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, training-data, pelican-riding-a-bicycle
Release: llm-openrouter 0.6
llm openrouter refreshcommand for refreshing the list of available models without waiting for the cache to expire.
I added this feature so I could try Kimi 2.6 on OpenRouter as soon as it became available there.
Here's its pelican - this time as an HTML page because Kimi chose to include an HTML and JavaScript UI to control the animation. Transcript here.
Tags: openrouter, llm, llm-release, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, kimi, ai-in-china, llms, ai, generative-ai
Trials for a pancreatic cancer mRNA vaccine: “Nearly 90% of people whose immune systems responded to the vaccine were still alive up to six years after receiving the last treatment. The five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer is around 13%…”
