FeedCity

The planet next door may be rough, but it has a lot of atmosphere

GPT-5.5 is out. It's available in OpenAI Codex and is rolling out to paid ChatGPT subscribers. I've had some preview access and found it to be a fast, effective and highly capable model. As is usually the case these days, it's hard to put into words what's good about it - I ...

ProPublica explores what a future without vaccines would look like in the US. Hundreds of thousands of deaths, tens of thousands of children paralyzed, and many other children stricken with serious but easily preventable health issues.

Nilay Patel, in a terrific essay (and Decoder one-sider) at The Verge: In fact, the polling on this is so strong, I think it’s fair to say that a lot of people hate AI, and that Gen Z in particular seems to hate AI more and more as they encounter it. There’s that NBC New...

The earliest-known recordings of whale songs (from 1949) were recently discovered in the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s archive. The scientists who recorded the audio didn’t even know what they were listening to.

Speaking of Chris Espinosa, this is pretty neat:

On September 1 I’ll join the elite club (members Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Mike Markkula, and Bill Fernandez) who have worked under a number of Apple CEOs ≥ our employee number:

Woz: 1 (Scott)
Jobs: 2 (Scott, Markkula)
Markkula: 3 (Scott, Sculley, Spindler)
Fernandez: 4 (Scott, Markkula, Sculley, Spindler)
Espinosa: 8 (Scott, Markkula, Sculley, Spindler, Amelio, Jobs, Cook, Ternus)

Link: mastodon.social/@Cdespinosa/116439702239797827

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma held an all-hands meeting this morning and laid out her strategy for a "return of Xbox" with employees. While rebranding Microsoft Gaming back to Xbox was part of the agenda, Sharma also revealed that Xbox is looking into "reevaluating" Xbox exclusive games and windowed releases of titles. It's a hot topic […]

"Why is a right-wing press reissuing century-old adolescent mystery novels?"

I’ve never seen anything like these photos before. In October 2024, Rachel Moore had a close encounter with a humpback whale in French Polynesia and took these photos of the whale’s eye. Moore wrote of the experience: This moment of eye contact was beyond my wildest dre...

Tom Warren, The Verge (gift link): “Many of these employees have spent years, and in some cases, decades, shaping Microsoft into what it is today,” says Microsoft’s HR chief Amy Coleman in a memo seen by The Verge. “For those who may be considering their next chapter, we...

Rachel Metz, reporting for Bloomberg: A small group of unauthorized users have accessed Anthropic PBC’s new Mythos AI model, a technology that the company says is so powerful it can enable dangerous cyberattacks, according to a person familiar with the matter and documen...

Austn Fischer's work harnesses an exuberant sense of play, utilizing fashion and style to explore identity.

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 Contrast Reigns in Austn Fischer’s Conspicuous Black-and-White Photos appeared first on Colossal.

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has had a busy week. Sharma held an internal town hall with Xbox employees today, just days after announcing an Xbox Game Pass price cut, commenting on the status of the Xbox mobile store, and teasing a mysterious Xbox and Discord partnership. One of the items on the agenda for the […]

Worried About Teens Today? So Were Adults in the 1920s. “A century ago, new technology and mobility reshaped what it meant to be young, linking rural life more closely to the city.”

The Lebanese president, Joseph Aoun, accuses Israel of deliberately targeting journalists, a day after another reporter, Amal Khalil, was killed in an Israeli attack. Also: a UN official tells the BBC that even if the Iran war ends tomorrow, at least 32m people around the wo...

I got the chance to go to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden with friends recently and it was magical, otherworldly, lovely. I think we hit peak blossom down to the second. It was cold and gray and windy, which kept the crowds down, provided the perfect photographic contrast, and made for an enchanting petal-fall. Tags: photography

It feels like not a week has gone by this year without a senior Microsoft executive leaving the company. Some departures have triggered sweeping shakeups of Microsoft's biggest businesses, while others have seen fresh faces replace veteran employees. Executive departures at Microsoft are nothing new, but the pace feels notable this early in the year. […]

If you want to surf elsewhere in the galaxy, it doesn’t actually look that promising. “Surfing on Titan would likely be a surreal, slow-motion, and tenebrous experience.” Or there’s also a planet with a sulfuric acid ocean?