24.04.2026
Colossal
• Kate Mothes
Navid Baraty’s Atmospheric Photos Explore Contrasting Scales of Time
The contrasts and tensions of contemporary urban life and timeless landscapes merge in otherworldly images.
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 Navid Baraty’s Atmospheric Photos Explore Contrasting Scales of Time appeared first on Colossal.
Longreads
• Cheri Lucas Rowlands
The Disappearance of the Public Bench
"Benches are microcosms of an expansive debate about who belongs in urban public spaces. When they are removed or made uninviting, we lose more than just a place to rest."
Longreads
• Longreads
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Deaths in donation bins, the Hardy boys, MAGA slop, billionaire playgrounds, and nostalgia for the complicated.
HWC DUS April is behind us. Daniel told us about his (CSS) color palette and color spaces deep dive. And about emojis and the plain symbol version of those. So here’s some links to the things we talked about:
- Okabe-Ito Color Palette
- Paul Tol’s Color Schemes
- Dead Code podcast (RSS, FeedCity)
- font-variant-emoji
- Unicode Variation Selectors
Next event: Beyond Tellerrand on April 27, 2026 – April 28, 2026 at Capitol Theater, Düsseldorf.
23.04.2026
DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price
Chinese AI lab DeepSeek's last model release was V3.2 (and V3.2 Speciale) last December. They just dropped the first of their hotly anticipated V4 series in the shape of two preview models, DeepSeek-V4-Pro and DeepSeek-V4-Flash.
Both models are 1 million token context Mixtur...
It's a big one
This week's edition of my email newsletter (aka content from this blog delivered to your inbox) features 4 pelicans riding bicycles, 1 possum on an e-scooter, up to 5 raccoons with ham radios hiding in crowds, 5 blog posts, 8 links, 3 quotes and a new chapter of my Agentic Engineering Patterns guide.
Tags: newsletter
The Lebanon ceasefire is 'extended by three weeks'
President Trump says the Lebanon ceasefire has been extended for another three weeks, after hosting talks with diplomats from Israel and Lebanon at the White House, but insisted he won't "rush" a deal with Iran. Also: the Kremlin battles to control cyber space. The tech gia...
russellromney/honker
russellromney/honker
"Postgres NOTIFY/LISTEN semantics" for SQLite, implemented as a Rust SQLite extension and various language bindings to help make use of it.
The design of this looks very solid. It lets you write Python code for queues that looks like this:
import honker
...
An update on recent Claude Code quality reports
An update on recent Claude Code quality reports
It turns out the high volume of complaints that Claude Code was providing worse quality results over the past two months was grounded in real problems.
The models themselves were not to blame, but three separate issues in the C...
Serving the For You feed
Serving the For You feed
One of Bluesky's most interesting features is that anyone can run their own custom "feed" implementation and make it available to other users - effectively enabling custom algorithms that can use any mechanism they like to recommend posts.
spacecowbo...
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
United Kingdom to Enact Smoking Ban Only for Those Who Are Not Yet Legal Adults
Ephrat Livni, reporting for The New York Times (gift link):
Britain aims to raise a “smoke-free generation” by permanently
banning the sale or supply of tobacco to anyone born in 2009 or
after, with a bill that was approved by Parliament on Tuesday.
The bill applies to ...
Leaving Neverland director Dan Reed on the Michael...
Leaving Neverland director Dan Reed on the Michael biopic out in theaters right now: “How can you tell an authentic story about Michael Jackson without ever mentioning the fact that he was seriously accused of being a child molester?”
Extract PDF text in your browser with LiteParse for the web
LlamaIndex have a most excellent open source project called LiteParse, which provides a Node.js CLI tool for extracting text from PDFs. I got a version of LiteParse working entirely in the browser, using most of the same libraries that LiteParse uses to run in Node.js.
Spati...
Twin Peaks × LCD Soundsystem: a video mashup of Dance...
Twin Peaks × LCD Soundsystem: a video mashup of Dance Yrself Clean and the Twin Peaks theme music. Perfect. A damn fine cup of coffee, even.
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
Trump’s Blog Has Somehow Lost $1.1 Billion
motherjones.com/politics/2026/04/truth-social-ceo-out-after-1-1-billion-in-losses/
Russ Choma, reporting for Mother Jones:
Devin Nunes was not an obvious choice to run a fledgling social
media network, but after $1.1 billion in losses, the former dairy
farmer and congressman is out as the head of Truth Social.
Donald Trump Jr., a board member at Trump...
Mars For The Rest of Us
• Maciej Cegłowski
Why not Venus?
The planet next door may be rough, but it has a lot of atmosphere
A pelican for GPT-5.5 via the semi-official Codex backdoor API
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...
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.