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I just sent out the April edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here.

In this month's newsletter:

• Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5, both with price increases
• Claude Mythos and LLM security research
• ChatGPT Images 2.0
• More model releases
• Other highlights from my blog
• What I'm using, April 2026 edition

Here's a copy of the March newsletter as a preview of what you'll get. Pay $10/month to stay a month ahead of the free copy!

Tags: newsletter

Speaking of companies with valuable minority stakes in AI companies, there’s one thing that stuck in my craw about the blockbuster Ronan Farrow / Andrew Marantz investigative piece on Sam Altman and OpenAI last month for The New Yorker. It didn’t come up during Nilay Patel’s...

The Booksellers is a 2019 feature-length documentary film about antiquarian and rare book dealers; you can watch the whole movie for free on YouTube.

The New York Times, back in March last year (gift link): To win the artificial intelligence race, Google not only has developed its own technologies, but has also pumped money into prominent A.I. start-ups. And to preserve its competitive edge, Google has kept its owners...

Jeremy Provost, on the blog for Think Tap Work, his mobile app development company: iOS App Store search is no longer about relevance. It’s about ad inventory. With Apple’s introduction of a second search ad, for any query where we weren’t #1, we’ve effectively moved dow...

The artist Banksy has installed (without a permit, one assumes) a new statue in London that depicts a man in a suit marching off off a ledge, blinded by a flag.

The artwork has been dubbed Blind Patriotism, although Banksy, enigmatic as always, doesn’t explain the meaning of his latest work. However, many have interpreted it as satirising the rise of nationalistic fervour in the UK, typified by the populist politician Nigel Farage and other forces on the far right.

Another bullseye for Banksy. 🎯

Tags: art · Banksy · politics

Designer Jenny Volvovski’s collection of unsolicited book cover designs. “I really wanted to design book covers but didn’t have any book cover work. So I hired myself to redesign my personal library.”

This is what happens when 80 artists are confined to a historic quarantine island without phones or internet access for one week.

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 We Spent a Week Quarantined on an Uninhabited Island with 80 Artists appeared first on Colossal.

Jake Adelstein (author of Tokyo Vice) on his blog Tokyo Paladin: For decades, Japan’s Oreos weren’t made by Nabisco at all. They were produced domestically by Yamazaki Biscuits, under a licensing arrangement with what eventually became Mondelez International. This was, b...

Marcin Wichary at Unsung: I’m angry. (Clearly.) We should all be angry in face of stuff like this. This is how people get fed up with software — because it feels unstable and deteriorates on its own without needing to. I know I brought up that an existing power user bas...

I’m not a fan of the first part of this music video (reminds me too much of dipshits I had to endure at school), but the single-take choreography from ~4:18 is great.

Sam Sabin, writing for Axios one year ago: Anthropic expects AI-powered virtual employees to begin roaming corporate networks in the next year, the company’s top security leader told Axios in an interview this week. [...] Virtual employees could be the next AI innovation...

Two months ago, revisiting Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s year-prior prediction that AI would soon be writing 90+ percent of all programming code, I wrote: But where I think Amodei’s remarks, quoted above, are facile is that it hasn’t played out as simply that lines of cod...

Research: TRE Python binding — ReDoS robustness demo

If it's good enough for antirez to add to Redis I figured Ville Laurikari's TRE regular expression engine was worth exploring in a little more detail.

I had Claude Code build an experimental Python binding (it used ctypes) and try some malicious regular expression attacks against the library. TRE handles those much better than Python's standard library implementation, thanks mainly to the lack of support for backtracking.

Tags: security, python, regular-expressions, c, ctypes

According to this peer-reviewed paper, the “screeching sound of peeling tape” is caused by tiny sonic booms. The speeds at work here are in the range of Mach 0.7–1.8. Supersonic crafts!

NASA has released some 12,000 unseen photos from the recent Artemis II mission; here are some of the best shots.

The ethereal, life-size sculpture is an ode to the historic Herkenrode Abbey.

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 Gijs Van Vaerenbergh Gracefully Reimagines a 16th-Century Belgian Abbey Church in Steel appeared first on Colossal.

Tool: Redis Array Playground Salvatore Sanfilippo submitted a PR adding a new data type - arrays - to Redis. The new commands are ARCOUNT, ARDEL, ARDELRANGE, ARGET, ARGETRANGE, ARGREP, ARINFO, ARINSERT, ARLASTITEMS, ARLEN, ARMGET, ARMSET, ARNEXT, AROP, ARRING, ARSCA...

Nowhere on XKCD’s map of The Contiguous 41 States does it say that you need to find the missing seven states, but that’s immediately where my mind went. And it was a little more challenging than I anticipated — all of New England is present & accounted for somehow?

The answer key is here, along with this tidbit:

The United States did have exactly 41 states for a few days in 1889, from the admission of Montana, the 41st state, on November 8, to the admission of Washington (the state, not DC), the 42nd state, on November 11.

See also this super-sized US map with 64 states.

And then after I wrote all of the above, I decided to check and of course I’d posted about this map before, soon after it came out. *sigh*

Tags: maps · usa · xkcd