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So it’s well known that Y Combinator owns some stake in OpenAI. But how big is that stake? This seems like devilishly difficult information to obtain. I asked around and a little birdie who knows several OpenAI investors came back with an answer: Y Combinator owns about 0.6 percent of OpenAI. At OpenAI’s current $852 billion valuation, that’s worth over $5 billion.

— John Gruber, Y Combinator’s Stake in OpenAI

Tags: openai, y-combinator, ai, john-gruber

The Ringer’s Bill Simmons, Chris Ryan, and Sean Fennessey try to figure out how Ted got the frank above the beans after rewatching the 1998 comedy classic ‘There’s Something About Mary,’ starring Ben Stiller, Cameron Diaz, and Matt Dillon. Producers: Craig Horlbeck, Chia Hao Tat, Eduardo Ocampo, and Matt Pevic Get more value with the McValue menu at McDonald’s Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Granite 4.1 3B SVG Pelican Gallery IBM released their Granite 4.1 family of LLMs a few days ago. They're Apache 2.0 licensed and come in 3B, 8B and 30B sizes. Unsloth released the unsloth/granite-4.1-3b-GGUF collection of GGUF encoded quantized variants of the 3B model - 21 ...

[...] Between 2000 and 2024, farmers sold in total a Colorado-sized chunk of land all on their own, 77 times all land on data center property in 2028, and grew more food than ever on what was left. None of this caused any problems for US food access.

And then, in the middle of all this, a farmer in Loudoun County sells a few acres of mediocre hay field to a hyperscaler for ten times its agricultural value, and the response is that we’re running out of farmland.

— Andy Masley, pushing back against the "land use" argument against data center construction

Tags: ai-ethics, ai, generative-ai, andy-masley

Paul Thurrott:

I may or may not write and publish a short e-book about Markdown sometime this year, most likely as part of a monthly focus. But l’ve written small parts of it already, as I do, and I figured it might be interesting for at least some readers. And so here’s an early draft of an introductory chapter that may or may not be called “On writing.” We’ll see.

It’s odd how things turn out in life. Thurrott’s and my careers are almost uniquely parallel, but have seldom intersected. This book would have been a very surprising outcome to me, if you’d told me about it 20 years ago. Sort of a fun outcome, though, and I must admit to being curious what comes of it.

Link: thurrott.com/paul/334577/the-markdown-book-on-writing?utm…

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