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It’s David Attenborough’s 100th birthday today! One of my few genuine heroes.

"On any given day I was seen as both valuable and disposable, sometimes oscillating between these in the same hour."

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The US says it struck Iranian military facilities after Iran targeted American warships crossing the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran claims the US was violating the ceasefire. President Trump says the ceasefire is still intact. Also: Russia prepares to celebrate Victory Day amid fe...

“In nine experiments involving 1,800 participants, researchers found that people consistently underestimated how interesting and enjoyable conversations about boring topics would be.”

In today's video, I'm breaking down why the next generation of musicians is skipping college and why it might actually be the smartest decision they can make.

Stu Maschwitz: Prolost Watches is an iPhone app for managing your watch collection. It’s part database, part journal; designed for the detail-obsessed mind of the watch fanatic. As you log each day’s choice of watch, insights are revealed. Wear logs trace a path on the m...

Organized by Capture the Atlas, the 2026 Milky Way Photographer of the Year saw a record number of submissions from around the globe.

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 Explore 25 Incredible Photos of the Milky Way Captured Around the World appeared first on Colossal.

David Kaylor is re-editing Rogue One into what he calls “The Andor Cut”; the trailer seems pretty compelling and well-done. He says this is Rogue One if it was produced after Andor: The original version is the events of Rogue One as seen through Jyn’s perspective, and thi...

A brief history: lessons from the rise and fall of Reconstruction. “Must America be forever defined by strict hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth – or can the nation finally realize its promise of egalitarian pluralism?”

Release: llm-gemini 0.31

• gemini-3.1-flash-lite is no longer a preview.

Here's my write-up of the Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite Preview model back in March. I don't believe this new non-preview model has changed since then.

Tags: llm-release, gemini, llm, google, generative-ai, ai, llms

Tool: Big Words

I'm using my vibe coded macOS presentations tool to put together a talk, and I wanted to add a slide with some text on it. The tool only accepts URLs, so I put together a quick page that accepts query string arguments and turns them into a simple slide.

Here's an example: https://tools.simonwillison.net/big-words?text=simonwillison.net&gradient=1&size=9.5

Double click or double tap the page to access a form for modifying the different options.

Tags: vibe-coding, tools

Tool: GitHub Repo Stats

One of the things I always look for when evaluating a new GitHub repository is the number of commits it has... but that number isn't visible on GitHub's mobile site layout. I built this tool to fix that, using this prompt:

Given a GitHub repo URL or foo/bar repo ID show information about that repo absorbed via wither REST or graphql CORS fetch() including the number of commits in the repo and other useful stats

Example output for simonw/datasette and simonw/llm.

Tags: github

The website for the Abolitionist Guide to NYC is just getting started, but the site does house an Abolitionist Map of NYC.

The Abolitionist Map of NYC offers a geographic survey of incarceration and anti-carceral resistance in Manahatta from the Dutch colonization of Lenapehoking to the present day. The map highlights some of the first jails and prisons to exist in the area, the movement of facilities from one place to the next, and sites of rebellion against the expansion of the prison industrial complex.

It is meant to serve as a tool for abolitionist resistance grounded in a long view of the struggle, tactics, and goals.

The map is available as a PDF and as an interactive version. (via @prisonculture.bsky.social)

Tags: maps · NYC · prison

"In some ways, the world is cooked. But being a twelve-year-old still kind of eats."

Chess Peace is an iOS puzzle game where you have to place chess pieces on a board so that none of them attack each other. Simple + clever!

Behind the Scenes Hardening Firefox with Claude Mythos Preview Fascinating, in-depth details on how Mozilla used their access to the Claude Mythos preview to locate and then fix hundreds of vulnerabilities in Firefox: Suddenly, the bugs are very good Just a few months ago, ...

There weren't a lot of big new announcements from Anthropic at yesterday's Code w/ Claude event, but the biggest by far was the deal they've struck with SpaceX/xAI to use "all of the capacity of their Colossus data center". As I mentioned in my live blog of the keynote, that...

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