Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
This scan isn’t very good (best I could find), but these are all the lightsabers used by Jedi and Sith in the various Star Wars shows and movies. I think this is from a few years ago, so I’m not sure how up to date it is.
In the SW universe, making your own saber is a Jedi and Sith rite of passage, which accounts for the diversity in design. No shortcuts allowed…Babu Frik wasn’t out there selling Ancient Laser Sword™ kits to young padawans (kyber crystal sold separately). (via dennis crowley)
Colossal
• Grace Ebert
How many spaces on Pat Perry's bingo card can you get?
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 Play ‘Liminal Bingo,’ Pat Perry’s Participatory Photo Treasure Hunt appeared first on Colossal.
My friend Adriana wrote about her story game based on Dante’s Inferno. “In Vya, I modeled Pom after the poet Alice Notley, whose Descent of Alette (1996) is one of the great contributions to the literature of katabasis.”
How fast is 10 tokens per second really?
Neat little HTML app by Mike Veerman (source code here) which simulates LLM token output speeds from 5/second to 800/second.Useful if you see a model advertised as "30 tokens/second" and want to get a feel for what that actually looks like.
Via Hacker News
Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms
From Universe Today, an ongoing series of articles on A Brief-ish History of SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). Part I is entitled “Where is Everybody?”
You Can Make an App for That. “The most important thing you’ll need is taste. Not objectively good taste, necessarily, so much as a keen sense of your own.”
Colossal
• Kate Mothes
A neglected portrait is given what seems like an almost miraculous second chance.
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 Baumgartner Restoration Painstakingly Brings a Neglected Portrait Back to Life appeared first on Colossal.
Longreads
• Krista Stevens
"Apparently anyone can vibe code anything these days. So Claude and I tried to make a database for tracking the petty grievances of the masses."
Mariame Kaba’s letter to young activists: “I don’t know how things will turn out, but I am committed to something other than this — the current structure and state of this world. We can live differently.”
Song Exploder
• Hrishikesh Hirway
Hot Chip is a band from London made up of Alexis Taylor, Joe Goddard, Al Doyle, Owen Clarke, and Felix Martin. Their second album, The Warning, came out in 2006. It was nominated for a Mercury Prize, and named one of the best albums of the year by NME and Pitchfork. And later, NME would include it in their list of best albums of all time. For this episode, I talked to them about one of the songs from The Warning called “Boy From School.” You might have heard it in the second season of the show Beef on Netflix—the band’s also in the show—or you might have heard it on The Simpsons. You could have also heard the song in my car all the time in 2006. So I was very excited to talk to Alexis and Joe from Hot Chip about how “Boy from School” was made.
For more info, visit songexploder.net/hot-chip.
A pep talk in the face of despair. “Things can always get better, but it doesn’t happen via inertia. It happens because a lot of people tried.”
