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Free admission to Canadian national parks this summer! “From June 19 to September 7, no fees apply for: admission for all visitors to all national historic sites, national parks, and national marine conservation areas operated by Parks Canada.”

Chicago-based artist and educator Holly Greenberg facilitates dozens of workshops to sew fabric birds and raise awareness of bird collisions.

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 Around North America, Community Members Are Stitching Nearly 11,000 Birds appeared first on Colossal.

Derek Sivers:

When someone speaks of a place, you have to ask, “When?” Geography is four-dimensional. You can’t know a place — only a place as it was at a time. Where is bound to when. Unless you are in a place right now, you can only speak of it in past-tense.

Link: sive.rs/4d

At Long Last, I Have Maxximized My Looks. “Apparently, eating a fistful of iguana tranquilizers for breakfast every morning has turned me cold-blooded, and I am no longer appropriately adapted for life on the Earth’s surface.”

My brother’s murder and its aftermath.

The US justice department has unveiled criminal charges against the former Cuban president, Raúl Castro. The accusations against the 94-year-old include conspiracy and four counts of murder. They stem from a 1996 incident in which Cuban military jets shot down two planes flo...

Andrew Liszewski and Stevie Bonifield, writing for The Verge (gift link):

Google’s I/O 2026 keynote today was once again full of AI-related announcements including a new family of Gemini 3.5 AI models, new features for Search and Gmail, and updates about its Project Aura smart glasses.

If you weren’t able to tune into the event’s livestream today or follow along with our live blog, you can catch up on everything you missed in our roundup below.

This roundup was the only way I could really make sense out of Google I/O.

Link: theverge.com/tech/933415/google-io-2026-biggest…

Katherine Blunt and Rolfe Winkler, reporting for The Wall Street Journal from Google I/O (gift link): Google is supercharging its Gemini artificial-intelligence model to become more competitive in the era of agentic AI. The company has started rolling out what it calls ...

We have the ability to use compute resources to support our proprietary AI applications (such as Grok 5, which is currently being trained at COLOSSUS II), while also providing access to select compute capacity to third-party customers. For example, in May 2026, we entered into Cloud Services Agreements with Anthropic PBC (“Anthropic”), an AI research and development public benefit corporation, with respect to access to compute capacity across COLOSSUS and COLOSSUS II. Pursuant to these agreements, the customer has agreed to pay us $1.25 billion per month through May 2029, with capacity ramping in May and June 2026 at a reduced fee. The agreements may be terminated by either party upon 90 days’ notice.

— SpaceX S-1, highlights mine

Tags: anthropic, grok, generative-ai, ai, llms

Interesting observation by Mitchell Hashimoto (creator of Vagrant and Ghostty) on how a company’s or product’s choice of programming language matters less in the age of agentic programming: On the interesting side is how fungible programming languages are nowadays. Programm...

Tripp Mickle, Kate Conger, and Brian X. Chen, opening The New York Times’s report on yesterday’s Google I/O keynote (gift link): For 25 years, Google’s iconic search box was a long, slender bar where people typed in keywords like “World Cup.” But over the past three yea...

22-year-old pop singer-songwriter Brye, on TikTok: “Lemons”, my biggest song ever, that went like super viral during quarantine back in 2020, was actually produced, if you can believe it, in GarageBand on my school iPad. My high school gave us all iPads and I produced “...

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)

Tags: movies · Star Wars · TV

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

Contemporary pop artist fnnch’s essay on How to Make a Living as an Artist is pretty great. Lots in here that resonates with my experience of turning a creative hobby (KDO) into a business. Most people who enjoy making art should not try to make it their full time job. W...

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?”