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Paul Brown’s iPod. This is a lovely remembrance & time capsule: a playable iPod emulator of “the music on the iPod my dad had in 2018 before he died”. Click wheel works and everything.

One of the questions on The Colbert Questionert that Stephen Colbert would administer to his celebrity guests was “What number am I thinking of?” As you can see from this compilation, his answer was often, but not always, “no”.

A few of the guests said “42” but none ever said “69”?

So anyway, the Late Show is coming to an end tonight, a casualty of CBS’s newfound fealty to the Trump regime, and Stephen Colbert finally took the questionert himself. And yes, at last, he revealed the number that he was thinking of…to Robert De Niro no less:

Tags: Stephen Colbert · The Late Show · TV · video

This is impressive: an AI model has disproved an 80-year-old conjecture by Paul Erdős. “The proof came from a new general-purpose reasoning model, rather than from a system trained specifically for mathematics.”

Wow, BBC Earth has posted this three-hour-long video to YouTube of David Attenborough narrating Unbelievable Moments From Nature. I’ve had it on in the background for the last little while as I’m working and it’s great.

Tags: David Attenborough · video

“US is ‘simply choosing not to stop’ Ebola outbreak after massive public health cuts.” Just so fucking stupid and maddening and wasteful and dangerous and callous and evil.

There has been international condemnation of Israel's treatment of pro-Palestinian activists who were on board a Gaza-bound aid flotilla intercepted by Israeli naval forces. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir posted a video showing himself taunting activists kneeling...

Trump Destroyed USAID. Now People Are Dying. “Everyone, especially in South Sudan, wanted to know if the US really had cut off aid. It was easier for them to believe that the aid organizations were lying to them than to think that the US would do this.”

Tight edit but covers the whole thing. (XCancel link; Threads link.)

Link: x.com/ArtemR/status/2056961743142957143

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