FeedCity

“Hackers say that they used Meta’s AI support chatbot to break into a host of high-profile Instagram profiles by asking the support bot to change the email address associated with the target account.” And the bot just went ahead and did it.

In Post-War Japan, the US Used Quiz Culture to Help Democratize the Country. TV quiz shows “normalized participation, merit-based competition, and equal opportunity — values that contrasted sharply with the hierarchical structures [of] prewar Japan”.

The golden hour hues of the West Coast's legendary sunsets spurred Hubbard's reacquaintance with the camera.

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 Pacific Surf Takes Center Stage in Craig Hubbard’s Dreamy Photos appeared first on Colossal.

"On the nature of autobiographical memory."

Timur Fatkullin is a Ukrainian flying ace who uses his acrobatic flying skills honed before the war to shoot down Russian drones. When I fly close to the target, I can’t engage because there’s houses or infrastructure underneath. So we keep flying, keeping it in the searc...

Katie Notopoulos, a month ago at Business Insider:

Amazon has launched a new feature that uses AI to generate a short, podcast-like audio segment where two “hosts” discuss the merits and reviews of a specific product.

I think it could be one of the funniest, closest endpoints to human civilization we’ve seen yet in our new AI-enabled world. If this sounds a little confusing, here’s an example. I tried it out for diaper rash cream, and, voila! A podcast! (Sound on.)

I don’t know what’s worse: that anyone at Amazon thought actual people would really listen to these, or if actual people really are listening to them.

Link: businessinsider.com/amazon-ai-generated-podcasts-products…

Power Lines: Maps That Shaped the Way We See the World. “A collection of the greatest political maps in history and how these images have an unmatched power to influence our thinking — and our world.”

“Serena Williams has announced her sensational return to professional tennis at 44 years old next week at the Queen’s Club in London.” Yessss.

Israel has ordered attacks against Hezbollah in the southern suburbs of Beirut - prompting many residents to evacuate the Lebanese capital. Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said the military would strike what he called 'terrorist targets' in the area, in response...

For his project Windows, Dave Krugman took photos of hundreds of NYC apartment windows at night and stitched them together into ever-shifting typologies. What’s going on in each of those apartments? Tags: Dave Krugman · NYC · photography

A new exhibition at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art surveys the artist's art-everywhere approach.

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 ‘Keith Haring in 3D’ Highlights the Artist’s Prolifically Art-Filled Life appeared first on Colossal.

Legendary film editor Marcia Lucas died last week. Lucas edited Star Wars (won an Oscar for it), Taxi Driver, Return of the Jedi, and American Graffiti. It was Marcia that suggested to George Lucas that Darth Vader kill Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Which year of your life is the most dangerous? For many people, it’s not old age but infancy. Where you're born can dramatically change your chances of survival, and millions of child deaths are still preventable today. #kurzgesagt #inanutshell #kurzgesagt_inanutshell #learn...

Over the past several years, Microsoft has largely managed to withstand populist calls to break up Big Tech while peers faced sweeping lawsuits. But a probe by the Federal Trade Commission suggests that grace period could be nearing an end. Earlier this year, Bloomberg outlined the contents of civil investigative demands (CIDs) - similar to […]

Roost is a messaging app where messages aren’t instant; they travel between users at the speed of whichever bird they use to send it. Note sending is limited by the # of birds in your rookery…if they’re all out, you have to wait until one returns.

Sacha Baron Cohen turned Glod into a punchline.

Abelardo de la Espriella will face left-winger Ivan Cepeda in Colombian presidential run-off in three weeks. The two offer strikingly different visions of how to tackle Colombia's challenges, including violence and drug crime. Also: France and Germany have condemned Israel's...

I just sent out the May edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here.

This month:

• Al got expensive, and Anthropic had a really good month
• The model releases were a little disappointing
• Conferences and podcasts
• I launched Datasette Agent and made a lot of progress on Datasette
• What I'm using, May 2026 edition
• Miscellaneous extras

Here's a copy of the April newsletter as a preview of what you'll get. Pay $10/month to stay a month ahead of the free copy!

Tags: newsletter

My thanks to exe.dev for sponsoring last week at DF (with a very cool graphic ad — just love the way it looks). exe.dev is a cloud for the agent era — it gives you a pool of VMs with SSH, root, and web auth by default. Secrets injected at the network edge stay out of the LLM’s hands. Persistent servers, internal tools, vibe coding, disposable devboxes, whatever. You can share your web server as easily as you can share a Google Doc, and your VMs share CPU/RAM — you pay for underlying resources, not per VM.

It’s just a computer.

Link: exe.dev/?df