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I bet you're wondering why I've gathered you all here.

British oil giant Shell continued to operate major pipeline in Nigeria even though bosses knew it was causing widespread pollution, according to secret documents obtained by BBC. Shell has always rejected the accusations, blaming the theft and illegal refining of oil taken fr...

Microsoft announced two new text LLMs this morning - MAI-Thinking-1 (reasoning, 35B parameters, available to "select early partners") and MAI-Code-1-Flash (5B parameters, "purpose-built for GitHub Copilot and VS Code to deliver high performance and lower cost [...] rolling out to GitHub Copilot individual users in Visual Studio Code"). I've not been able to try either of them just yet.

It's very interesting to see Microsoft releasing models with such low parameter counts, especially given how expensive larger models are to access right now. They claim MAI-Thinking-1 "is preferred to Sonnet 4.6 in our blind human side-by-side evaluations", which is impressive for a 35B model seeing as I frequently run models larger than that on my own laptop.

Tags: llm-release, generative-ai, ai, microsoft, llms

California Brown Pelican, in Fort Mason, CA, US

I'm at the Microsoft Build conference today, held at Fort Mason in San Francisco. There are California Brown Pelicans diving into the water directly behind venue!

Tags: microsoft, ai, generative-ai, llms, llm-release

"With biting satire, Alan Dunn captured how 20th-century architectural trends left everyday Americans astonished, baffled, and enraged."

James Pero, summarizing for Gizmodo this paywalled report by Jyoti Mann for The Information: But, wait, there’s more: in addition to the fall releases, The Information reports that Meta also has a pair slated for December, codenamed “Mojito VIP.” There are also two proto...

One more bit of “metaverse fever dream” follow-up. The one company in the field that Nick Heer doesn’t mention is Apple, makers of the best-known (albeit not best-selling) virtual reality headset. Think and say what you want about the Vision platform (I still think it’s the first inning of a long game), but no one at Apple ever once gave a hint of endorsing “metaverse” hype. In fact, as I’ve noted before, at a 2022 WSJ event, seven months before Vision Pro was announced and over a year before it was released, Joanna Stern asked Greg Joswiak and Craig Federighi:

Stern: You have to finish this sentence, both of you. The metaverse is...

Joz: A word I’ll never use.

“Fever dream” is right.

Link: daringfireball.net/2025/12/meta_says_fuck_that_metaverse…

"Because paper is such an everyday material, there’s something especially powerful about transforming it into something unexpected."

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 Meticulously Detailed Natural Specimens by Marisa Aragón Ware Emerge from Paper appeared first on Colossal.

A follow-up point from my post yesterday linking to Nick Heer’s blockbuster “The Metaverse Fever Dream”. In particular, the connection Heer draws between the rise of “metaverse” hype and the pandemic. I always sort of knew that metaverse hype roughly coincided with the Covi...

The 100 Greatest Bird Names of All Time, including Inaccessible Island Rail, Macaroni Penguin, Morepork, Chocolate Boobook, Dickcissel, Carunculated Caracara, and Resplendent Quetzal.

Michael M. Grynbaum and Benjamin Mullin, reporting for The New York Times (gift link): CBS News faced a fresh wave of turmoil on Monday after Scott Pelley, the “60 Minutes” correspondent, laced into the show’s newly hired executive producer during a staff meeting and acc...

In this episode I finally weigh in on the controversy surrounding Fender and their outrageous lawsuit against other guitar manufacturers. My Beato Club supporters: Justin Scott Terence Mark Jason Murray Lucienne Kilpatrick Alexander Young Jason Wagner Todd Ladner Rob Kline Nicholas Long Tim Benson Leonardo Martins da Costa Rodrigues Eddie Perez David Solomon MICHAEL JOYCE Stephen Stubbs colin stead Jonathan Wentworth-Linton Patrick Payne MATTHEW KARIS Matthew Barouch Shaun Samuels Danny Kurywchak Gregory Reedy Sean Coleman Alexander Verbitskiy CL Turner Jason Pappafotis John Fulford Margaret Carno Robert C David M Combs Eric Flatt Reto Spoerli Herr Moritz Adam Monte St. Johns Jon Beezley Peter DeVault Eric Nabstedt Eric Beggs Rich Germano Brian Bloom Peter Pillitteri Piush Dahal Toby Guidry

"Matt Rudd has remarkable conversations with three Britons who, after life-changing accidents, have fully active minds but cannot move or speak, and can communicate only via the blink of an eye."

The Best Thing About The Satanic Panic. “There’s a phenomenon called the rhyme-as-reason effect that says people are more likely to believe something is true if it rhymes.”

JS Crossword. “This crossword uses some lesser-known and cursed JS features, so I’d recommend it for people already somewhat familiar with JavaScript.” Diabolical.

From paper towel drenched in ceramic slip, Jongjin Park sculpts these layered forms.

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 Jongjin Park Layers Slip-Soaked Paper into Patchwork Sculptures appeared first on Colossal.

Watch and listen to bardcore trio Courseval play a cover version of Daft Punk’s Veridis Quo, a track from Discovery. This is lovely. And a banger.

Courseval have covered other popular music in medieval style, including Rihanna’s Umbrella, Take On Me by A-Ha, Bad Romance by Lady Gaga, and Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive.

Tags: Courseval · Daft Punk · music · remix · video

Jason Zweig, back in 2018:

My father, who died in 1981, was an inexhaustible font of wisdom and wit. I don’t know when he told me this particular three-part rule, but I’ve never forgotten it. I tweeted it three years ago, but people keep asking for it in one place, so here it is.

There are three ways to make a living:

1. Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich.

2. Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living.

3. Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.

The rest is commentary.

Pairs well with Om Malik’s remarkable line about the success of “the grifters and the hucksters and the influencers selling impossible things” in his “We Are Living in Pinocchio’s World” essay that I linked to yesterday.

Link: jasonzweig.com/three-ways-to-get-paid/

Frozen To -22 Degrees, BYD’s New EV Just Charged To 97% In Only 12 Minutes. This is genuinely impressive — charging and driving an EV in subzero winter weather is just brutal (ask me how I know).