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Well, this is kinda depressing, courtesy of Jason Zweig’s father:

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.

I aim for #2. But maybe society needs more of #3 and, it goes without saying, a whole lot less of #1. (via df)

Tags: how to · Jason Zweig · working

TIL that Muji once sold a car. “The Muji Car 1000 was a debadged and stripped down 2-door version of the Nissan March, with the smallest engine, an automatic, steel wheels, and A/C, available in one color: white.”

"The New Deal project that preserved Kentucky’s recipes."

"Pete Hegseth is the product of an essentially American ethos—which means we have no choice but to ask what to do with him, and what to do with ourselves."

Uber Caps Usage of AI Tools Like Claude Code to Manage Costs I wrote the other day about Uber blowing its 2026 AI budget in four months, and how that wasn't particularly surprising given they would have set that budget in 2025, before anyone could have predicted how popular ...

Release: datasette-agent-micropython 0.1a0

I want Datasette Agent to be able to generate and execute Python code safely. This alpha is looking promising so far. GPT-5.5 has so far failed to break out of the sandbox!

Tags: python, sandboxing, datasette, webassembly, datasette-agent

Release: micropython-wasm 0.1a1

Fixes for some limitations that emerged while I was trying to use this to build datasette-agent-micropython.

Tags: python, sandboxing, webassembly

Release: micropython-wasm 0.1a0

My latest sandboxing experiment: This alpha package bundles a lightly customized WASM build of MicroPython with a wrapper to execute code in it via wasmtime.

Tags: python, sandboxing, webassembly

Smart lighting company Nanoleaf has been acquired by OneRobotics, the parent company of SwitchBot. In an exclusive interview with The Verge, Nanoleaf CEO Gimmy Chu says the company will remain independent and that he and his cofounder and COO, Christian Yan, will continue to run it. "Nothing is changing operationally," says Chu, adding that there […]

By the time the Children's Hospital closed its doors to trans patients, Sage had already stopped taking testosterone. A nonbinary high school student, they originally received treatment for the rapid onset of puberty. The changes their body experienced felt frightening and sudden. They developed PMOS, a relatively common hormonal disorder that can lead to hair […]

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...