Watch the full podcast on the @complexly channel!
Good news! As of June 1, a transmission line is...
Good news! As of June 1, a transmission line is delivering hydro-generated electricity into NYC: “1,250 megawatts of clean energy directly into New York City’s power grid”. That’s around 20% of the city’s total electric load, now clean.
Longreads
• Brendan Fitzgerald
Online Trolls Harassed Her Six-Year-Old. That Was Only the Beginning.
"How a group of sports fans at the University of Iowa sparked a clash involving a basketball star, a T-shirt company, and a reporter from halfway across the country."
Colossal
• Kate Mothes
Ruth Borgenicht Links Thousands of Ceramic Rings in Elaborate Chainmail Sculptures
The New Jersey-based artist's works hang tapestry-like on the wall or unfurl into three-dimensional biomorphic 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 Ruth Borgenicht Links Thousands of Ceramic Rings in Elaborate Chainmail Sculptures appeared first on Colossal.
The Three Ways to Make a Living
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...
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.”
02.06.2026
Longreads
• Krista Stevens
Librarians on Horseback
"The New Deal project that preserved Kentucky’s recipes."
Longreads
• Seyward Darby
Made in the USA
"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
datasette-agent-micropython 0.1a0
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
micropython-wasm 0.1a1
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
micropython-wasm 0.1a0
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
Exclusive | The Verge
• Jennifer Pattison Tuohy
SwitchBot’s acquisition of Nanoleaf is about more than lighting
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 […]
Features | The Verge
• Grace Byron
Trans teens have something to say
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 […]
Mars For The Rest of Us
• Maciej Cegłowski
Who is the Villain in Mars Sample Return?
I bet you're wondering why I've gathered you all here.
Shell accused of ignoring pollution evidence in Nigeria
Microsoft's new MAI models
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

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
Longreads
• Cheri Lucas Rowlands
The Cartoonist Who Mocked the Madness of Modernism
"With biting satire, Alan Dunn captured how 20th-century architectural trends left everyday Americans astonished, baffled, and enraged."