FeedCity

"Matter is memory, and memory is a medium," Neil says.

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 Natural Dyes Merge with Mixed Media in Annalise Neil’s Dreamy Cyanotypes appeared first on Colossal.

Billionaires’ Billions Are Increasing Faster Than Ever. 15 years ago, billionaires had $4.5 trillion. “Now, their combined wealth totals $20.1 trillion — an amount that is equivalent to nearly a fifth of the entire world’s total yearly output.”

"Decades after 'The Emporium' failed to open on Broadway in 1954, one man went on a quest to find it."

The editor of The Best Women's Travel Writing series on curation, grief and levity, and the stories she hopes to read more of in the future.

The United States says it's now completed the latest wave of airstrikes on Iran early Thursday morning local time. Iran says it responded with attacks of its own. Earlier on Wednesday, President Trump promised to keep up military pressure on Tehran because Iranian leaders we...

Anthropic Walks Back Policy That Could Have ‘Sabotaged’ AI Researchers Using Claude

Big scoop for Maxwell Zeff at Wired:

“We’re changing Fable 5’s safeguards for frontier LLM development to make them visible.” Anthropic said in a statement to WIRED. “We made the wrong tradeoff and we apologize for not getting the balance right.”

There's been a huge outcry about Anthropic's policy, tucked away in their system card, that Claude Fable/Mythos would identify "requests targeting frontier LLM development" and "limit effectiveness" without notifying the user.

It's very good news that they're dropping this.

Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, anthropic, claude, ai-ethics, claude-mythos

Chance Miller, at 9to5Mac on Monday: Apple’s Siri team, led by Craig Federighi, held a post-WWDC keynote tech talk with members of the press this afternoon to talk through iOS 27 and the new Siri AI. During the talk, Federighi shared more details about Apple’s collaborat...

Release: datasette-agent 0.2a0 Highlights from the release notes: Tools can now ask the user questions mid-execution. Tools that declare a context parameter receive a ToolContext object, and await context.ask_user(...) can ask a yes/no, multiple-choice (options=[.....

Perhaps the worst UI crime in MacOS 26 Tahoe was the inexplicable decision to add inscrutable, distracting icons next to every item in the menu bar. You will recall Jim Nielsen writing about it, rightly describing it as exactly the sort of thing that Mac users look down upon...

The White House’s Top Science Goal Is Ignorance. “The actions are seen as a deliberate attempt to stifle science and ignore the reality of climate change, in order to support the fossil-fuel industry and satisfy the climate denialism of Trump’s base.”

Known for his vibrant palettes and flattened perspectives, Kristof Santy translates common sights and everyday objects into vivid tableaux.

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 Domestic Arrangements Unfold in Kristof Santy’s Vivid Paintings appeared first on Colossal.

Oof, what a beauty. In the 1960s, four Porsche 912s were customized for use as police cars in Japan. This one, which was used in Kanagawa until 1973, is the only one left standing (and even it needed restoration). This Japanese police 912 served in Kanagawa Prefecture fro...

DiffusionGemma

Last May Google briefly released an experimental Gemini Diffusion model. I tried the preview at the time and recorded it running at 857 tokens/second. It was an exciting model, but Google made no further announcements about it.

That research has returned in the best possible way: as a new open weight (Apache 2 licensed) Gemma model, google/diffusiongemma-26B-A4B-it.

NVIDIA are currently hosting the model for free on their NIM cloud API. I used that API to generate this pelican, which took 4.4s (according to time uv run generate.py) to return 2,409 tokens - so at least 500 tokens/second.

Via Hacker News

Tags: google, ai, generative-ai, llms, nvidia, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, gemma, llm-release, llm-performance

Your Search Results Are Getting Sloptimized. SEO (and Google’s embrace of it) has spent the last 25 years ruining the internet and search results. Now it’s GEO’s turn (generative-engine optimization).

The Best Headlights in the World Are Illegal in America. “America’s roads are now full of tactical-grade headlights, and no one is happy about it.”

Charity Majors, writing about how high-performing engineering teams are dealing with the transition from pre-AI to AI-native development: AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy. This is not a situation where one side is right a...

"My mom and I lived together for five years—the breast cancer years—until she died from the disease."

The Morgan Library & Museum presents 'Tarot! Renaissance Symbols, Modern Visions' and delves into this centuries-old tradition of divination.

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 Divination, the Renaissance, and Surrealism Commingle in ‘Tarot!’ appeared first on Colossal.