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After reading my posts earlier today about Eliza, the first “hit” chatbot from the 1960s, DF reader AP sent me a link to the Kickstarter page for Searching for SmarterChild, a project from documentary filmmakers Lindsey Sitz and Zan Gillies to make a movie about SmarterChild, an AOL Instant Messenger chatbot that once had 30 million “friends” (a.k.a. users). I don’t recall ever hearing of SmarterChild before, let alone using it. (I think I was on a very different level of the Internet back then.)

But this looks like a great indie nerd documentary. The Kickstarter campaign has just one week left and they’re a wee bit short of their primary goal, and quite a bit short of their stretch goals. I just chipped in.

Link: kickstarter.com/projects/smarterchild/searching-for…

What’s the Point of Sex, Anyway? “There is yet another kind of male, known among ichthyologists as a ‘sneaky mater.’ This type dispenses altogether with nest-building and partnering and simply darts around squirting.”

The Open Source AI Gap Map shows the current capabilities of open source AI tools with an eye toward answering an important question: “What building blocks are missing for creating completely open source AI products?”

I vaguely recall first trying some version of Eliza back in the 1990s. I never found it all that impressive nor understood its stature in the AI literature. It’s better than a bunch of if/then statements but not by much. There’s some natural language grammar parsing that is ...

The Eliza Archaeology Project: ELIZA is the original and highly influential chatbot that launched the genre of human-computer interactions using text-based agents. It was created at MIT in the 1960s as part of Project MAC by it’s [sic] designer and programmer, Joseph Wei...

The End of Reading Is Here. “The decline of reading will bring about changes of the same magnitude. It will affect our innermost thoughts, our society’s politics and culture, and how we tell the history of our civilization.”

"When an alligator kills someone in America, it can make international headlines. What happens to the thousands of gators that people deem 'nuisances' does not."

President Trump says the ceasefire agreement with Iran is "over", blasting the country's leadership as "scum" and "cuckoo" after fresh exchanges of fire. Mr Trump has warned the US will hit Iran 'hard' again tonight, but added that talks could continue if they want. Speaking...

David Epstein, author of the recent Inside the Box (a book about the value of constraints), did a fascinating video on “anticipatory skill” and “chunking” and how players like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo (who can accurately head the ball even in the dark) use them t...

Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI. “This book presents the rediscovered original source code of ELIZA alongside previously unseen scripts…, revealing a far more sophisticated system than previously documented.”

British political news: Nigel Farage is facing competition for his parliamentary seat from “a man with a ‌trash can on his head, better known as Count Binface”. From the country that brought you Boaty McBoatface…

"Masha Polska, 15, was an avid dancer who had been dreaming of a star turn in the group waltz. That was not to be."

This year, photographers in 160 countries submitted more than 108,000 images.

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 Atmospheric Scenes and Layered Interpretations Top the 2026 Hasselblad Masters Contest appeared first on Colossal.

Dr. Drang, in a post replete with examples of icons of popular apps from the original Macintosh, in their one-bit glory: You can see that Apple liked the idea of app icons being a tilted rectangle with some image inside the rectangle to indicate what the app did. The han...

Users expect apps and agents to reach the tools they already work in. Every integration that gets you there is a different OAuth flow, a different token lifecycle, weeks of infrastructure before you write a line of product code.

WorkOS Pipes handles it with one API call. Pre-built connectors for GitHub, Slack, Salesforce, Google Drive, and more. Pipes handles OAuth, token refresh, and credential storage. You call the real provider API with a fresh token, every time.

Connect to 100+ providers →

Link: workos.com/pipes?utm_source=daringfireball&utm_medium…

Metric is a band from Canada that was formed in 1998. They’ve won four Juno Awards, including Group of the Year. Rolling Stone included them in their list of the 50 Greatest Canadian Artists of All Time. In April 2026, Metric released their 10th album, Romanticize the Dive. And for this episode, I spoke to Emily Haines and Jimmy Shaw about how they made the opening song on that album, “Victim of Luck.”

For more info, visit songexploder.net/metric.

City’s Beautification Initiative Hamstrung By Commitment To Local Artists. “I’m pretty sure when the mayor promised residents a revitalized arts district, he didn’t mean a couple of wonky fish sculptures haphazardly nailed to a tree…” Bwhahaha.

"Netflix’s new adaptation of the beloved book series will probably leave out some of the most fascinating details from the author’s life—from Pa Ingalls’s ineptitude to the serial killers that stalked Kansas during her childhood."

"It felt like a stabbing. It felt like a burning. It felt like a dull ache, then a sharp one, then it radiated all the way down."

The author of Any Person Is the Only Self and recent Guggenheim fellow talks about the worst time of day, the value of wasting an hour, and chilaquiles.