The Lost Joy of Music Piracy. “Still to this day, I’ve never seen such an actively maintained network of knowledge and output, it really sucked me in.”
Daring Fireball
• Daring Fireball Department of Commerce
[Sponsor] WorkOS MCP: Manage Your Auth Platform From Any AI Agent
Debugging SSO, managing users, adjusting auth policies, configuring branding: every configuration task has lived behind a UI that only a human can drive.
The WorkOS MCP server gives agents the same access as your dashboard login. Hundreds of operations, discoverable at runtime. Connect in one command via OAuth, with scoped tokens instead of a master API key. Pass a screenshot of your marketing site and ask your agent to match the login page. If a human had to do it before, an agent can do it now.
He Wrote 'We Can't Stop' for Rihanna. She Said No.
In this interview, Theron Thomas shares his incredible journey from his beginnings as a struggling artist in the Virgin Islands to becoming one of pop music's top songwriters. Theron openly shares his early struggles finding work, managing initial success, and his ultimate ri...
Goofy Oversized Wicker Costumes
Artist Lewis Prosser describes himself on Instagram as an “absurdist basket-maker”. His costumes for a project called Making Merrie reflect that self-description.
Making Merrie explores the material culture of folk theatre. Inspired by mummers’ plays and masked tradi...
Excerpt from a longer (podcast) conversation with John...
Excerpt from a longer (podcast) conversation with John Waters about how he used to work at Mary Oliver’s bookstore in Provincetown. “They had this bookshop where you were allowed to be mean to the customers. It was really fun.”
Longreads
• Cheri Lucas Rowlands
A Beastie Boy Returns to the Mic, With Some Help
"Thanks to an assist from his sons, Mike D is set to release “Thank You,” the first new music from a member of the pioneering rap trio in 15 years."
This ZOOM is Insane!
Keep zooming. Keep zooming.
Filmmaker Ava DuVernay is making a documentary about the...
Filmmaker Ava DuVernay is making a documentary about the 14th amendment, “spotlighting America’s long running and sometimes bloody battle with itself over who is a citizen and how much freedom they get”.
Reverse-engineering is cheap now
I keep hearing anecdotes from people who used coding agents to reverse-engineer and automate devices in their homes.
I think this is an interesting illustration of the impact of the reduced cost of writing code.
Prior to agents, it was entirely possible to reverse-engineer h...
On Japan’s visible evidence of care . “American...
On Japan’s visible evidence of care. “American service providers, private and public, increasingly run like ghost ships. Japanese technology and design seemed in greater service to humans, their journeys, and enterprises.”
Watch 1969’s Apollo 11 Moon Landing “Live!”
57 years ago today, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong & Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon and went for a little walk. For the 18th year in a row, you can watch the original CBS News coverage of Walter Cronkite reporting on the Moon landing and the first Moon walk on a smal...
Mike Elizondo talks about the rhythm of Eminem #song #rap #shorts
Who’s Afraid of Chinese Models?
Who’s Afraid of Chinese Models?
Interesting proposal from Ben Thompson that both addresses the hypocrisy of labs outlawing distillation against their models despite training on unlicensed data, and could help US open models compete more effectively with their Chinese counter...
Longreads
• Brendan Fitzgerald
A Texan Risked Everything to Defend Ukraine. So Did His Father.
"Erik Giggleman was an elite Army soldier who went in search of a righteous struggle and found it in Ukraine. As his commitment deepened, his father confronted an excruciating truth: Either the conflict would end, or Erik would die fighting."
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
‘Who’s Afraid of Chinese Models?’
Ben Thompson, on the hype regarding Kimi K3, at Stratechery:
This is a point that bears repeating: because U.S. open weight
model makers must follow the frontier labs’ terms of service, they
(1) are worse than Chinese alternatives and (2) end up distilling
the distillati...
Colossal
• Kate Mothes
Presence, Memory, and Time Merge in the Surreal Works of ‘Architects of Absence’
The group exhibition at Gallery Wendi Norris plumbs the dialogue between absence and present.
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 Presence, Memory, and Time Merge in the Surreal Works of ‘Architects of Absence’ appeared first on Colossal.
Burnham becomes UK's seventh PM in a decade
In his inaugural speech in Downing Street, the new prime minister Andy Burnham says Britain needs to show the world it can regain stability. He promises a new political and economic model including measures to help people with the cost of living. He indicates his first calls...
Arthurian Connector
Behind the Scenes at Yetch.Studio
I love the 1-bit aesthetic of this story-driven city...
I love the 1-bit aesthetic of this story-driven city builder game called GlagStone.