FeedCity

Ivan Mehta, TechCrunch: With this year’s Pixel 11 series launch, Google is thinking more agentic AI to complete your tasks. With Gemini, U.S.-based users will be able to order groceries, book rides, or get coffee, for instance. Plus, Gemini can call businesses on users’ ...

Sam Rutherford, writing for Engadget: Granted, the P11 Pro Fold still includes IP68 dust and water resistance, which is better than what you get on the Z Fold 8 line (IP48). But after making an absolute tank of a foldable phone with last year’s model, I said Google reall...

Victoria Song, The Verge: The $399 Google Pixel Watch 5 isn’t about the hardware. Sure, there’s a new satin pyrite case finish, a few new strap colors, and a Steph Curry Special Edition. Under the hood, there’s a slightly faster Qualcomm processor and an itty-bitty batte...

I’m Done Using AI. “It made me lazy. It made me stop caring. It made me a worse programmer. It made me depressed. Because I stopped doing the hard work, I stopped learning, I stopped growing, I stopped being the one making the software.”

Mia Sato, The Verge: Earlier this summer, Amazon customers began noticing that emails related to their online orders looked sparse: Order confirmation emails didn’t name specific items anymore, and instead listed only item categories. “Your Beauty item is confirmed!” an...

Why weren’t bicycles invented sooner? “Why was no one…even considering the question of human-powered vehicles until the 1400s? Why weren’t there bicycle mechanics in the 1300s, when there were clockmakers, or at least by the 1500s, when we had watches?”

Death Cab for Cutie rolled into the NPR offices for a Tiny Desk Concert, which featured two new songs from their current album and some oldies: Title and Registration and Soul Meets Body. Gibbard noted:

I’m starting to realize that some of our earlier records came out a similar distance away from, like, the Beatles records when I was a kid.

This is Death Cab’s second Tiny Desk…here’s the first one from 2015:

I took this as an opportunity to listen to my favorite Death Cab song, Transatlanticism. And when are we getting a Postal Sevice Tiny Desk? Come on, we’ve been good! We need this!

Tags: Death Cab For Cutie · music · Tiny Desk Concerts · video

Two Palestinian families remain trapped in their homes by settlers who moved into their village in the occupied West Bank on Sunday. The first Israeli soldiers who arrived at the scene were filmed praying with the extremist settlers. But after clashes they left and the settl...

Jongmans' works look to the past but are exquisitely contemporary, prompting us to consider the meaning of value.

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 Suzanne Jongmans Recycles Everyday Materials for Elegant Renaissance-Style Portraits appeared first on Colossal.

But then users start to report a weird bug. It's the 4th time your team has been trying to fix it. I mean... asking AI to fix it. Unfortunately, it seems like not even Fable can figure it out.

You go talk to the person who worked on this feature.

"So where does the data come from?"

"Hmm... actually I don't know. Let me ask Claude."

You sit next to each other watching an endless wall of text appear on the screen. Neither of you has any idea whether any of it is true but Claude seems very confident. [...]

This project has become so convoluted, with so many layers and services, that no one on your team could possibly start to understand what's going on.

— Florian Herrengt, AI is removing the middle class of software engineering

Tags: ai-misuse, cognitive-debt, generative-ai, ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming

Release: datasette-upload-dbs 0.5a0 This plugin has been around for a while - it lets users upload a brand new SQLite database to a hosted Datasette instance, at which point that database will start being served by that instance. It can also be used to atomically swa...

Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same. “A recommender that’s a mediocre predictor of what you’d love in a rich, diverse world becomes an excellent predictor of what you’ll click in the impoverished one it creates.”

Jeff Johnson: These purported reviews, all but one of which is 5 stars, are all in English. Yet none of them is in the US App Store. I also looked at other English-speaking countries such as Australia and Canada but found no reviews. Also suspicious is that the name of e...

Watch this. No words needed, everyone can feel it. Genes are a hell of a thing.

Link: x.com/sabrinahalper/status/2086964813788258588?s=46

Basic Apple Guy:

Apple just dropped the hardest icon glow-up for the new Chess icon in macOS 27 Beta 5.

This is not just a tweak or small improvement. This is the difference between total shit and a really nice icon.

Link: mastodon.social/@BasicAppleGuy/117073366339407186

The U.S. National Science Foundation’s powerful Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope captured details smaller than 12 miles across.

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 Get Up Close to the Sun in the Highest Resolution Image Ever Captured appeared first on Colossal.

Oh wow, Williams College’s Hopkins Observatory has a huge collection of eclipse glasses & viewers (and other eclipse ephemera), some of them dating back to 1793. Here are a few of my favorites: (via present & correct) Tags: design · eclipses