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"For the children of south Mull, secondary school means leaving home age eleven. Their parents' silence was never consent."

“Draw any shape and hear it as a drum.” Eigendrum: a drum simulator where you can change the shape of the drum to see how it affects the sound it makes.

G.P.S. and the Lost Art of Getting Lost. “G.P.S. has also led us to outsource existential skills: locating yourself in space, parsing out your surroundings, staying calm when you don’t know where you are. Do we lose something when we no longer get lost?”

"A Tennessee native and longtime film projectionist who first started working in Imax theaters in the ’90s, Caldwell has become integral to Imax’s 70-mm. rollouts even as he considers himself mostly retired."

Some of the most storied problems in mathematics, those posed by Paul Erdős, are being solved by LLMs.

"These photographs don’t just capture what’s beneath the surface; they surface the stories our planet most needs us to hear," says founder and director Will Harrison.

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 The Ocean Photographer of the Year Finalists Highlight the Sorrowful and Sublime appeared first on Colossal.

"A Chinese man hired a Florida surrogate, then didn’t pick up his kids, sparking a custody battle that could upend the industry."

"An interview with the author of 'Strangers to Ourselves'—and now, 'You Won’t Get Free of It.'"

Seven stories that celebrate the surprising influence of a humble dessert.

Emily Zarka is the host of the PBS digital series Monstrum, a show that tries to  figure out how monster mythology was created and shaped through oral storytelling, literature, and film.

Today she tells us about the Flatswoods monster in West Virginia, a legend that dates back to the 1950s.

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A few years ago I’d have looked at this post and maybe leaned toward the idea that a precocious 8th grader somewhere hacked into the @GoogleDesign Twitter account and tried to pass off their little to-do app as having come from Google’s design team. But this is apparently real. I almost hope it’s AI slop and that there aren’t any human designers there who think anything in this app has appropriate proportions or is aesthetically pleasing.

(Here’s an XCancel link for the x.com averse. You can just change any x.com/* URL to xcancel.com/*. But, alas, the XCancel mirror of the original tweet loses the animation showing the UI in motion — for some, but not all, users.)

Link: x.com/googledesign/status/2087195277094695096

DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (on OpenRouter) The latest DeepSeek Pro model is now available, via API only. I had to link to OpenRouter because DeepSeek don't have any obvious announcement page for their new model. I haven't been able to confirm if they plan to release the open weigh...

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

There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text Sophie Alpert shares her "internal policy on acceptable use of AI writing by engineers". It's a short read (supporting its own recommendations) and really good. If you chose to have LLMs help massage your writing...

Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs A vanity domain name (stolen-thoughts.com) for a neat paper: Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google return encrypted chain-of-thought blocks to clients that can be replayed across sessions, users, and models. We take a trace produc...

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...

Introducing Muse Glimmer Meta are back in the open weights game! Muse Glimmer is a brand new 30B model under a clean Apache 2.0 license (a step up from the janky Llama licenses of old). They claim to have optimized it for exactly the kind of things I'm looking for in a local...

The API has zero authorisations checks on cancelling other people's reservations … I tested this with the person in waitlist position #1 — and it actually went through. So you've moved from #4 to #3 already.

— OpenClaw (running Opus 4.6), hacking an Australian gym-booking website

Tags: ai-ethics, generative-ai, openclaw, ai, ai-security-research, llms

"The wind is my nemesis!" says Jennifer Latour.

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 Jennifer Latour Preserves Ephemeral Beauty in Her Otherworldly Botanical Assemblages appeared first on Colossal.