We live in a world of ordinary abundance & luxuries only dreamed of in centuries past: music on demand, photographs, books, eyeglasses, refrigeration, vaccination, bicycles, and the washing machine.
Work Chronicles
• Work Chronicles
(comic) Teamwork vs accountability
We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility
We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility
Excellent piece of reporting from 404 Media. For a while now there have been stories of book dealers receiving orders for large volumes of books from apparently price-insensitive anonymous custom...
Ozu in Color (Every Frame a Painting)
For TCM, Every Frame a Painting’s Taylor Ramos & Tony Zhou tell us how legendary Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu made the transition to color filmmaking. His first color film was Equinox Flower in 1958 and it took a couple of films for Ozu to work out how to best emplo...
Sean Ono Lennon on AI music #ai #music #shorts
Two new episodes of Ric Burns’ 1999 documentary...
Two new episodes of Ric Burns’ 1999 documentary series New York will soon air on PBS. “Produced by the same team that created the original NEW YORK series, The Future of Cities presents a sweeping and dramatic portrait of New York since Sept 11th.”
Colossal
• Kate Mothes
Clay Transforms into Vibrant and Funky ‘Habibti’ Sculptures by Maryam Yousif
"Clay, as a medium, has a way of connecting us to the past," Yousif 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 Clay Transforms into Vibrant and Funky ‘Habibti’ Sculptures by Maryam Yousif appeared first on Colossal.
What the Flu Does to Your Body
The flu is often dismissed as just a bad cold, yet it still kills hundreds of thousands of people every year. Here's how influenza damages your body, why it can become deadly, and what it would take to save many more lives.
#kurzgesagt
#inanutshell #kurzgesagt_inanutshell #...
Yale study : “A single-payer universal health care...
Yale study: “A single-payer universal health care system could cover every American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and still cost $1 trillion less than the system it would replace.”
Longreads
• Cheri Lucas Rowlands
G.P.S. and the Lost Art of Getting Lost
"A new book, 'Little Blue Dot,' by Katherine Dunn, raises questions about the unintended consequences of knowing where we are."
The Atlas Obscura Podcast
• SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura
Great Plains Dinosaur Museum (Classic)
We visit a museum in Montana that’s a dream for dinosaur nerds, and home to bones that are the real deal, locally sourced and sustainably foraged.
READ MORE IN THE ATLAS: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/great-plains-dinosaur-museum
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Markdown SVG upgrades
I started building my markdown-svg-renderer tool in May, but I've since added enough features to it that it's worth talking about here again.
It's evolved into my ideal tool for sharing Markdown transcripts that include SVG documents. Given my proclivity for drawing pelicans...
Todd Rundgren talks about one of the craziest nights of his life. #toddrundgren #shorts
Colossal
• Kate Mothes
Sly Foxes Emerge from Boxes and Under Bridges in Murals by Annatomix
The street artist is known for her vivid geometric animal murals evocative of origami.
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 Sly Foxes Emerge from Boxes and Under Bridges in Murals by Annatomix appeared first on Colossal.
Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to wildly overthinking things
Friday's big release was Qwen 3.8 27B, an Apache 2 licensed 27B parameter vision-capable LLM from Alibaba's Qwen research lab. I've been looking forward to this one: 27B is an excellent size for running a model on a reasonably specced laptop, and its predecessor Qwen 3.6 27B...
The State Of Music In 2026...A Rant
In today's livestream I talk about the state of music as I see it and where it might be headed.
Check out the Labor Day Complete Bundle here: https://rickbeato.com/s/labor-day-1
Simple Scale Tricks I Use All the Time: A 30 Minute Guitar Lesson
In today's livestream I show you a number of simple scale tricks to make your solos sound better.
🎸 THE PROFESSIONAL GUITAR COLLECTION — $67 (reg. $379)
Three complete courses:
1. Quick Lessons Pro
2. The Arpeggio Masterclass
3. The Scale Matrix
Every scale, arpeggio, and concept mapped across the entire neck. $379 worth of courses for $67 — that's less than the price of any one course, and the lowest price this collection has ever been.
Sale ends Wednesday, August 19th at 11:59pm ET.
Get it here: https://guitarscales.co/s/pgc
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
★ Anthropic’s ‘Watermark’ Text Adulteration in Claude Is a Perversion of Writing
When I wrote this week about Anthropic’s announcement that all Claude models, worldwide, would soon begin “watermarking” everything they generate, including text, to comply with this EU regulation, we were left to speculate how this was going to work, because Anthropic offer...
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
The Information Profiles Cami Clark — Dario Amodei’s Wife, Ivanka Trump’s Friend, One-Time Would-Be Pornographer, and Anthropic’s ‘First Lady’
theinformation.com/articles/anthropics-first-lady-took-winding-road-top?rc=jfy0lk
Cory Weinberg, Jemima McEvoy, Jessica E. Lessin, and Stephanie Palazzolo, writing for the paywalled-without-gift-links The Information:
As Amodei has hopscotched the globe to preach about the potential
and risks of AI — from New Delhi to Davos to Sun Valley — Clark
has a...
Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
‘Anthropic’s Weak Watermarks Appease a Weak Law’
blog.j11y.io/2026-08-12_Anthropics-weak-watermarks-appease-a-weak-law/
James Padolsey, on the Claude-text-watermarking-to-comply-with-an-EU-regulation imbroglio:
The same thought that led to this law could have applied to
calculators at the time of their inception, had their outputs
revealed themselves through artefacts. Thankfully, a sum b...