FeedCity

Thibault Sottiaux, the OpenAI genius in charge of Codex and the new ChatGPT Homer Simpson car, on Twitter/X: I don’t come often to GMail [sic] (OpenAI is a Slack company), but I swear, every time I do open it, there is a new button somewhere around the top right corner. ...

Over a 22-year period, Green illustrated final requests ranging from pizzas and lobster to pies and KFC cartons.

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 Julie Green’s ‘The Last Supper’ Memorializes Hundreds of People’s Final Meals While on Death Row appeared first on Colossal.

The area known as Tornado Alley continues to shift eastward (from Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas to Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin) due to “a warming climate that helps transport warmer and more-humid air farther north and east than in the past”.

Zac Hall, 9to5Mac:

macOS 27 Golden Gate beta 6 introduces redesigned traffic light window controls. The new look resembles older Mac OS X systems with more detail in each button.

Nice. But these changes can’t improve fast enough for me — I am impatient. The MacOS user interface had been in a slow, steady, sad, no-fun decline for years, and then, a year ago, the bottom fell out with the disaster of 26 Tahoe.

But all the changes in 27 Golden Gate are in the right direction. Golden Gate is not a mixed bag. Designers with taste and talent are clearly back at the helm. And I love that they’re still pushing UI and icon changes in mid-August, entering the home stretch of the .0 beta cycle.

Link: 9to5mac.com/2026/08/17/macos-27-golden-gate-beta-6-features…

"The lives that slither and scurry beneath the soil’s surface are vital for ecological health: now we can listen in to them."

Oh, the places you'll go when you say yes.

Producers Amanda and Glydel bring you stories of places, spanning from the Ozark mountains to a cave in Portugal, where death is not as final as it seems. 

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Oops.

Link: macrumors.com/2026/08/17/camera-equipped-airpods-macos-26-7…

This pod has no shot of dipping below 50 mph; it’s all gas, no brakes as we revisit the 1994 action thriller ‘Speed,’ starring Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock, Jeff Daniels, and Dennis Hopper.

Producers: Craig Horlbeck, Chia Hao Tat, Eduardo Ocampo, and Matt Pevic

LIONSGATE’S MUTINY, STARRING JASON STATHAM, ONLY IN THEATERS AUGUST 21

Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at https://ChatGPT.com by selecting Work mode. Available on Plus and Pro plans
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Some follow-up to this weekend’s stemwinder “Anthropic’s ‘Watermark’ Text Adulteration in Claude Is a Perversion of Writing”: Temperature Contra a bunch of idiots at Hacker News and elsewhere, I understand that popular LLMs do not just pick the “best” token (word) at each ...

Qwen 3.8 27B scores 52 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

That's the same score as GPT-5.6 Luna (max), and just one point behind GLM-5.2 (max) and DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (max) - that GLM is 753B and that DeepSeek is 1.6B parameters, and Luna is size unknown but presumably a whole lot bigger than 27B.

Qwen 3.8 27B is a truly astonishing model.

Via Hacker News

Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, qwen, ai-in-china, artificial-analysis

The Savant is a political thriller series starring Jessica Chastain that was supposed to debut a year ago. Apple “postponed” it, apparently out of fear of upsetting extremist right-wing nut jobs because the show is about an undercover investigator (Chastain) hunting down ext...

The Financial Times, back on July 1, with the transcontinental byline “Michael Acton in San Francisco and Barbara Moens in Brussels” (non-paywalled summaries from 9to5Mac and MacRumors): Apple chief executive Tim Cook and EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen held “constructive”...

“Sand temperatures above 29°C now produce 95–99% female sea turtles instead of the historical 50–50 ratio, creating a reproductive bottleneck that could collapse populations within two generations.”

Mabona's sculptures highlight how the personal and cultural intersect alongside the distinctly South African sense of resilience.

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 Milk Cartons and Bottle Gourds Form Sipho Mabona’s Tribute to His Late Father appeared first on Colossal.

A.J. Jacobs recently interviewed “the Papa Bear of Puzzling”, Will Shortz and came away with seven lessons he learned from him. “Creativity is usually more about evolution than revolution.”

Unwinding the Great Tech Power Grab. “If tech seeks to replace democratic governance itself, then the response has to be more democracy, not less.” Lots of related links in this piece too.

Wallace's glowing acrylic paintings feature crystals, enigmatic energy forces, starlight, and specters.

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 In Jewel-Like Paintings, Wiley Wallace Conjures Enchantment in the Desert appeared first on Colossal.