Daring Fireball
• John Gruber
Everyone Is Blaming AI for the Water Crisis. We’re Looking at the Wrong Culprit. “One drive to the work I do on the Colorado River used more than 20 times the water of everything I did with AI in 11 weeks.”
The Accursèd Alphabetical Clock. “This clock displays the current time alphabetically.” Totally deranged…I love it.
Every Frame a Painting’s Taylor Ramos & Tony Zhou are back with a video essay about pushing the boundaries of genre in Tsui Hark’s 1995 film The Blade.
One reason filmmakers like to work in a genre is that it gives us a pre-made box: a set of expectations, tropes, and boundaries. On the one hand, we want to play within that box, and on the other, we want to push against its edges. Tsui Hark’s The Blade is an exploration and a deconstruction of the box that is wuxia.
If you’re not familiar with wuxia, the video explains the genre; it’s basically Chinese martial arts fantasy — think Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or Hero. (thx, neil)
Tags: film school · movies · Taylor Ramos · The Blade · Tony Zhou · video
Peak slab phone in 2026 looks a lot like a camera attached to a phone
Auto Focus shot on Oppo Find X9 Ultra: https://youtu.be/9s69aThM7rA?si=x8qW7F4MorY2qgRp
MKBHD Merch: http://shop.MKBHD.com
Playlist of MKBHD Intro music: https://goo.gl/B3AWV5
Phone provided by Oppo for review.
~
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AI agents are already too human. Not in the romantic sense, not because they love or fear or dream, but in the more banal and frustrating one. The current implementations keep showing their human origin again and again: lack of stringency, lack of patience, lack of focus. Faced with an awkward task, they drift towards the familiar. Faced with hard constraints, they start negotiating with reality.
— Andreas Påhlsson-Notini, Less human AI agents, please.
Tags: ai-agents, coding-agents, ai
scosman/pelicans_riding_bicycles
I firmly approve of Steve Cosman's efforts to pollute the training set of pelicans riding bicycles.
(To be fair, most of the examples I've published count as poisoning too.)
Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, training-data, pelican-riding-a-bicycle
Release: llm-openrouter 0.6
llm openrouter refreshcommand for refreshing the list of available models without waiting for the cache to expire.
I added this feature so I could try Kimi 2.6 on OpenRouter as soon as it became available there.
Here's its pelican - this time as an HTML page because Kimi chose to include an HTML and JavaScript UI to control the animation. Transcript here.
Tags: openrouter, llm, llm-release, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, kimi, ai-in-china, llms, ai, generative-ai
Trials for a pancreatic cancer mRNA vaccine: “Nearly 90% of people whose immune systems responded to the vaccine were still alive up to six years after receiving the last treatment. The five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer is around 13%…”
“NASA’s Curiosity rover has detected organic molecules on Mars, including chemicals widely considered building blocks for the origin of life of Earth.” And: “We think we’re looking at organic matter that’s been preserved on Mars for 3.5bn years.”
It’s Getting Harder to Spot AI in Contemporary Publishing. And That’s Very, Very Bad. “The word salads that we might identify as AI today may not be the kind of machine-made writing that we will see tomorrow.”
ReciproCard: “Start by searching for your home library above to instantly see every free reciprocal agreement you qualify for.” Use this to have more options for Libby ebooks.
“The Extrapolated Futures Archive is a reverse-lookup for speculative fiction. Describe a situation you are facing, and find the SF stories that already worked through the implications.”
Longreads
• Peter Rubin
"For the richest men on Earth, everything is free and nothing matters."
Colossal
• Jackie Andres
The artist “questions our relationship to objects, their use value, and their narrative potential.”
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 Stained Glass Objects by Pia Hinz Reflect the Contrast Between Strength and Fragility appeared first on Colossal.
Longreads
• Peter Rubin
"I thought of the pinkish, folded gel which in its mysteries congeal all my memories and dreams, and how it had been thrust from a moving vehicle onto an English road with nothing to protect it but the back of my skull."
