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“I believe in an old-fashioned virtue called Doing the Freakin’ Work. Read the book, not the summary. Write the piece, not the prompt. Suffer like the artist you are. It ain’t easy, but if it were easy, it wouldn’t be worth doing.”

Sony’s AI division has designed a robot that can beat elite human players at table tennis. From the paper:

Evaluated in matches against elite and professional players under official competition rules, Ace achieved several victories and demonstrated consistent returns of high-speed, high-spin shots. These results highlight the potential of physical AI agents to perform complex, real-time interactive tasks, suggesting broader applications in domains requiring fast, precise human–robot interaction.

Ace is a fine name, but I might have gone with something like WALL-E Supreme instead. (Robbie Supreme?)

Tags: artificial intelligence · robots · sports · table tennis · video

"When we were offered jobs as deckhands, we jumped at the chance, naïve to the risks of the open sea."

I had somehow missed (or forgotten) that Greta Gerwig is writing and directing an adaptation of The Magician’s Nephew, one of The Chronicles of Narnia books by C.S. Lewis. Filming has wrapped and it’s out in theaters on Nov 26.

Daring Fireball t-shirts and hoodies are back. Order now, and we’ll start printing shirts at the end of this week and shipping them out next week. The hoodies are a new model from Bella Canvas, the manufacturer. Our previous hoodies were “heather gray” and the fabric was a blend of 50% polyester, 37.5% cotton, and 12.5% rayon. That model is being phased out. So we’ve switched to a new model that’s 85% cotton, 15% polyester, and a darker “heather black” color. The old ones were good, but the new ones feel even better.

Link: store.daringfireball.net/

A group of “unauthorized users” have accessed Anthropic’s Mythos AI model, which the company recently said they couldn’t widely release because it was too dangerous. Whoopsie doodle! Maybe don’t use guessable paths for your powerful cyberattack model?

"The new wave of Silicon Valley–backed gene-editing startups is straight out of 'Brave New World.'"

Filmmaker Noah Hawley was invited to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Campfire retreat in 2018. Reflecting on the experience recently for The Atlantic, Hawley writes that today’s super-rich have stopped “pretending that the rules of human society apply” to them. The Jeff Bezos ...

The New York Times (gift link):

A correction was made on April 21, 2026: Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated which day the New York Mets suffered their 11th straight loss. It was on Sunday, not Monday. Even the Mets cannot lose on an off day.

This is to New York Times corrections what “Headless Body in Topless Bar” was to New York Post headlines — perfection.

Link: nytimes.com/2026/04/21/nyregion/mets-mamdani-curse.html…

Wow, this interview! “I’ve never had an interview quite like this one with Charlize Theron.”

Grainy textures and gestural lines characterize the lush compositions of Tania Yakunova.

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 Tania Yakunova’s Expressive Figures Entwine with Plant Life in Digital and Graphite Illustrations appeared first on Colossal.

Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model Big claims from Qwen about their latest open weight model: Qwen3.6-27B delivers flagship-level agentic coding performance, surpassing the previous-generation open-source flagship Qwen3.5-397B-A17B (397B total / 17B act...

“In a new book called “Israel: What Went Wrong?,” [Israeli professor of Holocaust & genocide studies] Omer Bartov argues that Zionism has morphed into an ideology of extremism that led to genocide in Gaza following the Hamas attacks of October 7th.”

In this episode I give my thoughts on the recent controversy surrounding the band Geese and their sudden rise in popularity.

My Beato Club supporters:
Justin Scott
Terence Mark
Jason Murray
Lucienne Kilpatrick
Alexander Young
Jason Wagner
Todd Ladner
Rob Kline
Nicholas Long
Tim Benson
Leonardo Martins da Costa Rodrigues
Eddie Perez
David Solomon
MICHAEL JOYCE
Stephen Stubbs
colin stead
Jonathan Wentworth-Linton
Patrick Payne
MATTHEW KARIS
Matthew Barouch
Shaun Samuels
Danny Kurywchak
Gregory Reedy
Sean Coleman
Alexander Verbitskiy
CL Turner
Jason Pappafotis
John Fulford
Margaret Carno
Robert C
David M Combs
Eric Flatt
Reto Spoerli
Herr Moritz Adam
Monte St. Johns
Jon Beezley
Peter DeVault
Eric Nabstedt
Eric Beggs
Rich Germano
Brian Bloom
Peter Pillitteri
Piush Dahal
Toby Guidry

Ben Thompson at Stratechery, “Tim Cook’s Impeccable Timing”: Cook was, without question, an operational genius. Moreover, this was clearly the case even before he scaled the iPhone to unimaginable scale. When Cook joined Apple in 1998 the company’s operations — centered ...

Lessons from a 1969 documentary on Nazi-occupied France on how fascism takes root. “A former undercover British agent recalls that working-class French were eager to help him and to shelter him. Those who were wealthier preferred to stay out of it.”

"Famously vengeful Knicks owner Jim Dolan has long spied on people at his iconic arenas. WIRED goes deep inside the operation that allegedly tracked a trans woman, lawyers, protesters, and more."

The Bristol-based artist's vibrant practice is inspired by underwater organisms.

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 Vibrant Sea Creatures Spring to Life in Lisa Stevens’ Textured Sculptures appeared first on Colossal.

A new short story from Jeff VanderMeer (Annihilation, etc.) called Constellations about a mission that has crash-landed on a distant planet.