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Co-host Kelly McEvers doesn’t usually return to places – she always wants to go somewhere new. But there’s one place that makes her break her own rule over and over again.

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Introducing talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930 New project from Nick Levine, David Duvenaud, and Alec Radford (of GPT, GPT-2, Whisper fame). talkie-1930-13b-base (53.1 GB) is a "13B language model trained on 260B tokens of historical pre-1931 English text". talk...

My thanks to Rec League for sponsoring last week at DF. Rec League is a new app/social network for sharing what you’re into. (Get it? The “rec” in “Rec League” is for recommendations. It’s a damn clever name, and sometimes a clever name is half the battle.) It’s really well ...

This pod is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions. The Ringer’s Bill Simmons, Chris Ryan, and Van Lathan each carry an unlicensed nuclear accelerator as they rewatch the 1984 comedy classic ‘Ghostbusters’ starring Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and Sigourney Weaver. Directed by Ivan Reitman.

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

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microsoft/VibeVoice VibeVoice is Microsoft's Whisper-style audio model for speech-to-text, MIT licensed and with speaker diarization built into the model. Microsoft released it on January 21st, 2026 but I hadn't tried it until today. Here's a one-liner to run it on a Mac wit...

Weekly “sponsor the whole week at DF” spots are sold out until August 24. That’s a great sign that sponsorships here work. But it’s not so great if you have a product or service that you’d like to promote now, or soon, to the DF audience — savvy listeners and readers obsessed with high quality and good design.

The good news on that front is that the sponsorship schedule for The Talk Show has openings, including for the next few episodes, starting this week and into next month. The general rule of thumb is that sponsorship spots on The Talk Show cost one-third the rate for the weekly spots on DF. I’m happy to work out deals a little lower than that for first-time sponsors. If you’ve got a product or service you’d like to hear pitched on America’s favorite three-star podcast, get in touch.

Link: daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/

Greg Sargent writing for The New Republic: There’s no clean way to hive off terms like fascism or authoritarianism from Trump’s policies. Even if you disagree that the words apply, their use is backed up by a genuine attempt at intellectual justification for it. The use of...

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò on magical thinking and elite impunity. “We are ruled by a class of people who seem either to believe or presume that war, disease, and apocalyptic destruction are things that will only ever happen to poorer and browner people.”

"What happens when someone throws a message into the sea?"

Nicole Nikolich is a textile artist whose current focus is making crochet artworks that reference old school technology. You can explore her work on her website, at Paradigm Gallery and on Instagram. Some of her artworks are available for sale here. I’m a sucker for these types of projects because innovations in textile production led to the development of the first computers and the work of artists like Nikolich bring that relationship full circle. See also The Embroidered Computer. Tags: art · computing · crochet · Nicole Nikolich

David Pierce:

On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay are joined by Daring Fireball’s John Gruber to talk about their reactions to the news, the (mostly) smooth transition Apple seems to have pulled off, and what we should really make of Tim Cook’s legacy as a product person. Really, the question is: Do we blame Cook for the Touch Bar, or do we blame him for not trying hard enough to make the Touch Bar great?

I know that sounds like a joke but I really do think the biggest problem with the Touch Bar wasn’t that the first crack at it wasn’t good enough, but that they never took a second crack at it. Going back to dumb fiddly F-keys with functional icons printed on them was uncharacteristically lazy for Apple.

Link: theverge.com/podcast/917965/apple-ceo-cook-ternus…

For many years, Microsoft and OpenAI's relationship has included a weird clause saying that, should AGI be achieved, Microsoft's commercial IP rights to OpenAI's technology would be null and void. That clause appeared to end today. I decided to try and track its expression o...

Livestream of the Big Bear bald eagle nest (perched 145 feet up in a pine tree) with two fuzzy bald eagle chicks that hatched 3 weeks ago.

In this interview, I sit down with brilliantly innovative pianist and composer Tigran Hamasyan to explore his unique musical architecture. We discuss his evolution from growing up on Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, to transcribing bebop legends like Charlie Parker, to comple...

Presidents Can Be Impeached Because Benjamin Franklin Thought It Was Better Than Assassination. “The Constitution’s impeachment procedures make the removal of the chief magistrate less violent, less disruptive, and less error-prone than assassination.”

What better way to meditate on nature's most majestic features than to recreate its details one stitch at a time?

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 Cassandra Dias Takes an Impressionistic Approach to Painting with Thread appeared first on Colossal.

Speech translation in Google Meet is now rolling out to mobile devices

I just encountered this feature via a "try this out now" prompt in a Google Meet meeting. It kind-of worked!

This is Google's implementation of the ultimate sci-fi translation app, where two people can talk to each other in two separate languages and Meet translates from one to the other and - with a short delay - repeats the text in your preferred language, with a rough imitation of the original speaker's voice.

It can only handle English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, and Italian at the moment. It's also still very alpha - I ran it successfully between two laptops running web browsers, but then when I tried between an iPhone and an iPad it didn't seem to work.

Tags: google, translation