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I have a new camera (a Canon R6 Mark II) so I'm taking a lot more photos of birds. I share my best wildlife photos on iNaturalist, and based on yesterday's successful prototype I decided to add those to my blog.

I built this feature on my phone using Claude Code for web, as an extension of my beats system for syndicating external content. Here's the PR and prompt.

As with my other forms of incoming syndicated content sightings show up on the homepage, the date archive pages, and in site search results.

I back-populated over a decade of iNaturalist sightings, which means you can search for lemur you'll see my lemur photos from Madagascar in 2019!

Tags: blogging, photography, wildlife, ai, inaturalist, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, claude-code

Regarding my earlier post about the cleverness of Tim Cook’s solution to Apple’s dilemma regarding how to apply for, and accept, a potential tariff refund check without drawing the ire of Donald “Tariff Is My Favorite Word” Trump, at least one reader asked why Tim Cook comm...

Ohhhhh dear, Richard Dawkins: Is AI the Next Phase of Evolution? Claude Appears to Be Conscious. “My conversations with several Claudes and ChatGPTs have convinced me that these intelligent beings are at least as competent as any evolved organism.” 😬

Unruly Play: “A collection of 169 works of play in unlikely places. Games about unusual things. Unexpected encounters.”

Ada Palmer & Bruce Schneier: AI Learns Language From Skewed Sources. That Could Change How We Humans Speak – and Think. “Our sense of the world may become distorted in ways we have barely begun to comprehend.”

Remember the appalling but utterly-unsurprising story two months ago where a team of investigative reporters in Sweden uncovered a company in Kenya contracted by Meta to review video content captured by Meta’s “smart” glasses? They spoke to some of the workers, who told tale...

Kim Dacres gravitates toward renewal and care, transforming worn rubber into expressive sculptural portraits.

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 Kim Dacres Revitalizes Sleek Tires, Chains, and Gears in Defiant Sculptures appeared first on Colossal.

In this interview, I sit down with Swedish guitar virtuoso Per Nilsson to talk about founding Scar Symmetry, filling in with Meshuggah, and how he incorporates his vast jazz fusion vocabulary into some of the heaviest improvised music you've ever heard. Follow Per on Instag...

One more from Jason Snell, from his analysis of Apple’s quarterly results: During a complicated question from J.P. Morgan analyst Samik Chatterjee about product margins, Parekh unusually half-answered the question and then stopped and “turned it over to Tim” so that Cook...

Tool: iNaturalist Sightings I wanted to see my iNaturalist observations - across two separate accounts - grouped by when they occurred. I'm camping this weekend so I built this entirely on my phone using Claude Code for web. I started by building an inaturalist-clumper P...

Using the NY Times Archive API, journalist Ted Alcorn built Below the Fold, a dashboard through which you can explore the last 25 years of Times coverage: 2.2 million articles containing 1.5 billion words. You can slice and dice this data in a bunch of different ways — it’s a fantastic resource.

One of the site’s sections is about obituaries. From that data, Alcorn produced this infographic of whose obits contained the highest word count:

As you can see, it’s a lot of world leaders, religious leaders, politicians, and white men. There only appear to be five women on the list. Notable non-politicians include Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Muhammad Ali, and Charles Schulz.

The whole dashboard is fun/enlightening to explore.

Tags: infoviz · journalism · NY Times · obituaries · Ted Alcorn

"On the imperfection of elegies."

Am…am I “alternatively influential”? Defined roughly as “public thinkers and tastemakers who have real clout in their own demesnes despite only modest internet followings”.

This is excellent: Jamelle Bouie explains why he thinks the Supreme Court is corrupt and what we (through Congress) can do about it. Not all video transcripts work as text, but this one does, so I’m including his full remarks here: The Supreme Court is corrupt. You migh...

For his latest video essay, Evan Puschak tells us about Un Chien Andalou, the pioneering surrealist short film by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. The film is particularly notable for a shocking shot in the opening scene, which, if you’ve seen it, you’ve likely never forgotten. Said Buñuel of the film:

This film has no intention of attracting nor pleasing the spectator; indeed, on the contrary, it attacks him, to the degree that he belongs to a society with which surrealism is at war.

You can watch Un Chien Andalou on YouTube:

One wonders what Buñuel and Dalí would have made of YouTube…

Tags: art · film school · Luis Buñuel · movies · Salvador Dali · Un Chien Andalou · video

"New science is showing that nature’s vital pollinators are smarter than we ever imagined."