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NASA has released some 12,000 unseen photos from the recent Artemis II mission; here are some of the best shots.

The ethereal, life-size sculpture is an ode to the historic Herkenrode Abbey.

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 Gijs Van Vaerenbergh Gracefully Reimagines a 16th-Century Belgian Abbey Church in Steel appeared first on Colossal.

Tool: Redis Array Playground Salvatore Sanfilippo submitted a PR adding a new data type - arrays - to Redis. The new commands are ARCOUNT, ARDEL, ARDELRANGE, ARGET, ARGETRANGE, ARGREP, ARINFO, ARINSERT, ARLASTITEMS, ARLEN, ARMGET, ARMSET, ARNEXT, AROP, ARRING, ARSCA...

Nowhere on XKCD’s map of The Contiguous 41 States does it say that you need to find the missing seven states, but that’s immediately where my mind went. And it was a little more challenging than I anticipated — all of New England is present & accounted for somehow?

The answer key is here, along with this tidbit:

The United States did have exactly 41 states for a few days in 1889, from the admission of Montana, the 41st state, on November 8, to the admission of Washington (the state, not DC), the 42nd state, on November 11.

See also this super-sized US map with 64 states.

And then after I wrote all of the above, I decided to check and of course I’d posted about this map before, soon after it came out. *sigh*

Tags: maps · usa · xkcd

A 55-minute mix of Boards of Canada B-sides and rarities.

“They Would Never Use the Death Star on Us”: Alderaan Residents Reflect on Their Support for the Empire as a Large Imperial Installation Enters the System. “The Senate was ineffective, and the liberal Jedi were out of touch…”

I’m gonna call it: Every Frame a Painting, my all-time favorite YouTube channel, is back. Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos stopped producing their fantastic video essays back in 2017 and while they have popped up here and there since then, they’ve mostly stuck to their retiremen...

Two months ago, revisiting Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s year-prior prediction that AI would soon be writing 90+ percent of all programming code, I wrote: But where I think Amodei’s remarks, quoted above, are facile is that it hasn’t played out as simply that lines of cod...

Press release last week: SightMD, a leading ophthalmology practice in the greater New England area, today announced a historic milestone in surgical innovation. Dr. Eric Rosenberg, DO, MSE, has become the first surgeon in the world to successfully perform cataract surger...

Bryan Hoch, reporting for MLB.com:

A colorful personality who engaged and entertained fans with a distinct conversational style, Sterling called 5,426 regular-season Yankees games and 225 more in the postseason from 1989 until his retirement in 2024. After initially stepping away from the microphone in April of that year, Sterling returned to call selected games late in the ’24 season, including each contest of the World Series.

At the time of his initial retirement, Sterling said that he considered himself to be “a very blessed human being,” noting that he had lived out a childhood dream of broadcasting on the radio for more than 64 years.

“It’s your medium. You do what you want,” Sterling once said. “You have to paint the picture, which I love doing.”

That’s baseball, Suzyn.

Link: mlb.com/news/john-sterling-passes-away

One man's obsession with microscopic creatures is literally illuminated in marvelous transparencies.

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 Victorian-Era Transparencies Illuminate a Host of Microscopic Creatures appeared first on Colossal.

How Sylvester Stallone Rescued the First Rambo Film With a Radical Recut, Cutting It From 3½ Hours to 93 Minutes. “The solution that ended up saving the movie wasn’t much less drastic, producing a 93-minute cut that excised most of Rambo’s dialogue.”

Gil Durán, posting on Bluesky:

It’s official! I’m permanently banned from X for tweeting “TLDR: Fascism.” (appeal denied)

“TLDR: Fascism” was Durán’s two-word response to this 1,000-word essay from Palantir describing their vision for a “Technological Republic”. (Alternative link to essay if you don’t want to visit x.com.)

Getting perma-banned from Twitter/X by Elon Musk gives Durán a nice Streisand-effect boost to promote his upcoming new book, The Nerd Reich. If the book is even half as good as its title it should be a bestseller.

Link: bsky.app/profile/gilduran.com/post/3mky5taqg3222

I don’t want to spoil any of this story from David Gelphman, which he wrote back in 2013, but which I only came across this week had read so long ago I’d forgotten it. Go read it. But before you do, one bit of context you should keep in mind is that the original iPad was unveiled at a special Apple event on 27 January 2010, but it didn’t ship until early April. Gelphman’s story takes place in that interregnum.

Link: davidgelphman.wordpress.com/2013/03/29/2-letters-from-steve…

Producers India Rice and Morgan Johnson take you beyond this planet as they share two stories tied to the franchise Star Wars.

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A follow-up point to Friday’s post about Meta unceremoniously shitcanning its entire contract with Sama, the Kenyan contractor that employed over 1,100 contractors to serve as Mechanical Turks for Meta’s AI efforts, after a few of the contractors told investigative reporters...

We used an automatic classifier which judged sycophancy by looking at whether Claude showed a willingness to push back, maintain positions when challenged, give praise proportional to the merit of ideas, and speak frankly regardless of what a person wants to hear. Most of the time in these situations, Claude expressed no sycophancy—only 9% of conversations included sycophantic behavior (Figure 2). But two domains were exceptions: we saw sycophantic behavior in 38% of conversations focused on spirituality, and 25% of conversations on relationships.

— Anthropic, How people ask Claude for personal guidance

Tags: ai-ethics, anthropic, claude, ai-personality, generative-ai, ai, llms, sycophancy