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“In nine experiments involving 1,800 participants, researchers found that people consistently underestimated how interesting and enjoyable conversations about boring topics would be.”

In today's video, I'm breaking down why the next generation of musicians is skipping college and why it might actually be the smartest decision they can make.

Stu Maschwitz: Prolost Watches is an iPhone app for managing your watch collection. It’s part database, part journal; designed for the detail-obsessed mind of the watch fanatic. As you log each day’s choice of watch, insights are revealed. Wear logs trace a path on the m...

Organized by Capture the Atlas, the 2026 Milky Way Photographer of the Year saw a record number of submissions from around the globe.

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 Explore 25 Incredible Photos of the Milky Way Captured Around the World appeared first on Colossal.

David Kaylor is re-editing Rogue One into what he calls “The Andor Cut”; the trailer seems pretty compelling and well-done. He says this is Rogue One if it was produced after Andor: The original version is the events of Rogue One as seen through Jyn’s perspective, and thi...

A brief history: lessons from the rise and fall of Reconstruction. “Must America be forever defined by strict hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth – or can the nation finally realize its promise of egalitarian pluralism?”

Release: llm-gemini 0.31

• gemini-3.1-flash-lite is no longer a preview.

Here's my write-up of the Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite Preview model back in March. I don't believe this new non-preview model has changed since then.

Tags: llm-release, gemini, llm, google, generative-ai, ai, llms

Tool: Big Words

I'm using my vibe coded macOS presentations tool to put together a talk, and I wanted to add a slide with some text on it. The tool only accepts URLs, so I put together a quick page that accepts query string arguments and turns them into a simple slide.

Here's an example: https://tools.simonwillison.net/big-words?text=simonwillison.net&gradient=1&size=9.5

Double click or double tap the page to access a form for modifying the different options.

Tags: vibe-coding, tools

Tool: GitHub Repo Stats

One of the things I always look for when evaluating a new GitHub repository is the number of commits it has... but that number isn't visible on GitHub's mobile site layout. I built this tool to fix that, using this prompt:

Given a GitHub repo URL or foo/bar repo ID show information about that repo absorbed via wither REST or graphql CORS fetch() including the number of commits in the repo and other useful stats

Example output for simonw/datasette and simonw/llm.

Tags: github

The website for the Abolitionist Guide to NYC is just getting started, but the site does house an Abolitionist Map of NYC.

The Abolitionist Map of NYC offers a geographic survey of incarceration and anti-carceral resistance in Manahatta from the Dutch colonization of Lenapehoking to the present day. The map highlights some of the first jails and prisons to exist in the area, the movement of facilities from one place to the next, and sites of rebellion against the expansion of the prison industrial complex.

It is meant to serve as a tool for abolitionist resistance grounded in a long view of the struggle, tactics, and goals.

The map is available as a PDF and as an interactive version. (via @prisonculture.bsky.social)

Tags: maps · NYC · prison

"In some ways, the world is cooked. But being a twelve-year-old still kind of eats."

Chess Peace is an iOS puzzle game where you have to place chess pieces on a board so that none of them attack each other. Simple + clever!

Behind the Scenes Hardening Firefox with Claude Mythos Preview Fascinating, in-depth details on how Mozilla used their access to the Claude Mythos preview to locate and then fix hundreds of vulnerabilities in Firefox: Suddenly, the bugs are very good Just a few months ago, ...

There weren't a lot of big new announcements from Anthropic at yesterday's Code w/ Claude event, but the biggest by far was the deal they've struck with SpaceX/xAI to use "all of the capacity of their Colossus data center". As I mentioned in my live blog of the keynote, that...

#RealLaundryMagic #TideEvo

The Northern California-based artist explores nature as a reflection of our inner lives.

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 Jake Messing’s Hyperrealistic Paintings Celebrate the Abundance of Nature appeared first on Colossal.

One of the coolest things about honey is its theoretically infinite shelf-life. 3000-year-old jars of still-edible honey have been found in Egyptian tombs — they used it medicinally for all sorts of things.

I’m sure there’s a scene marker right at the cut, so that’s why an ad got inserted there. But, my god. Someone at Amazon should go to prison for this.

(I think it’s a total coincidence that the Febreze ad seems roughly color-matched to the sky. But scroll down in the Bluesky thread for some links to the absolute genius campaign from Cerveza Cristal beer, with spots specifically designed to integrate into Star Wars when it was broadcast on commercial TV in Chile. “Your father wanted you to have this when you were old enough” might be the funniest TV commercial ever made.)

Update: Here’s Todd Vaziri’s 2026 HD remaster of the original jump cut, for your comparison. Enjoy.

Link: bsky.app/profile/gethill.bsky.social/post/3ml6fyfv7kc2l

Ok, this is incredible: this person on Reddit discovered that if you take a bunch of the sequential photos of the Earth captured by the Artemis II crew and animate them, you can see that some of what appear to be stars are actually satellites, buzzing around the Earth like flies. You can see them really clearly in Seán Doran’s remastered animation. Totally totally gobsmacking. Literally awesome.

Tags: artemis · astronomy · Earth · photography · science · Sean Doran · space