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Smart lighting company Nanoleaf has been acquired by OneRobotics, the parent company of SwitchBot. In an exclusive interview with The Verge, Nanoleaf CEO Gimmy Chu says the company will remain independent and that he and his cofounder and COO, Christian Yan, will continue to run it. "Nothing is changing operationally," says Chu, adding that there […]

By the time the Children's Hospital closed its doors to trans patients, Sage had already stopped taking testosterone. A nonbinary high school student, they originally received treatment for the rapid onset of puberty. The changes their body experienced felt frightening and sudden. They developed PMOS, a relatively common hormonal disorder that can lead to hair […]

I bet you're wondering why I've gathered you all here.

We visit an office building in Guadalajara, and learn how one man moved it – workers and all – exactly 40 feet.   

This episode is part of our ongoing coverage of the soccer world championship. In each episode, we take you beyond the stadium, and to a nearby wonder that’s off the beaten track.

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Microsoft announced two new text LLMs this morning - MAI-Thinking-1 (reasoning, 35B parameters, available to "select early partners") and MAI-Code-1-Flash (5B parameters, "purpose-built for GitHub Copilot and VS Code to deliver high performance and lower cost [...] rolling out to GitHub Copilot individual users in Visual Studio Code"). I've not been able to try either of them just yet.

It's very interesting to see Microsoft releasing models with such low parameter counts, especially given how expensive larger models are to access right now. They claim MAI-Thinking-1 "is preferred to Sonnet 4.6 in our blind human side-by-side evaluations", which is impressive for a 35B model seeing as I frequently run models larger than that on my own laptop.

Tags: llm-release, generative-ai, ai, microsoft, llms

California Brown Pelican, in Fort Mason, CA, US

I'm at the Microsoft Build conference today, held at Fort Mason in San Francisco. There are California Brown Pelicans diving into the water directly behind venue!

Tags: microsoft, ai, generative-ai, llms, llm-release

"With biting satire, Alan Dunn captured how 20th-century architectural trends left everyday Americans astonished, baffled, and enraged."

James Pero, summarizing for Gizmodo this paywalled report by Jyoti Mann for The Information: But, wait, there’s more: in addition to the fall releases, The Information reports that Meta also has a pair slated for December, codenamed “Mojito VIP.” There are also two proto...

One more bit of “metaverse fever dream” follow-up. The one company in the field that Nick Heer doesn’t mention is Apple, makers of the best-known (albeit not best-selling) virtual reality headset. Think and say what you want about the Vision platform (I still think it’s the first inning of a long game), but no one at Apple ever once gave a hint of endorsing “metaverse” hype. In fact, as I’ve noted before, at a 2022 WSJ event, seven months before Vision Pro was announced and over a year before it was released, Joanna Stern asked Greg Joswiak and Craig Federighi:

Stern: You have to finish this sentence, both of you. The metaverse is...

Joz: A word I’ll never use.

“Fever dream” is right.

Link: daringfireball.net/2025/12/meta_says_fuck_that_metaverse…

"Because paper is such an everyday material, there’s something especially powerful about transforming it into something unexpected."

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 Meticulously Detailed Natural Specimens by Marisa Aragón Ware Emerge from Paper appeared first on Colossal.

A follow-up point from my post yesterday linking to Nick Heer’s blockbuster “The Metaverse Fever Dream”. In particular, the connection Heer draws between the rise of “metaverse” hype and the pandemic. I always sort of knew that metaverse hype roughly coincided with the Covi...

The 100 Greatest Bird Names of All Time, including Inaccessible Island Rail, Macaroni Penguin, Morepork, Chocolate Boobook, Dickcissel, Carunculated Caracara, and Resplendent Quetzal.

Michael M. Grynbaum and Benjamin Mullin, reporting for The New York Times (gift link): CBS News faced a fresh wave of turmoil on Monday after Scott Pelley, the “60 Minutes” correspondent, laced into the show’s newly hired executive producer during a staff meeting and acc...

In this episode I finally weigh in on the controversy surrounding Fender and their outrageous lawsuit against other guitar manufacturers.

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

"Matt Rudd has remarkable conversations with three Britons who, after life-changing accidents, have fully active minds but cannot move or speak, and can communicate only via the blink of an eye."

The Best Thing About The Satanic Panic. “There’s a phenomenon called the rhyme-as-reason effect that says people are more likely to believe something is true if it rhymes.”

JS Crossword. “This crossword uses some lesser-known and cursed JS features, so I’d recommend it for people already somewhat familiar with JavaScript.” Diabolical.

From paper towel drenched in ceramic slip, Jongjin Park sculpts these layered forms.

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 Jongjin Park Layers Slip-Soaked Paper into Patchwork Sculptures appeared first on Colossal.

Watch and listen to bardcore trio Courseval play a cover version of Daft Punk’s Veridis Quo, a track from Discovery. This is lovely. And a banger.

Courseval have covered other popular music in medieval style, including Rihanna’s Umbrella, Take On Me by A-Ha, Bad Romance by Lady Gaga, and Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive.

Tags: Courseval · Daft Punk · music · remix · video