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Text • Kate Mothes

Women Sport Puffer Coats in Bold Baroque Portraits by Nieves González

Women Sport Puffer Coats in Bold Baroque Portraits by Nieves González"Creating isn't something we do (in Spain), it's something we are," the artist says. "And I come from that; I carry it in my body."

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 Women Sport Puffer Coats in Bold Baroque Portraits by Nieves González appeared first on Colossal.

Mars For The Rest of Us Valid
Text • Maciej Cegłowski

The Plight of the Martian Farmer

The Plight of the Martian Farmer

Programming note: I’m delighted to announce that this newsletter now has over 1,000 subscribers!

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention Valid
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sqlite-utils 4.0rc2, mostly written by Claude Fable (for about $149.25)

I wrote about the sqlite-utils 4.0rc1 release a couple of weeks ago. Since we only have Claude Fable on our Max subscriptions for a few more days, I decided to see if it could help me get to a 4.0 stable release that I felt truly comfortable about, since I try to keep to Sem...

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Building a World Map with only 500 bytes

Building a World Map with only 500 bytes

Iwo Kadziela (assisted by Codex) figured out a way to generate a credible ASCII world map using 445 bytes of data:

A map of the world rendered as black asterisk ASCII characters, it looks very good

The key trick is to use deflate compression, which is then wired together using this neat snippet of JavaScript. I didn't know you could use fetch() with data: URIs like this:

fetch('data:;base64,1ZpLsgIxCEXnrM...==').then(
  r => r.body.pipeThrough(new DecompressionStream('deflate-raw'))
).then(
  s => new Response(s).text()
).then(
  t => b.innerHTML = '<pre style=font-size:.65vw>' + t
)

Via Hacker News

Tags: ascii-art, javascript

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Better Models: Worse Tools

Better Models: Worse Tools Armin reports on a weird problem he ran into while hacking on Pi: The short version is that newer Claude models sometimes call Pi’s edit tool with extra, invented fields in the nested edits[] array. And not Haiku or some small model: Opus 4.8. The...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Day One Journal

dayoneapp.com/blog/introducing-daily-chat/

My thanks to Day One Journal for once again sponsoring Daring Fireball. Day One first launched in 2011 and has been the stalwart of journaling apps on Mac and iOS ever since. Day One’s apps exhibit a commitment to technical and design excellence, and, more importantly, every...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

From the DF Archive: ‘Electron and the Decline of Native Apps’

daringfireball.net/2018/12/electron_and_the_decline_of_native_apps

Yours truly, back in 2018: I don’t share the depth of their pessimism regarding native apps, but Electron is without question a scourge. I think the Mac will prove more resilient than Windows, because the Mac is the platform that attracts people who care. But I worry. I...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

Fantastical 4.1.15 Adds Calendar Mirroring

flexibits.com/blog/2026/06/double-booked-never-heard-of-it-meet-calendar-mirroring-in-fantastical/

Flexibits: Calendar Mirroring allows you to connect two separate calendars (like work and personal) so that events from one automatically show up on the other. The best part? No event information is sent to Flexibits servers or saved outside of your device. You can cho...

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🎬 undertone

letterboxd.com/danielpietzsch/film/undertone-2025/

Movie poster for “undertone”.
This review may contain spoilers. Tap or click to view.

Was actually quite well done with not much (effectively just one on-camera actor). But I found the plot too constructed and a little incoherent, which made it less spooky than it could’ve been.


Next event: The Haunted on July 24, 2026, 20:00 at Turock, Essen.

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Mike Elizondo on working with Avenged Sevenfold #guitar #guitarist #shorts

xkcd.com Valid
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Types of Tornado Alert

I hate the unearthly sound my phone makes when the weather service issues a tornado harbinger.

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Open Source AI Gap Map

Open Source AI Gap Map Current AI is "a global partnership building a public option for AI", founded as a non-profit at the AI Action Summit in Paris in February 2025 and backed by serious capital ($400m already committed). They launched their Gap Map a couple of days ago - ...

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Quoting Josh W. Comeau

I just launched my third course, Whimsical Animations, and so far, it’s on track to sell roughly ⅓ as many copies as a typical course launch. It’s a similar story with my two existing courses. Sales are down significantly from last year. There are likely a lot of reasons fo...

Daring Fireball Valid
Text • John Gruber

★ Claude’s Criminally Bad Electron Mac App Is an Inside Job

Anthropic released the first version of the Claude “desktop” app for MacOS in October 2024 — an Electron clunker that did not impress UI designers. When it came out, I wrote: ChatGPT’s native Mac app, on the other hand, is a truly native Mac app. It looks like a Mac app ...

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Fable's judgement

One of the most interesting tips I got from the Fireside Chat I hosted with Cat Wu and Thariq Shihipar from the Claude Code team at AIE on Wednesday was to let Fable (and to a certain extent Opus) use their own judgement rather than dictating how they should work. The exampl...

Longreads Valid
Text • Brendan Fitzgerald

Inside the Food Truck Mafia Wreaking Havoc Around the National Mall

"Turf wars. Food and fire hazards. $15 ice-cream cones. How an organized network of unlicensed food trucks took over America's Front Lawn."

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June 2026 newsletter

The June edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter is out. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here.

This month:

  • Claude Fable 5, GPT-5.6, and US export restrictions
  • GLM-5.2 is the new best open weights model
  • Tokenmaxxing is so over
  • Datasette Apps
  • sqlite-utils and shot-scraper and Datasette
  • Miscellaneous WASM projects
  • Other model releases
  • What I'm using

Here's a copy of the May newsletter as a preview of what you'll get. Pay $10/month to stay a month ahead of the free copy!

Tags: newsletter

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Audio • WNYC Studios

Atomic Artifacts

Back in the 1950s, facing the threat of nuclear annihilation, federal officials sat down and pondered what American life would actually look like after an atomic attack. They faced a slew of practical questions like: Who would count the dead and where would they build the re...

Longreads Valid
Text • Carolyn Wells

Paradise Revisited

"What Darwin saw in the Galápagos."

The Atlas Obscura Podcast Updates instantly via WebSub
Audio • SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura

The Wizard of Wamego (Classic)

The story of how a former nuclear missile silo in Wamego, Kansas became the site of the largest LSD bust in US history (allegedly). Fore more information, check out author Dennis McDougal’s website and Rolling Stone’s interview with Leonard Pickard.


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